I would say it’s great. According to one of the car magazines, either Car & Driver or AutoWeek, it’s apparently the best kind of mid-speed acceleration of any car they ever tested. So that’s perfect for when you’re driving on the highway and you want to make a lane change or something like that. It’s incredibly responsive, so it’s a very, very fun car to drive.”

–Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk sings his creation’s praises.

Now that Tesla Motors has finally managed to roll its first zero-emission Roadster out of the garage, the company is looking at markets other than the luxury one for which the $98,000 car was intended. The company plans to build an electric four-door, five-passenger sports sedan that will sell for about half the price of the Roadster.

To do that, Tesla figures it needs another $250 million in the bank and so it’s mulling an IPO. Said Tesla’s chairman Elon Musk, “I would say within [the] end of this year or next year there is a good chance we would go public.”

(Crash test photo courtesy Tesla Motors)

Why? Tesla won’t quite say. “I’m sorry that it came to this and wish it were not so,” Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said in an email to the San Jose Mercury News. “It was not a question of personality differences, as the decision to have Martin transition to an advisory role was unanimous among the board. Tesla has operational problems that need to be solved, and if the board thought there was any way that Martin could be part of the solution, then he would still be an employee of the company.”

Eberhard, however, has a different take on the situation. “Yes, it is true–I am no longer with Tesla Motors–neither on its board of directors nor an employee of any sort,” he wrote in a post to the Tesla Motors Club blog. “I have also signed a nondisparagement agreement with Tesla, so I must, by contract, be a bit careful about how I word things. But I am also not going to lie about it. I am not at all happy with the way I was treated, and I do not think this was the very best way to handle a transition–not the best for Tesla Motors, not the best for Tesla’s customers (to whom I still feel a strong sense of responsibility), and not for Tesla’s investors.”

Google’s current engineering facilities in the United States, India and Switzerland are all leaders in search technology development. However, by locating a research and technology center on the moon, Google engineers will be able to experiment with an entirely different set of parameters. For example, imagine tapping unlimited solar energy to drive megawatt data centers and power innumerable arrays of massively parallel lava lamps, with ample no-cost cooling available to regulate the temperature of server farms sprawling over acres of land unblighted by sentient lifeforms or restrictive zoning ordinances.”

–Excerpt from “Google Copernicus Center Is Hiring,” the company’s 2004 April Fool’s Day hoax

With the establishment of the Google Lunar X Prize, Google’s 2004 Copernicus Center announcement seems less April Fool’s Day hoax, more company aspiration. At Wired NextFest in Los Angeles yesterday, Google said it will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

To win the purse, the lunar craft must travel the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet and relay video, images and data back to Earth. And it must do so by the end of 2012.

“We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration,” said Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation–the nonprofit institute working with Google on this effort. “Moon 2.0, the second era of lunar exploration, will not be a quest for ‘flags and footprints.’ This time we will go to the moon to stay. The moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth–energy independence and climate change.”

That seems a noble goal. Question is: is it an attainable one? There are plenty of skeptics who claim it’s not. “It’s hard to imagine this project costing less than a few hundred million dollars; PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, so far the most accomplished of the ‘new space’ entrepreneurs, has pumped an estimated $100 million into his Falcon 1 launch vehicle [and] still hasn’t reached orbit,” says Popular Mechanics air and space correspondent David Noland. “Against that kind of financial investment, $20 million is a drop in the bucket. A prize-winner would have to come up with millions upon millions on his own. Anyone who can come up with that kind of money would probably want to make up his own rules, not follow Google’s.”