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Editorial: Don't hold your breath on Tesla Motors plant

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Whether you're buying from a used car salesman or the pitch-men for a new electric car manufacturing plant, it's good old common sense to kick the tires.

Albuquerque lately is glowing from:

• All the great surveys and polls that give it high marks as a great place to live, visit or do business.

• Attracting high-value manufacturing enterprises, such as Eclipse Aviation, which is on the brink of building affordable jets on the West Side.

• A real estate boom that appears to defy national realities, in which housing prices are dropping across the country — in some cases like lead weights — while housing inventories climb, real estate sales cool and foreclosures explode.

Maybe it's time for a gut check.

One of the biggest development stories yet to pay a local dividend is the promise of the Tesla Motors electric car plant, which the company said in February it had expected to begin building in the Cordero Mesa West Side business park "at the latest" in April.

Now, as Tribune reporter Erik Siemers' article — "Electric car plant still only on paper" — said Monday, company officials aren't exactly sure when they'll proceed.

That's in part because the company is continuing to design, modify and redesign its WhiteStar model - a four-door, luxury electric sedan.

Company spokesman Daryl Siry told Siemers the company still is designing and engineering the new car. The assembly plant has to reflect that car design, and first the company needs "to make sure we have the right car."

Siry said the company is trying to learn from its past effort — the design and production of its Roadster in England — in which the design wasn't locked down, reslting in delays and rising costs.

For example, the design and cost of the WhiteStar is bound to determine whether some parts are better assembled in Albuquerque or elsewhere, Siry said. And all that, of course, will affect the size and design of the West Side plant.

Fair enough - perhaps even for a company that also said back in February that it would employ about 400 workers at the 157,000-square-foot West Side plant, where it projected it would be rolling out its WhiteStar cars in 2010.

But in the here and now, Tesla last month asked for a 30-day extension on committing to the plant to re-evaluate the car's design and determine if more production space will be needed in the plant, which will be leased from Rio Real Estate, the development company.

Tim Cummins, a Bernalillo County commissioner and a Rio Real Estate co-owner, said he still expects the plant to be completed early next year.

However, Siry couldn't put a time on it, in part because the company is so focused right now on bringing its English Roadster to market this fall.

Reminds one a bit, perhaps, of the Quail Ranch development — the northwestern Bernalillo County area annexed by Rio Rancho and slated for a grandiose 22,000 homes, 4,500 of which were on the fast track. Until last month, that is, when the developer, Sandia Properties Ltd., shouted "Whoa!" and announced that the area's water uncertainties made it prudent not to proceed to purchase the land. Or could it have been those dark clouds hovering over Albuquerque's real estate horizon?