With their bulging price tags and as-yet unimpressed consumers, electric vehicles haven’t exactly taken the American market by storm.

Promising vehicles with a solid 200-mile range at around $40,000 or less, EV manufacturer Tesla is hoping to change that by the year 2017. Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes his company’s charge is to make an electric vehicle that boasts both high performance and efficiency.

Tesla and its CEO have enjoyed plenty of media attention as of late, including word of the company paying back a $465 million loan nine years ahead of time. On the negative side, Tesla has drawn the ire of North Carolina auto dealers who are pressing legislators to ban the company from doing business in the Tar Heel state for the way it takes and fills online orders.

Tesla’s future still appears bright, however, as the company reportedly posted losses of $90 million a year ago but turned that around to be $11.2 million in the black as of May this year. Its Model S plug-in also drew rave reviews from Consumer Reports.

“It’s what Marty McFly might have brought back in place of his DeLorean in Back to the Future,” and brimming with innovation,” has “impressive attention to detail,” runs incredibly quietly, yet has power and performance “that will make many sports cars weep with envy,” the magazine reported.

USA Today didn’t care for the car’s long charging time and noted its $90,000 price tag though one can expect Musk and his team of engineers to do more than their share of tweaks to the product.

Musk has seemingly bottomless pockets of cash too, as the PayPal co-founder (later sold to eBay) has watched shares of Tesla increase 180 percent in value this year. Musk also acts as chairman for the green-friendly renewable energy firm SolarCity, which has gone from an initial IPO price of $8 to $48.78 as of Friday’s stock market close.

The smell of success for Musk amounts to about $4.8 billion, according to a recent Bloomberg report. The old “everything he touches turns to gold” adage just may apply to Musk lately, as SpaceX became the first commercial venture to successfully attach a vehicle to the International Space Station, a feat it accomplished twice last year.