Martin Eberhard (Co-Founder and former CEO of Tesla) had named the car for Nikola Tesla, an eccentric late-19th and early 20th century inventory whose name has become a byword for genius tethered to other-worldly ambition. The Tesla itself – 400 volts of electric potential wrapped in a carbon-fiber body – is as far out as its namesake, styled like the cars you used to see only in cartoons but charged by a high-powered outlet in your garage. Stomp the accelerator, and thick cables connecting the liquid-cooled lithium ion battery pack to a printed circuit board send all that current into a series of silicon transistors the size of your little fingernail. They are capable of switching as much as 850 amps, which drive the AC motor as high as 14,000 rpm and send the rear-wheel drive Roadstar screeching off the line, with a range of 220 miles on a single charge. The car accelerates from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds.
Source: Copeland, Michael V. "Tesla's wild ride." Fortune, July 21, 2008: pp. 82-94.