Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BEACHES (90%); WOMEN (77%); JEWS & JUDAISM (77%); MUSLIMS & ISLAM (76%); ANNIVERSARIES (75%); WEDDINGS & ENGAGEMENTS (75%); CHRISTIANS & CHRISTIANITY (72%); RELIGION (64%); MOTOR VEHICLES (50%); SURFING (90%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (64%)
GEOGRAPHIC: TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (94%) ISRAEL (94%); MEDITERRANEAN (90%)
LOAD-DATE: July 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: A surfer and a wedding party present contrasting images in Neve Tzedek, a quiet corner of the city. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RINA CASTELNUOVO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.TR1)

TOP RIGHT: A surfer rinses off on the beach.

CENTER LEFT: The port at Jaffa

CENTER RIGHT: The reviving Florentine neighborhood near Jaffa.

FROM FAR LEFT: A lively bistro on trendy Sheinkin Street

the Jaffa bell tower, a landmark

a seaside promenade. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY RINA CASTELNUOVO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.TR6 and TR7) MAP: Tel Aviv, Israel
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

567 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Mr. Ford's T: Mobility With Versatility
BYLINE: By LINDSAY BROOKE
SECTION: Section AU; Column 0; Automobiles; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1009 words
WHEN Henry Ford started to manufacture his groundbreaking Model T on Sept. 27, 1908, he probably never imagined that the spindly little car would remain in production for 19 years. Nor could Ford have foreseen that his company would eventually build more than 15 million Tin Lizzies, making him a billionaire while putting the world on wheels.

But nearly as significant as the Model T's ubiquity was its knack for performing tasks far beyond basic transportation. As quickly as customers left the dealers' lot, they began transforming their Ts to suit their specialized needs, assisted by scores of new companies that sprang up to cater exclusively to the world's most popular car.

Following the Model T's skyrocketing success came mail-order catalogs and magazine advertisements filled with parts and kits to turn the humble Fords into farm tractors, mobile sawmills, snowmobiles, racy roadsters and even semi-trucks. Indeed, historians credit the Model T -- which Ford first advertised as The Universal Car -- with launching today's multibillion-dollar automotive aftermarket industry.

Many of these Model T oddities are likely to surface this week at a centennial celebration in Richmond, Ind., hosted by the Model T Ford Club of America. The event is expected to draw nearly 1,000 Model Ts, the largest gathering of the cars since production ended in 1927.

Do-it-yourself magazines ran story after story describing how to modify the T. But some of the most clever and practical conversions came from owners' sheer ingenuity, with a bit of carpentry and mechanical skill. One Midwestern traveling minister built a tiny church atop his car. He installed a pint-size organ inside and designed the steeple to fold down so the road-going chapel could be garaged.

And the Model T worked on the railroad. Their original wood-spoke wheels replaced with heavy flanged-steel railcar wheels, the Fords served as track-inspection cars and even railyard switcher engines.

No duty was too mundane or extreme for the wildly popular T, which became known by the nickname Flivver. By jacking up the rear and replacing one wheel with a pulley and leather drive belt, owners could turn the Ford into a fine stationary power plant for milling grain or turning the saw blade of a mobile lumber mill.

Even years after its heyday, the T continued as the Swiss Army knife of automobiles. In the 1930s, a group of New England ski enthusiasts created the first tow rope on the slopes of Woodstock, Vt. Their initial power source was a well-worn T equipped with a Pullford tractor conversion, its huge steel drive wheels turning at just the right speed to reel skiers up the mountain.

Even when the original bodies and frames had rusted away, T owners would swap out the nearly unburstable Ford engines and drive axles to power boats, oil derricks and stationary pumps.

The car's do-it-all utility sprang from a combination of stout basic design and widespread availability, said Robert Casey, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., and author of ''The Model T: A Centennial History'' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

''First, there were simply more of them than anything else,'' Mr. Casey explained. ''And the T was cheaper than just about every other car once Ford got production really rolling.'' By the mid-1920s, Ford's mass-production juggernaut at its Highland Park factory near Detroit had reduced the price of a new two-seat Runabout to $240.

Those looking to convert their Fords for uses beyond transportation found the T's 4-cylinder engine a willing accomplice. Although it produced just 20 horsepower, the rugged 2.9-liter unit didn't have a lot of weight to haul around. The basic car tipped the scales at about 1,300 pounds, giving it peppy performance.

''The engine was torquey, which made it work pretty well on the farm,'' Mr. Casey added.

Indeed, the T often served as a mechanical beast of burden. The car moved capably in tilled soil because Henry Ford and his draftsmen had designed its wagonlike 30 x 3 1/2 inch wheels, high ground clearance and flexible suspension for traversing the rutted dirt roads of rural America.

But in competing with horses and mules pulling heavy disc harrows and grain threshers, the Ford quickly showed its limitations, spurring inventors and entrepreneurs to step in with tractor conversion kits. In his 2004 book, ''Ford Farm Tractors,'' Randy Leffingwell noted about 125 manufacturers offering tractor conversion kits for the Model T in 1914-30.

Well-known names included American-Ford-A-Tractor, the Adapt-O-Tractor and the Smith Form-A-Tractor (which also made chain-drive kits to turn Model Ts into semi-trucks for road use). Sears & Roebuck and other retailers sold hundreds of kits. ''Make your Ford do the work of two or three horses!'' shouted ad copy for Pullford's $135 kit, sold by Montgomery Ward.

One of the most successful makers, the E. G. Staude Manufacturing Company of St. Paul, Minn., produced nearly 30,000 of its Mak-A-Tractor kits for Ford cars. The $225 kit included two large-diameter cleated wheels and different gearing to boost the car's lugging power (and reduced top speed to 2.5 miles an hour).

Nearly as prolific as the tractor kits were speedster bodies, designed to make the humble Ford look like a Grand Prix car or dirt-track racer. The two-seat speedster body kits were made by at least a dozen specialist companies, including F. M. Ames, Bub and Paco. Stripping off the standard Ford sheet metal and installing a lightweight speedster body further improved the T's power-to-weight ratio and made performance brisk.

''There haven't been many automobiles, or even machines in general, which can be made into a race car and a tractor,'' Mr. Casey of the Ford museum said.

Today, no single vehicle has to serve as many purposes as the milestone Model T. Perhaps a minivan comes closest to being the do-it-all device, but it would be ill-suited to pulling a disc harrow over a freshly plowed field.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MOTOR VEHICLES (90%); SAW MILLS (88%); ELECTRIC POWER PLANTS (78%); AUTOMOTIVE AFTERMARKET (78%); MAGAZINE ADVERTISING (74%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (72%); MAIL ORDER RETAILING (70%); MOUNTAINS (63%); SKIING (63%); POWER PLANTS (60%); HISTORY (53%)
COMPANY: FORD MOTOR CO (92%)
ORGANIZATION: MODEL T FORD CLUB OF AMERICA (55%)
TICKER: FORDP (PAR) (92%); F (NYSE) (92%); FDM (LSE) (92%); F (SWX) (92%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS336112 LIGHT TRUCK & UTILITY VEHICLE MANUFACTURING (92%); NAICS336111 AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING (92%); SIC3711 MOTOR VEHICLES & PASSENGER CAR BODIES (92%)
GEOGRAPHIC: MIDWEST USA (79%); INDIANA, USA (79%); NORTHEAST USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: July 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: OFF ROAD: Kits to take the Model T places Henry Ford never intended included tractor conversions, top, and left, a speedster replacement body. Below, hauling the harvest.(PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM)

MULTITASKING: Creative Model T reworks included adaptations for hauling livestock, above, and a mobile chapel.(PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM)

(PHOTOGRAPH BY HEMMINGS CLASSIC CAR)(pg. AU14) CHART: Where Snowmobile Began: ONE of the most specialized and useful Model T conversions was the snowmobile kit. Popular across the Snow Belt states, the unusual machines were the creation of Virgil D. White, a Ford dealer in West Ossipee, N.H. In the early 1910s, White was searching for a way to make the Model T a true all-season vehicle. His solution was to add a second set of rear wheels and caterpillar tracks. White then replaced the front wheels with wooden runners. He called his creation a Snowmobile, a term now used to describe sporty snow vehicles. White's shop began selling fully converted Model Ts for $750 and conversion kits for about $400. Eventually, his small factory in West Ossipee was making about 3,000 Snowmobile kits a year. The Model T Snowmobile Club of America (www.modeltfordsnowmobile. com) and its regional affiliates hold rallies, where the restored crawlers are as unstoppable as ever.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

568 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Double Edge to Brooklyn's Success
BYLINE: By PATRICK McGEEHAN
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 21
LENGTH: 1373 words
When the Brooklyn Brewery set up its brew house 12 years ago in a decaying section of Williamsburg riddled with empty shells of the borough's industrial past, Steve Hindy, the brewery's president, was hailed as a pioneer.

Today, the neighborhood has come a long way: Condominiums a block away offer rooftop cabanas, while developers are turning neighboring warehouses and factories into bowling alleys and boutique hotels designed for hipsters.

Like the neighborhood it helped to reinvigorate, the brewery is thriving, enough to justify an expansion. But the gentrification Mr. Hindy once championed has made a hostage of his company, he says.

He and his partners are willing to spend $15 million for a bigger brewery that would employ at least twice as many workers as he has now and would have a beer garden where customers could sample his growing roster of specialty brews. But after four years of searching and two failed bids to be included in redevelopment projects in Red Hook and Carroll Gardens, they have not found a suitable building in the borough at a feasible price.

''We are the Brooklyn Brewery, and we want to be in Brooklyn,'' said Mr. Hindy, who often bicycles to work from his home in Park Slope. ''If we can't find a place, then who can? We're about as perfect an example of light manufacturing as you can get.''

Mr. Hindy has plenty of company in the hunt for affordable industrial land. Manufacturing space has become scarcer and more expensive as city officials have encouraged developers to replace crumbling factories and warehouses with amenity-laden condominiums.

''The scarcity of manufacturing land becomes a problem for manufacturers that are otherwise thriving in New York City,'' said Leah Archibald, executive director of the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation, a Brooklyn business coalition.

The number of manufacturing jobs in the city, which once exceeded 850,000, fell below 100,000 in recent months, according to statistics compiled by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing now accounts for about one of every 40 jobs in the city, down from almost a quarter of all jobs in the mid-1960s.

''These manufacturing jobs are worth preserving because they're excellent, high-wage jobs that don't require English as a first language or a high level of education,'' Ms. Archibald said. ''They pay way better than retail.''

Many of the survivors are makers of specialty foods, like Amy's Cookies in Red Hook, which sells tea cookies to Dean & DeLuca markets, and Bagels by Bell in Canarsie, one of the biggest bakers of bialys in the country. Warren Bell, who employs more than 30 people, said he had given up after a few years of trying to find an affordable building for his growing bakery and had decided to seek a variance that would allow him to add a second floor.

''I could move out to Long Island and send the product here and distribute it out to my customers from here,'' said Mr. Bell, who lives in Bergen Beach. But, he added, ''I have ties here. I like saying we produce in Brooklyn.''

Ms. Archibald said her organization ''would do back flips'' to keep the Brooklyn Brewery in the area. But she said there was simply no space available in North Brooklyn that would accommodate its needs, in part because some landlords are holding onto industrial property with the hope that it will be rezoned for residential buildings.

''Absolutely, there's warehousing of space going on,'' Ms. Archibald said. ''You can make so much more money with a residential development, so many times more than you can with an industrial user.''

Ms. Archibald described the brewery as a valued part of the community partly because ''they got here first.'' Mr. Hindy and his co-founder, Tom Potter, moved their business into its home on North 11th Street when only a few art galleries had attempted to breathe new life into Williamsburg.

Back then, Brooklyn Brewery was making and selling about 15,000 barrels of beer a year, but none of it was produced anywhere in New York City. The company's flagship product, Brooklyn Lager, was brewed 180 miles away at a large contract brewery in Utica, N.Y.

Since then, the company's output has grown sixfold. Most of its products, including the six-packs of its lager and brown ale that are sold in New York City, are bottled in Utica. But the brewery in Williamsburg turns out about 12,000 barrels of specialty beers annually, including a premium brew, Brooklyn Local 1, which comes corked like Champagne and sells for as much as $15 a bottle.

Mr. Hindy said the company could expand its local production to more than 40,000 barrels a year, and more than double its current payroll of 35 people, if it found a space that was large enough. But that quest has left Mr. Hindy feeling unappreciated by city officials.

He was a champion of the rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pushed through in 2005. But now he contends that the changes went too far by allowing a variety of nonindustrial uses of land in areas that are labeled industrial business zones.

Entrepreneurs, like the ones who plan to turn the warehouse next to the brewery into a bowling alley, are willing to pay far more for space, Mr. Hindy said. He said the rent on the brewery started at $3 a square foot and has risen to $9. He estimated that the bowling alley would pay about twice as much, a price that he said would be prohibitive for a brewery.

A few years ago, Mr. Hindy and his partners hatched a plan to team up with the company that distributes its beers, Phoenix/Beehive Beverages of Long Island City, Queens, and move to Pier 7 in the Red Hook container port. Once there, Phoenix, which is the exclusive distributor of Heineken beer in the city, would have been able to receive its imports by water, skipping the expensive step of having them trucked in from Port Newark in New Jersey and ensuring a steady flow of work for longshoremen on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Under the plan, the new, bigger Brooklyn Brewery would have occupied a building at the foot of the pier, with a beer garden to attract local residents and tourists. The brewery would have served as a buffer between Brooklyn Bridge Park and the industrial piers.

Mr. Hindy and executives of Phoenix convinced officials of the city's Economic Development Corporation that the city should acquire the pier from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and lease it to them. But the Port Authority got tangled in a legal battle with American Stevedoring, the operator of the Red Hook container port. Several elected officials, including Representative Jerrold Nadler, opposed the city's effort to replace American Stevedoring, which renewed its lease for 10 years in April.

Mr. Hindy said he was ''completely baffled'' by the rejection of the Pier 7 plan and felt as though his need for an alternative location had lost the attention of city officials.

''I just felt like in that whole battle, I got left out,'' he said with a go-figure shrug.

Andrew Genn, a vice president in the maritime division of the Economic Development Corporation, said the agency shared Mr. Hindy's frustration and continued to work with him to find an alternative location. But, Mr. Genn said, the brewery's demands were hard to meet because ''they need a lot of land in New York City under a roof.''

With the Pier 7 location eliminated, Mr. Hindy sought to have his brewery included in plans for Public Place, the proposed redevelopment of six acres along the Gowanus Canal in Carroll Gardens as a residential and commercial complex. But the developer Mr. Hindy had teamed with was not the winning bidder, so the brewery was left to continue its search.

Mr. Hindy has been pressing city officials to help him because he says that their rezoning decisions have put growing manufacturers like the brewery in bind. ''If the government wants me to be here, then make it less expensive for me to be here,'' he said.

But, unlike some other employers, he is not threatening to leave the city if he does not get the help he needs.

''Once you name your company Brooklyn Brewery, you kind of take away the threat of moving to New Jersey,'' Mr. Hindy said.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BREWERIES (91%); FACTORY WORKERS (89%); CONDOMINIUMS (89%); MANUFACTURING OUTPUT (89%); CITY GOVERNMENT (89%); INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY (89%); GOURMET FOOD STORES (83%); CITIES (78%); RETAILERS (76%); WAGES & SALARIES (74%); DRINKING PLACES (73%); STATISTICAL METHOD (73%); STATISTICS (73%); TEA (71%); LABOR DEPARTMENTS (69%); BAKERIES (69%); LABOR SECTOR PERFORMANCE (67%); FOOD INDUSTRY (63%); BOWLING CENTERS (56%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (82%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (95%) NEW YORK, USA (95%) UNITED STATES (95%)
LOAD-DATE: July 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Tom Villa checks fermentation levels at the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. It opened there 12 years ago, helping to usher in the area's rebirth.

The brewery's owners want to expand, but rents in the neighborhood have shot up. Proposals to move elsewhere in Brooklyn have fallen through. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEATRICE DE GEA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.A21)

Industrial buildings around the Brooklyn Brewery on North 11th Street in Williamsburg have been turned into condominiums.

Steve Hindy, the brewery's president, says that city zoning decisions have put him and other growing manufacturers in a bind.

The revitalization of Williamsburg and Greenpoint has meant higher rents and less available space for businesses. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEATRICE DE GEA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.A24)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

569 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 19, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

Costly Toys, Or a New Era For Drivers?
BYLINE: By JOE NOCERA
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; TALKING BUSINESS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1629 words
''In and of itself,'' said Elon Musk, ''a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world.''

Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)

The second is Tesla Motors, which was started in 2003 -- Mr. Musk became its chief backer and board chairman in early 2004. After raising $150 million and going through four years of technological and internal struggles, the company has begun manufacturing the first-ever all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Its base price is $109,000. And if Mr. Musk is willing to concede that the Roadster, by itself, isn't a world-changer, he fervently believes that the technology Tesla has created -- technology that gives the car a range of 227 miles per battery charge, and enough acceleration to go from zero to 60 in under 4 seconds -- will indeed change the world. The age of the electric car, he is convinced, has dawned.

The Tesla Roadster is a gorgeous sports car. That's not a surprise: one of Tesla's goals was to prove that an electric car didn't have to look stodgy -- or resemble something out of ''The Jetsons.'' Tesla's other goal, though, was to show that an electric vehicle could provide a driving experience that was a good or better than any finely tuned sports car.

They appear to have succeeded at that as well. ''My experience was highly positive,'' said Don Sherman, the technical editor at Automobile magazine who test-drove it last December. ''It was a very exciting, very interesting piece of work that I found quite appealing.'' Though I'm no auto expert, I'd have to agree. I took the wheel for an hour last week and came away exhilarated by how quickly it accelerated, and how beautifully it handled. For the first time in my life, I had car lust.

So far the company has delivered four cars, with 27 more in production. It has 1,080 customers waiting patiently for a Roadster, which is a year behind schedule. (Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Tesla investors, are scheduled to get cars seven and eight.) Tesla expects to be delivering four cars a week soon, a number it eventually hopes to double.

But for all its sex appeal, the Roadster only hints at Tesla's real ambition. By the end of 2010, Mr. Musk and his executive team expect to be manufacturing a five-seat, all-electric $60,000 sedan. This, however, will be a much more expensive and difficult task -- and many auto experts doubt that Tesla can pull it off. Which raises the question of whether the era of the electric car is really about to begin, as Mr. Musk believes -- or whether the Tesla Roadster is little more than an expensive toy for rich people.

In the documentary ''Who Killed the Electric Car?'' -- about the EV1, an all-electric car General Motors began making in 1996 and killed once and for all in 2003 -- the filmmakers posit the theory that the vehicle was done in by a grand conspiracy involving the oil industry, the Bush administration and the car industry. But that's not what happened. Gas was cheap when the EV1 was on the market; auto buyers preferred S.U.V.'s. And the technology didn't exist to allow the EV1 to become a viable mass-market automobile. Among its flaws, the EV1 used a nickel metal hydride battery that couldn't get more than 75 miles before needing a charge.

''My daily commute was 37 miles one way,'' wrote a man named Michael Posner on a Web site called The Truth About Cars, who drove an EV1 for several weeks back in 1997. ''Every trip was loaded with drama,'' he added. ''If I went to lunch, I gave up a few precious miles. That could mean disaster.'' At General Motors, they took to calling this problem ''range anxiety.'' Is it any wonder the car didn't catch on?

Jump ahead a decade. Oil is so expensive that everybody is thinking about alternatives to $4.50-a-gallon gasoline. At the same time, the technology that makes electric cars possible has greatly improved. The development of lithium ion batteries, in particular, was such a great leap forward that it has made it possible, with enough additional innovation by electric car companies, to produce vehicles that get more than 200 miles. Suddenly, an electric car seems viable.

And yet, and yet. Despite all this progress, we're not close to being ready to mass-produce an electric car. For starters, everyone trying to build an electric car is coming at it from different directions. For instance, while the Tesla has a 1,000-pound battery pack, consisting of over 6,800 cells (at an estimated cost of $30,000), the new Aptera Typ-1 -- a Jetson-mobile if ever there was one -- uses a much smaller battery; its secret sauce is its aerodynamic shape, which greatly reduces drag. Bill Gross, the head of Idealab, which is behind Aptera, told me that he believes that when the car comes on the market late this year, it will sell for around $29,000 -- meaning of course that its business model is the opposite of Tesla's.

Meanwhile, a third company, Phoenix Motorcars, is hoping to make traditional cars, like S.U.V.'s, that just happen to run on electricity. It will take years, if not decades, for the marketplace to choose a winner, which, in turn, will keep consumers from committing to an electric car.

Secondly, even though the range of an electric car can extend to 200 miles or more, that is still not enough for people to abandon internal combustion engines. Surveys have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of people drive 50 miles or less a day -- and the nascent electric car industry takes great comfort in those numbers. But what happens when you want to take a longer drive?

For an electric car to truly take hold, the country will need some kind of national electric car infrastructure -- either a place where people can stop to charge the battery (although that still means waiting hours to get a full charge) or a system in which batteries can be exchanged like propane tanks.

Then there are the manufacturing problems. Just because Tesla has succeeded in making an expensive electric sports car does not mean that it will be able to make a moderately priced five-seat sedan. The latter is a quantum leap more difficult. ''If the Roadster costs $100,000, how much will the sedan cost?'' Mr. Sherman of Automotive magazine said. ''It will have more doors, more seats, more metal, larger brakes. The operative word here is 'more.' ''

David Cole, the chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, is another Tesla skeptic. For one thing, he says, the battery solution in the Roadster probably won't work in a heavier car. ''Lithium batteries are going to change the world,'' he said, ''but they are not ready for prime time.'' Tesla's solution in the Roadster -- tying together thousands of small batteries into one giant one -- is ''suboptimal.'' He added, ''On a degree of difficulty scale, building a sports car is a 2. Building a high-volume affordable car is a 10.''

Tesla, of course, insists that it is well aware of the difficulty, but remains confident it can succeed. Darryl Siry, the Tesla marketing chief, argues that the company has access to all the capital it needs, that it has just hired a manufacturing expert from Chrysler and that it has a hard-headed chief executive, named Ze'ev Drori, who has a reputation for getting things done. The more I prodded, though, the more skeptical I became. For instance, what Tesla doesn't say, unless you really push, is that the sedan it hopes to sell for $60,000 will not get 200 miles per charge but closer to 160. It will cost considerably more to get 200 miles per charge -- which of course makes it an awfully costly car even for the moderately wealthy. And that kind of petty dissembling on Tesla's part doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

So where should we pin our short-term electric car hopes? Andrew Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, has lately been pounding the table on behalf of something called a plug-in hybrid -- which uses a far more energy efficient design than the Prius, Toyota's popular hybrid. The Prius is powered both by batteries and an internal combustion engine, but essentially they are both working at the same time, so it is always consuming gas.

A plug-in hybrid would drive completely on electricity until the battery runs down -- after about 40 miles or so -- and only then would the car switch to internal combustion. Such a solution has the potential to cut the nation's gasoline bill in half.

Mr. Grove believes that big cars like S.U.V.'s can be retrofitted to become plug-in hybrids, and he's right. But it is also expensive; Martin G. Klein, the founder of the battery company Electro Energy told me that it costs $50,000 to turn a Prius into a plug-in hybrid. (He's done it.) ''But in a future scenario,'' he added, ''it would cost a few thousand dollars.''

So where should we look, realistically, for a mass-market electric vehicle? Believe it or not, Detroit. In fact, the quick-fix approach that strikes me as the most promising comes from -- surprise! -- General Motors, the chief villain of ''Who Killed the Electric Car?'' The Chevy Volt, which the company wants to bring to market in 2010, is a plug-in hybrid that aspires to be able to travel 40 miles before switching to gasoline power. But the best part is that the combustion engine will automatically recharge the battery -- so it can switch back even while you're driving.

It's not sexy like the Tesla, and it's not aerodynamic like the Aptera Typ-1. But for a mass-market solution in the here and now, that's the one to root for.