In October, Stephen Casner and his wife Karen toured the Lotus factory in England as their Roadster rolled off the assembly line. They took delivery at the Menlo Park store three weeks later. Stephen, who has written several other blogs about Tesla, describes the tour and his first impressions with the car.

While U.S. Republicans and Democrats were fighting it out across the pond in late October, VP19 was busy creating its own political agenda in the United Kingdom.

Tesla engineers have been keenly focused for some time on the 1.5 powertrain, which we have been testing extensively both on roads and at closed facilities. We have our own data collection kit, but we wanted to see what sort of performance figures we would get from a public track.

These are extraordinary times. The global financial system has gone through the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and the effects are only beginning to wind their way through every facet of the economy. It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks, and this is true for Silicon Valley as well.