SiliconBeat

Tesla's Model S goes on sale in 2011.

Lost in the hoopla of yesterdays’ unveiling of the Tesla Model S — who expected a 7-seater electric? — was what sounded like pretty final news about the location of the factory that will assemble the car.

In the LA Times, reporter Ken Bensinger said Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company would build its all-electric sedan in Southern California.

Musk declined to name the city, but said, “We have a term sheet on a location, but we can’t divulge it until the contract is finalized.”

In an AP story that ran on the Mercury News Web site, Tesla said it would start building the car in the 4th quarter of 2011 “in a yet-to-be determined Southern California location.”

I took a spin recently in Tesla’s first model, the Roadster. Click here for that report.

A year ago, Tesla Motors CEO, Chairman and Product Architect Elon Musk fairly bristled when critics noting production delays and some CEO turnover at his Silicon Valley electric car company compared it to two of the most well-documented failures of U.S. car-making history, Tucker and DeLorean.

It’s now safe to say that Tesla has easily passed Tucker, and seems headed on a path to leave comparisons to DeLorean behind, too.

Tucker was the dream of Preston Tucker. But only 51 of his 1948 Tucker Torpedo models were built before the company folded.

DeLorean was the name of another eponymous dreamer, John DeLorean. The ex-Pontiac chief saw about 9,000 of his DMC-12s built in Northern Ireland before production ended in 1982.

Tesla’s production of its Roadster has reached 250 deliveries, and later this week, it’ll unveil its second car, the Model S sedan. The company hopes to produce 20,000 of these vehicles a year once assembly starts in 2011.

It’s worth noting that Tucker, DeLorean and Tesla do share something: screen time.

Both Tucker and DeLorean are probably more famous with movie buffs than car fans. Jeff Bridges starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” It gets 6.8 stars (out of 10) on imdb.com.

And the DeLorean was Doc Brown’s time-traveling machine in the “Back to the Future” triology (8.3, 7.4 and 7.0 on imdb.com) that ran from 1985 to 1990.

And it was his 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” (7.7 stars on imdb.com) that led film-maker Chris Paine to Tesla. There’s a glimpse of the first Tesla at the end of his documentary.  He now owns one of the electric rides, and has been seen at various Tesla events with a film crew as he puts together a sequel called “Revenge of the Electric Car.”

You can read Paine’s blog item on his first week driving a Tesla here.

(Photo of the 2009 Tesla Roadster Sport courtesy of Tesla Motors.)

Think, the Norwegian electric-vehicle maker, said today in Michigan that it would built a U.S. factory and tech center. It will be located either in Michigan or in one of 7 other states, which the company didn’t identify. (Spokesman Brendan Prebo did say this afternoon that the automaker is talking to California.)

“The U.S. is quickly overtaking Europe as an attractive market for EVs and is an ideal location to engineer and build EVs,” Think CEO Richard Canny said in a statement released by the company.

The Think City — OK, the company writes it as TH!NK city — is a small EV capable of going 112 miles on a single charge. The company said U.S. production will start in 2010, and that about 2,500 vehicles will be build in the first year to go into fleets and demonstration projects.

The plant will start with 300 workers and an annual capacity of 16,000 cars, with expansion plans leading toward 900 workers and 60,000 Think Cities a year.

With today’s announcement, Prebo said, Think North America is now based in Dearborn, Mich. When Think North America was formed last year, it was using Menlo Park and Kleiner Perkins, the cleantech VC firm, as its home. The company is now 100% owned by Think Global, Prebo said, and KPCB becomes a share-holder in Think Global. Rockport Capital Partners as well as battery-makers A123 and Ener1 have been identified as other partners.

In late 2008, the company entered Norway’s equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and temporarily suspended production in its home country, but has since been able to obtain interim financing.

Here’s a  story in AutoWeek.

Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric automaker, continues to expand its distribution network. The automaker, now selling the $109,000 Roadster, has showrooms in Menlo Park and Santa Monica.

Tesla's LA showroom

It also has begun taking orders for its first model in Europe.

Today it added Canada to its roster, as it began taking orders from our neighbor to the north. (An aside: This should be a good test of the viability of electric autos and batteries in colder climates as the high today in Toronto will be 32 degrees F, 21 in Montreal and -13 in Inuvik.)

Cars will start rolling into Canada in the 4th quarter, Tesla said, initially through regional centers in Seattle and New York. Eventually, the automaker said in a release, Tesla hopes to open stores in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

Tesla’s crack PR staff alerted me to the brand’s Canadian connections. Chairman/CEO/product architect Elon Musk, though born in South Africa, worked on his cousin’s wheat farm in Saskatoon when he was 17. His mom and grandmother lived in places like Regina and Moose Jaw. And Musk went to Queen’s University before transferring to the U of Pennsylvania. Also, eBay’s Jeff Skoll, an early Tesla investor, lived in Montreal.

Stateside, Tesla said it would open its third U.S. showroom in Chicago. It’ll be located at 1053 W. Grand Ave., near the Kennedy Expressway in the River West neighborhood.

Read more on Tesla’s Web site.

(Photo of Tesla’s LA showroom courtesy of Tesla Motors.)

A conversation with Bobby Kennedy Jr. can be an illuminating, if a bit of a strenuous, experience.

Kennedy, who was added as a partner specializing in cleantech at San Bruno’s VantagePoint Venture Partners, this week, is one of those big-idea guys.

I talked to him recently for a profile I was doing of Shai Agassi, the tech exec turned electric-car guru. VantagePoint invested in Agassi’s firm, Better Place of Palo Alto, and Kennedy introduced him at a press event when Better Place said it was going to work with the Bay Area big-city mayors to bring EV chargers here.

Anyhow, Kennedy was on his car phone and what I thought would be a 5-10 minute interview stretched into a 30-minute conversation. And it only ended when his cell phone cut out.

Kennedy, the 54-year-old son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of JFK and Teddy, is an environmental lawyer and activist. He also hosts a radio show, and our conversation that started with electric cars expanded to include the melting Arctic ice cap, China, energy storage and more.

The last thing he told me before his phone clicked out: “This is about transforming our whole country into a self-sufficient nation. What happens then is a whole series of miracles that helps restore our national prestige.”

Like I said, a big idea guy.

VPVP says he’ll focus on water issues, and join the board of 2 of its portfolio companies –  Premium Power, a leading manufacturer of energy storage solutions, and Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc., a wastewater remediation company producing environmentally safe commercial fertilizer.

Coulomb Technologies, a maker of electric-vehicle chargers based in Campbell, will unveil more of its outlets this morning in downtown San Francisco.

The presser at SF City Hall, with SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, takes place at 10 a.m. City Car Share and Zip Car also are participating.

Here’s a link to a Web cast of the event.

Coulomb, which recently raised its first round of venture funding, has charge ports in San Jose’s 4th Street garage and one in front of City Hall.

Here is my recent story on the company.