Click here for VIDEO In a process fitting of a company headquarted in Silicon Valley, Tesla assembles the Roadster in Menlo Park, Calif. using a chassis built by Lotus in England, an electric motor manufactured in Taiwan, and a battery pack it constructs in house using parts imported from Japan. Electric cars have been around a long time, but it's that last piece of the puzzle that brings Tesla's into the 21st century. Unlike the Mini-E concept which uses a smaller, air-cooled lithium ion (Li-ion) battery pack, the one in the Tesla is both liquid cooled and heated. This allows it to extract more than the typical 50 percent of charge you can usually squeeze out of Li-ion batteries without destroying them. Tesla claims over 80 percent of the stored energy can be accessed in normal use, and you can even tap into that last 20 percent if desired, but the added strain will hurt the battery in the long run. Comprised of a staggering 6,831 individual cells, the Roadster's 992 pound pack pumps out 53 kilowatt hours (kwh) of electricity. For comparison, the batteries in everyday hybrids typically provide less than 2 kwh, which is why you can only drive one of those a couple of miles in electric mode and the Tesla can go 244. That is if you happen to drive like a tester for the Environmental Protection Agency. Most people who buy $109,000 sports cars are looking for an experience slightly more exhilarating than that one probably is, and the Tesla Roadster delivers, up to a point. Click here for PHOTOS Despite the weight of the batteries, the aluminum and composite construction of the rest of the car keeps the weight near 2,700 pounds, about 500 less than a Chevy Corvette or Porsche 911. With 276 pound-feet of torque on tap the second you touch the accelerator, the Roadster can sprint from 0-60 mph in a seamless 3.9 seconds, a feat helped by a transmission that has just a single gear and doesn’t require any time consuming shifts as you approach the speed limit. Sadly, even though Tesla's promotional material is peppered with the phrase "100% torque, 100% of the time," the company's own power charts show that it actually starts to drop off around 5,500 rpm. So by the time you are in ticket territory the fun is already starting to dissipate. That's not to say things go downhill quickly from there. At extra legal speeds the 248 horsepower Roadster merely goes from being rail gun fast to plain old rocket sled fast up to its maximum speed of 125 miles per hour, at which point the motor is spinning at 14,000 rpm. But it won't stay there for very long. If you run the Roadster like that for an extended period of time the motor, which is air cooled, will heat up and the Power Electronics Module (PEM) will dial back the power to help cool it down. You can override this to a point by switching to a special performance mode, but you'll be sacrificing some of the life of the powertrain in the process and ultimately the Master Control Program will have its way and deny your request before letting you kill it. You’ll also be giving up a lot of distance in the process. To get those 244 miles out of the Roadster you need to use the control screen to switch the PEM to its extended-range setting which cuts the torque by about half, making the performance more like a Mazda Miata than a missile. By no means is it slow in this mode, but if a Dodge Challenger SRT8 pulls up next to you, it’s better to look the other way. When I picked up the Roadster for my drive, it was set to normal and fully-charged, the range meter indicating that I had about 150 miles of juice in the box. After a day of putting it through a variety of situations including city traffic, highway cruising and mountain roads, I made it about 140 miles before the low battery warnings started in earnest. By then I was already in extended mode, trying not to look worried that I wasn’t going to make it back to the garage. Had I not, a tow probably would’ve been preferable to the 24 or more hours it would take to get a fill-up for the Roadster from a standard wall outlet. With the high voltage fast charger that comes with the car and has to be installed in your home, the minute hand still has to make three and a half trips around the clock before you have a full battery. In either case, you won’t be taking the Tesla too far away from base unless you have a place to plug it in and lie down for a couple of long naps on the other end.