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Tesla Motors' plans to build an assembly plant in Albuquerque for its battery-powered sedan may be growing.

Officials with the San Carlos, Calif., electric car company will be in Albuquerque today to discuss details about the $50,000, four-door WhiteStar sedans it plans to build at a yet-to-be-built assembly plant on the West Side.

"We're looking at a potentially larger program," said Darryl Siry, the company's vice president of sales, marketing and service, told The Tribune on Tuesday. "The program has been much more clearly defined, and we're further along in defining what the car is. That has ramifications for our supply chain and logistics."

Exactly what that means won't be known until later today, after Ron Lloyd, vice president of the WhiteStar program, and Diarmuid O'Connell, the company's head of corporate development, meet with local officials, Siry said.

Tesla in February announced plans to employ about 400 people at an assembly plant in the Cordero Mesa business park at I-40 and Paseo del Volcan.

As of August, Tesla said it had yet to break ground at Cordero Mesa because the WhiteStar was still being designed. The car's final design would determine how the assembly plant would be constructed, company officials said.

Siry said those details have been further defined, making it appropriate to return to Albuquerque to discuss specifics about the assembly plant.

He declined to offer any details about the WhiteStar, or what a "larger program" means, other than to say it doesn't necessarily add to the projected number of employees. The car to be built here remains a four-door, five-passenger all-electric sedan, he added.

State Economic Development Secretary Fred Mondragon said the state is in discussion with Tesla about a "larger involvement in Albuquerque."

While he couldn't provide details, Mondragon said, "We are in discussions with them about the possibility of more than just an assembly plant."

Tesla plans to have the individual components of WhiteStar sedans manufactured at locations around the world. Those components would be shipped to Albuquerque for final assembly, with the first cars rolling out around 2010.

Tim Cummins, co-owner of Rio Real Estate Investment Opportunities which developed the Cordero Mesa business park, said the scope of today's discussions is likely to be about "how big their initial facility will be and what different components that will include."

Cummins said the company's original plans called for using a 14-acre site at the business park, with the option of expanding by another 75 acres in the future.

"That's almost 90 acres of land, and from the beginning they had always anticipated an expansion," Cummins said.

The company's immediate focus has remained on its first model, the two-seat Tesla Roadster, a $98,000 electric sports car being built in England.

Tesla had hoped to begin production and delivery of the Roadster by this fall. But the company has been slowed by issues with the car's design, suppliers and parts shipments to its assembly plant, according to a report Monday in the Wall Street Journal. Deliveries of the Roadster have been pushed back to the first quarter of 2008, according to the report.

Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard told the Wall Street Journal that the company was "deep, deep" into developing the WhiteStar line, but did not specify what the car would be.

"We are planning on building (cars) in Albuquerque," Eberhard told the newspaper. "It's possible we might want to do something different."