Electric-Car Maker Tesla to Set Up IPO

Tesla Motors Inc., the maker of electric sports cars that hasn't posted a profit since its founding in 2003, will seek to sell 11.1 million shares at $14 to $16 each in its initial public offering, The Detroit News reported.

The producer of the $109,000 electric Roadster will use the proceeds from the $178 million IPO to pay for factories and fund possible acquisitions, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed.

Existing stockholders, including Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, will sell 1.1 million of the 11.1 million shares; Toyota Motor Corp. will buy $50 million of stock in a private placement, Palo Alto, California-based Tesla said.

The automaker is pushing forward with its sale even after the European debt crisis spurred at least 34 companies to postpone or withdraw IPOs since the start of May.

Tesla, which has sold about 1,000 Roadsters while losing $290 million, is using the share sale and a $465 million loan from the government to help produce its second electric car, the Model S sedan.

Tesla hired New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., along with Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt, to lead the sale. The company originally filed with the SEC in January to raise as much as $100 million.

Musk, who founded PayPal Inc., the online payment company now owned by eBay Inc., spent more than $70 million of his own money on Tesla before May 2009, when Daimler AG of Stuttgart, Germany, invested $50 million.

The company is backed by investors including Google Inc.'s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; the government of Abu Dhabi; and Daimler, the world's second-biggest maker of luxury vehicles.

General Motors Co. also has said that it may sell shares to the public as early as this year.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Zipcar Inc., the car-sharing company that rents vehicles by the hour, filed this month to raise as much as $75 million in an IPO.