A few automotive blogs have been speculating about what platform underpins Tesla’s S Coupe.  You see, it takes large, large amounts of cash and engineering resources to develop a vehicle platform from scratch.  Many folks in the automotive industry believe Tesla does not currently have the capacity financially to develop it’s own.  They used the Lotus Elise as the basis for their Roadster after all, so their is a precedent to show Tesla’s need to use commercially available platforms.

Living here in Southern California has many benefits.  Other than the constant sunshine and warmth, we are the virtual epicenter of modern automotive design.  As a result, info and rumor about future automotive products are often a topic of conversation amongst car guys.  Just last week I was having a conversation with someone (who is involved in the local industry) about the Tesla  S Coupe, partly because I’m just endlessly curious about the business and partly because he’s a great source of info.  During this conversation he offered up some interesting info about the Tesla S Coupe.  He said that the vehicle is based on a Mercedes platform.  Which one exactly, he wasn’t sure.  Tesla went out to the local dealership and bought a few of these Mercedes vehicles, only to strip them down to their barest of essentials.  On these stripped down platforms, they built the cars we all saw at the unveiling on March 26th.  What seems odd to me about this bit of info is that Mercedes apparently didn’t supply Tesla with the platforms through any sort of formal agreement.

So we here at Motorlust decided we would do a little sleuthing to see if this info could possible be true.  We compared the wheelbase specs of Mercedes vehicles available in 2008 with the published wheelbase spec of the Tesla Coupe to see if we could find any that matched.  We found that the Tesla Coupe and the Mercedes CL had wheelbases that only varied by 2 tenths of an inch.  Next we overlaid an image of the Coupe over the CL, scaled so the wheelbases match (as per manufacturers specs) to see if other bits of the vehicle designs matched.  We created a little animated gif to show our results.

As you can see, the vehicles match very closely.  The wheelbases match.  The A-pillar base is very similar between the two cars.  The front doors hinge at the same location.  The bumpers and lights are at the same height.  The front seats mount at almost the same position.  There is at least one thing that makes me take pause.  One car has two doors and the other has four.  If these cars are both based on the same platform, there was a lot of work done to the Tesla to hide that fact.

Given the credability of our source and the dimensions illustrated above, it seems likely that these cars are  based on the same platform.  Does Tesla plan to sell S Coupes built upon Mercedes CL?  I’m still searching out that scoop.