They're coming

Tesla Motors is opening five service centers across the country to coincide with the public launch of the Tesla Roadster later this year. Evidently they're already selling well, even at $92K a pop; they've taken orders for 350 and sell "another one or two a day."

obligatory hot rod by the ocean shot

From ZDNet:

The service centers will be located in Chicago, Northern California, Southern California, New York and Florida, according to a Daryl Siry, vice president of marketing. Each of the centers will have a couple of the cars in different colors, displays on the technology used in the vehicles, technicians and, of course, cheery, helpful salespeople ready to take that cashier's check.

More will follow, Siry added, largely because the company will start producing a line of sedans in 2009. "To do 10,000 units for Whitestar (the codename for the sedan) we need to be in a lot more places," he said.

Unlike most other car manufacturers, Tesla will not sell its cars through independent dealers. Instead, it will sell them through its Web site and company-owned dealership/service centers...

Siry also added that the company wants to control the customer's buying experience. Most of the time, buying a car is unpleasant: dealers are paid to move the cars they have on the lot. Changing that arrangement could help Tesla-owned dealerships gain an edge in sales, he said. Additionally, selling through independent dealers might hurt the company's plans to sell direct. Large manufacturers like Ford, for example, can't sell cars directly in a state where an independent-dealer Ford franchise exists. Thus, by establishing company-owned dealers, Tesla will circumscribe where it can sell direct.