You may not have heard it coming, but the electric car is here. The Tesla Roadster officially began rolling off the assembly line in mid-March, and just a week later one of the high-performance $98,000 electric cars was spotted, (silently) cruising through a small town just south of San Francisco. At first glance, the Tesla’s profile looks very similar to that of a Lotus Elise, from which Tesla borrowed the chassis, but it’s a subtly stretched out version of that extreme, minimalist sports car, lengthened to accommodate the battery unit. The best indicator that we really had spotted one of the first electric sports cars? The widely spaced T E S L A across the rear and, of course, the absence of combustion sounds.

The company insists (and even car nerds are starting to believe) that the Tesla Roadster is slated to change the way the world thinks about automobiles. After several years of development rife with management changes and engineering hang ups that prompted doubts about the Roadster’s feasibility, investors and the faithful who plunked down early deposits on cars have been vindicated with news of production. Moving to actual customer delivery signals the growing reality of consumer-ready electric cars. But apparently old habits die hard with the first owners. Just as we spotted the Tesla, it pulled into a gas station and briefly stopped at a pump, before pulling back on to the road.