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.)

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.)

Brian Halla, National Semiconductor’s chief exec since 1996, sees energy efficiency as a promising growth market for his computer-chip company.

So Halla, who’d been tooling around town in a Jeep Wrangler and a Hummer, recently decided to buy an all-electric Tesla Roadster, a vehicle that carries a $109,000 pricetag. And he dropped by the Mercury News to show it off the other day.

How’s it to drive?

“It’s awesome,” Halla declared. “It is unbelievable. You sit at an intersection three abreast. And you’re literally at the next light before the other two cars have crossed the intersection.”

But the tiny car is a bit of a tight fit for a big fella like Halla, he noted. And driving something that fast (he said it can hit 60 miles per hour in just under four seconds) is somewhat unnerving.

“I have nightmares. I’m not qualified to drive the thing,” he said. “I just need to figure out how to get in and out of it. Then I’m going to be a happy camper. And how to drive it safely.”

After a nice late-summer vacation, I’m back posting on a (hopefully) daily basis. And first up is news that Technology Review, the influential magazine published by MIT, has released its annual list of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

At the head of this year’s class is Silicon Valley’s JB Straubel, a co-founder and chief technology officer at Tesla Motors, who was named “innovator of the year.” Straubel was recognized for his efforts to engineer the Tesla Roadster, the electric sports car.

From the press release:

“Discovering the amazing young men and women who make up the TR35 is one of the highlights of the year for us,” said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review. “The innovators on our 2008 list have made truly remarkable and valuable contributions.”

Other Bay Area Winners include:

• Jack Dorsey: Twitter.
• Seth Hallem:co-founder, president and CEO of Coverity, for developing an improved method of finding software bugs.
• Sundar Iyer: founder of Nemo Systems acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005; recognized for developing a technique that combines the benefits of SRAM (static random access memory) with DRAM (digital random access memory) to make routers faster, cheaper, and more efficient and reliable.
• Andrew Ng – Assistant professor of computer science at Stanford for founding the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project.
• Adam Smith – co-founder of Xobni for developing the plugin to Outlook that simplifies email searches and turns the inbox into a social networking tool.
• Eric Wilhelm – CEO of Instructables, a SquidLabs company (Eric is also a co-founder of SquidLabs) for the Instructables “how to” company.
• Christopher Chang – Assistant professor of chemistry at Berkeley for developing a new way of cellular imaging by changing the way biologists tag cells.
• Michelle Chang – professor of chemistry at Berkeley for research into biofuels. .
• Bilal Shafi – recognized for developing a company to commercialize technology that can help prevent congestive heart failure.

Go here for the full list.