Electric car makers plug in to L.A.

You can feel the electricity.

Tesla Motors Inc., manufacturer of an exotic electric roadster, will launch its brick-and-mortar retailing effort with a store on Santa Monica Boulevard near the 405 Freeway in November.

And Environmental Motors, the newest dealer for Zap, importer of a three-wheeled, low-speed electric “city car” called the Xebra, just held a grand opening for its showroom at 134 S. Glendale Ave. in Glendale.

Environmental is the creation of Kent Sokolow, whose family has been in the auto retailing business for more than half a century. The Glendale dealership will be located near the family’s Colonial Honda store.

In addition to Zap’s vehicles, Environmental sells Zenn low-speed electric cars, imported from a Canadian manufacturer, and a number of electric scooters.

Tesla, which is marketing a roadster capable of freeway speeds and longer distances between battery recharges, has already leased its Westside facility, marketing Vice President Darryl Siry says.

But the Northern California company is keeping mum on the exact location until a bit closer to opening day.

Siry says other Tesla stores will follow in the top-tier markets of San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Miami.

Then there will be a second round of store openings in locations including San Diego, Seattle and Denver.

Because San Carlos-based Tesla already has orders for 400 of the 1,200 roadsters it expects to sell in its first year, the showrooms won’t have inventory. Each will have just a demonstration car or two to enable prospective customers to take test drives and see the $98,000 vehicles up close before ordering.

“Ideally, we’ll never have unsold inventory of the roadster,” Siry said.

The company does plan, however, to begin marketing a $50,000 electric sedan in 2009 and hopes to be able to sell 5,000 a year.

“We’d like demand to outstrip supply for the next four or five years,” Siry said, voicing the dream of every car salesman, “but at some point there may be inventories of the sedan” for shoppers to choose from.

The Tesla stores will combine showroom and service areas under one roof so that an owner or potential buyer could sit in the showroom and watch cars being worked on, he says. “Electric cars are so clean we can do things that they just wouldn’t do in a regular dealership.”

Tesla will own all its dealerships, because the company wants complete control over the sales and service experience.

Company executives don’t believe that a traditional dealership, steeped in decades of selling conventional internal-combustion engine vehicles, could do justice to an electric car.

“They’ll see it through the prism of what it isn’t” and have difficulty explaining it to buyers, Siry said. “We’re going to develop our own sales experience.”

The Tesla roadster is a swift two-seater capable of accelerating from a standstill to 60 mph in less than four seconds. It boasts a top speed of 130 mph and a range, when driven at legal speeds, in excess of 200 miles before its lithium-ion batteries need to be recharged.

Tesla’s sedan, code-named WhiteStar, will be a bit more sedate. Performance figures have not been make public, but it is expected to have a lower top speed but a greater range per charge than the roadster.

Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal Inc., is Tesla’s chairman and largest investor. Other significant backers include Google Inc. founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.