4:00 pm
Nov 27, 2013


Test Drive: Summing Up the Tesla Model S

    • I have one for a year now and I can honestly say it’s has been just perfect, the drive is just uncomparable to an ICE drive. It has been nothing more then perfect so far and with regular updates, it’s the first car I ever had that consistently gets better. Features are constantly being added. I recommend anyone that is looking for a car in that price range, you won’t regret it.

    • If electric vehicles will ever become practical,
      battery research and development is the ultimate priority.

      Here are goals they should aim for: 
      ● A battery with twice the capacity of Model S’s high-end having the same dimensions/weight/cost
      ● A battery that costs half as much as the Model S’s high-end while having the same dimensions/weight/capacity
      ● A battery that’s half the size of the Model S’s high-end with the same capacity/cost.

      Somebody get on Kickstarter and setup a fund for this!

      Clearly, this is something we should all give a damn about.

    • If they offered great lease deals like GM does on the Volt, I would get a Tesla. For example my total monthly lease on my $44,000 Volt is $259 including tax and the amount I put down. If Tesla offered a base $70,000 Model S for $500 a month lease for 2 or 3 years, I would jump at it.

    • Jonathan Welsh. I have found the Model S all that you said plus it is by far the easiest car (ever) to drive. I often give people test drives and they catch on real quick, they especially like the smooth and quiet ride, regen brakes, and the great-instant acceleration.

      Wallace. For your consideration. GM is having a hard time selling the Volt, they lose about $40K per Volt to sell or lease them. Most auto companies heavily subvent their leases to move out cars, happily,Tesla is not in that position as all their cars are presold. If you leased a $70K car for 36/36 you would have a lease payment of $1K per month.

      Darren. Same here, couldn’t have said it better.

    • We have had our Model S 85 for 9.5 months, picking it up mid-February. After driving it for a few weeks with 3 to 4 days each week of 150 – 400 miles/day and not needing to use our gas guzzling Prius once, we sold the Prius and the Model S has been an everyday car for more than 22k miles.

      I typically start out days I am going to be driving more than 200 miles with about an 80% charge, about 220-ish miles of range and I plan my day around charging at one of the four supercharges within 150 miles of home. I have arrived at a remote charger or back home with as little as 13 miles of range on a couple of occasions and often below 30 miles of range remaining; but I have less range anxiety that when I used to push my Prius to a low cost gas station with the low fuel light flashing.

      The Human Race is doing its best to over everything (pollute, consume, build, populate, deface, etc.) this planet and while it felt good driving a hybrid for 6 years because electric or natural gas vehicles were not long range or sufficient people and cargo space enough for what was needed, with the Model S, we have a car that fulfills those needs and we do not have to feel bad about driving several hundred of miles during spare the air days in CA.

      Fantastic car, I hope to not purchase another fossil fuel driven vehicle.


      This is not true. You know exactly where the chargers are and can see them on the Nav page of the 17″ touchscreen. Also, with over 200 miles on tap, in the day to day, there is no need to charge anywhere but your own garage at the end of the day, unless you drive a whole lot like few people (George) do. It’s very convenient to wake up every day with a full charge instead of stopping at a gas station twice a week or more.

      I only drive more than 200 miles in a day twice a month. The average daily drive for most people is 35 miles, making the Chevy Volt perfect for anyone who can afford it and doesn’t need 5 seats. I’ve driven it, and it was quite nice-wouldn’t mind owning it. But I think I’m waiting until the Gen III Tesla (Model E?) hits the roads.

    • It is VERY disingenuous (and I’m being generous with that) not to point out how easily and cheaply it is to install a “charging station” in one’s home garage, in turn eliminating the need for most owners to ever find a charging station. Any electrician can set you up with a 220 charge for a few to several hundred bucks, depending on the location of wiring to your parking. Do this, and you can even set the vehicle to charge at not on off-peak residential rates.

    • I’m sorry I can’t type the characters of your name, but I do want to reply to you. You made a comment about how researching battery technology should be a high priority, and you make it sound like no one is doing that, and you even mention a Kickstarter campaign to get people to start working on it. That’s one of the things that makes electric vehicles such a good growing platform for the future. It’s not just automotive that is working on it to use those advances. Rechargeable battery technology is used in all portable electronics. The cell phone, tablet, and laptop industry are all strongly desiring better battery technology, so there is constant work in this area that gets to benefit all products that rely on rechargeable batteries. So electric cars have the built-in benefit of entire other multi-billion dollar industries driving the development and innovation of their most important component.

    • The Model S is a game changer. I have 13k miles on mine. No other vehicle offers seating for 7, huge cargo space, head-snapping acceleration, 17″ controls screen, continuous software improvements, free charging at Superchargers and so much more in a head-turning body style. This is the future, people!

    • I don’t think drivers had internet access and apps that would show them all the gas stations a century ago.

    • I enjoyed reading this article and agree with you after owning the car for the last 6 months.


      Only comment on this is that we now have the convenience of the internet and websites like Recargo.com that can tell us exactly where the 10′s of thousands of public chargers are right from our smart phones, if there’s even a need for that since most owners charge at home at night while they sleep.

    • Has it spoiled you for driving gas cars forever, as many report?

    • Brian, yes I would say so. I still have a Lexus with a V8, which I thought was as smooth as butter before owning the Model S. Now when I drive it once in a great it feels like driving a tank, Things are exploding under the hood, feeling the engine struggling to increase the rpm, and the smell of exhaust under acceleration. Being in the Model S feels care free in comparison, like an effortless extension of the body; I look at where I want to go and I’m there. Open the hood and nothing there but a cap to fill windshield fluid and a lot of storage space. No belts, plugs, sensors, dipsticks and exhaust system that you constantly worry about checking or replacing. Regenerative braking adds to the smooth driving experience, and I no longer worry about downshifting on hills to prevent warped rotors. The brake pedal in the Model S is a lonely piece of metal. One gear with instant torque at any speed makes it feel like an invisible force with infinite power is moving the car, similar to a roller coaster that you can control. This is already amazing now, so I can’t wait to see what cutting-edge EVs 10-20 years from now will be like as other car makers get more serious about it. My work also has free chargers so I have paid almost $0 for fuel in the last 6 months. To fill it at home is the equivalent of around $8 a “tank” (265 miles range).

    • After driving 17k on my Model S, I still grin like a child every time I hit the accelerator. The acceleration is literally neck-snapping (this is not a joke, my husband complains when I catch him off guard). I can’t see myself driving a gasoline car ever again. The driving experience is simply not comparable to any other car, and I say this with 10 years experience driving high-end sports vehicles. The 17″ center display and the screen in front of the steering wheel is a technology so far advanced from what’s out there in current vehicle, it is simply mind-boggling.

    • I never thought I would consider my Infiniti M35x a truly “inferior” anything. But after we replaced my wife’s Volvo with a Tesla Model S (85), I hate having to drive the Infiniti.

      Our monthly gasoline expenditures (from when I am forced to take the Infiniti because the wife is using the Tesla) have plummeted from approximately $350/month when we had two gas vehicles to less than $50/month now for when I am forced to drive out to Costco and refuel the Infiniti once every 5 or 6 weeks. We estimate that our electric bill has gone up approximately $75/month due to recharging the Tesla every night at home with our 50amp/240 volt garage charger. Net savings: over $200/month in fuel cost. When our solar panels are turned on this month (we just had them installed), our electric bill will go DOWN and pretty much every mile in the Tesla will be completely free.

      The Infiniti mostly sits in the garage, abandoned and lonely. The Tesla beats it in comfort, performance, safety, passenger room, cargo room, maintenance cost, and obviously fuel cost. It drives like a super car, it has the cargo capacity of an SUV, it rides like a luxury car, and it is emissions free. When it’s hot or cold outside, you can warm the car up or cool the car down via your Tesla phone app before you get in…with no worries about carbon monoxide. And with periodic updates to the software behind the amazing 17″ touchscreen, it actually gets better with age. The Tesla Model S is just ridiculously awesome.

    • We took the model S for a test drive last week. Amazing sums it up for me!

    • I wish I could afford a Tesla, I would get one tomorrow. The Model X 4×4 would be my ultimate car.

    • Most everyone who drives a Tesla makes comments like “hardly anyone drives more than 200 miles at a time.” That may well be true for Tesla drivers, but almost everyone I know for the past 4-8 years does that. That’s because I have college-aged children who play sports. It is quite common for those kinds of parents to routinely drive 600-800 miles or more in a weekend (it’s over 200 miles from NYC to schools from northern Virginia to Boston, and close to 400 miles each way for schools from North Carolina to Maine. Since this represents literally thousands of students and parents, it’s not at all unusual. That’s not to say the Tesla isn’t a great car, but Tesla proponents weaken their argument when they resort to criticism of drivers and their driving patterns, trying to build a moral argument. That’s not what sells cars, at least not yet anyway. The sales of hybrids and electric-only vehicles probably do not yet equal a week’s worth of Chevy sales, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. And believe me, no one has enough time to stop every 200 miles for even a half hour to recharge, when a gas powered vehicle can easily go 500 miles on a single tank, and go another 500 miles after a 7 minute stop. And that’s not an argument against Tesla, or any alternate fuel vehicle. It’s simply a statement that says, like most things in life, one size does not fit all. If you drive a car that gets 30 MPG, and has a 15 gallon gas tank, you can drive 40 miles each day round trip to work for two weeks, and then fill your tank for under $50. That’s $1300 per year. Let’s say electricity is free. If you buy a $35,000 car versus an $80,000 Tesla, you can buy enough gas to drive for 34 years before you equal the price of the Tesla. See how silly that argument sounds? So, buy and drive a Tesla because it’s a great car, and you enjoy it, but justifying it in other ways is still difficult.

    • I love the look of this car and I’m excited about the technology advance but…

      Just curious. The low temprature here tonight will be 1 degree. How far does the S go when the high
      tomorrow will be 18? Especially after it sits all day while I am at work?

      I’m merely stating that if Southern climates are telling me this is the wave of the future and that “resistence is futile” but they are not thinking about any environments but their own, this might be a problem for a lot of us.

      And west coast progressives angsting about fossil fuels while they all speed up and down the 101 or 405 or fly around in their private jets always makes me chuckle.

      So good for you all touting your “free super charge” but don’t kid yourself about from where that charge came; most likely a coal, natural gas or nuclear power plant. And “free” means those electrons were paid for by tax subsidies??

      I’m not trying to be negative here…just not seeing the total practicality of this technology on a large scale.

    • 100 years ago one ever had a petrol station at their house. Today with a Model S, you can refill overnight in your home. The only concern is the rare times you want to go literally hundreds of miles away from home.

    • @James

      We live in Toronto, Canada where the temperature in the winter is about -5 degrees celcius during the day and can go down to -15 celcius at night. The battery degradation is the wintertime is very minimal, maybe 10-15 miles per charge.

      Secondly, your point regarding the supercharger energy coming from coal, natural gas or nuclear power is flat out wrong. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is a significant shareholder and the chairman of the board of SolarCity. All Tesla superchargers will have solar panels installed to them, so that their energy is generated 100% free, from the sun, forever.

    • I love the Superchargers. Just drove the entire West Coast in a Tesla over Thanksgiving holiday… for free! From Washington to Southern California, and then to Vegas and back. Total cost: not a penny! The Superchargers are amazingly fast and fill your car up before you can even get back from lunch. It rides like no other car can, and is by far the most technologically advanced car out there. Cold weather is barely a factor in the battery. I plan to keep this car (and get another) for 7-8 years. In that time, the amount of money I will save in gas (about $4000/year) will bring the cost of the car down from my purchase price of $59,500 to a price of $27,500. Assuming I even spend a few thousand of my own on garage charging, it is totally worth it! So Mr. Anonymous here, your math is all wrong. You can keep putting $50-60 of flammable fuel in your smog-producing car and I hope you enjoy supporting the Middle East oil companies.

    • @Mary
      Thank you for the information. Just wondering where the charge comes from when you plug in at night?

      And what is the square footage of solar panel required to generate enough electricity to recharge these cars if say, their population were to be expanded by a factor of ten? Superchargers will not be able to meet that demand without significant real estate.

      And finally, does this mean that my free solar charger in Fairbanks AK will only be useful from March to November?

      We certainly need to expand new technologies and reduce fossil fuels but currently, physics limits the ability of current technology to eliminate fossil fuel’s storage advantage.

      Thanks for the discussion

    • I recently took a Tesla for a test drive. If you haven’t driven one, I recommend you do. It was everything I had hoped for. I have been following and experimenting with various technology since the early 70′s. The Tesla is the culmination (to this point) of so much of those technological advances. One simple example is energy recovery when slowing down or going downhill. As one person put it in these comments, this is the future. This is what you will be driving not too long from now . . . or other companies’ cheaper versions of the same. As has already been well stated, Tesla’s quality speaks for itself.
      Okay, so it doesn’t fit every situation perfectly and it doesn’t completely replace the use of fossil fuel; I readily acknowledge that. For example, I think a hybrid should have been–from the very beginning–an electric car with a back up of a small gas or diesel run electric generator operating at it’s maximum efficiency rpm recharging the batteries. If you are within charging distances, the ICE wouldn’t need to run, and when it is needed it wouldn’t be able to produce the power as fast as the car would use it at 70 mph, but it would be extending the range dramatically as you drove . . . and then actually be catching up at a rest stop.
      The main point: we are definitely moving in the right direction. For now it is charge at home, maybe charge at work, more and more access to charging stations, but with a little planning, it is do-able for many people in most climates, and it will only get better.
      As Edward put it–it is a game changer.

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