Are you a frustrated Prius owner with money to burn and a strong desire to be the first on your block to own the next big, environmentally conscious status item? Then perhaps you should go test drive one of Tesla's $109,000 Roadsters (pictured), which are fully electric, and have a range of over 200 miles on a single charge. Perhaps you already have, and you're one of the 150 Bay Area residents who've already purchased one of these babies, one of whom told a NYT reporter the he bought the car because "three other guys on my block have them."

Over the weekend the NYT penned this piece about how San Francisco will be among the first cities in the nation to prepare the way for widespread electric car ownership. Soon, they say, SF will be changing its building code to require electric car chargers in all newly constructed buildings. "There is a huge momentum here," says a PG&E exec, while his company prepares "heat maps" of neighborhoods likely to overload the power grid charging their Nissan Leafs as they rush to purchase the first ones off the line in December.