Issue 39 🚀🚗🌇  August 30th 2016

Most $100,000 cars are babied by their owners. Never taken out except on a warm Sunday. Garaged and kept with extremely low mileage. Only driven by the owner, not even allowed to be driven by a spouse, much less a stranger. Not my poor Tesla.

I’ve worked that thing like a rented freaking mule. So, you ask, how did the Tesla hold up? What’s it actually look like now? What are the exact operating costs, repair numbers and dollars spent & earned on this car over the 2 years of ownership? Read on to find out all the gory details…and the photos to prove it.

This has been the planet’s hottest summer in recorded history, so it’s nice to know Elon Musk has commenced his grand scheme to transform the energy business so profoundly that there’s a chance Iceland won’t become the new Jamaica after all. One small step in Musk’s plan involves merging Tesla, his electric car company, with SolarCity, his cousin’s solar panel maker. That deal—announced in August—has been getting all sorts of blowback from short-term-thinking Wall Street nincompoops, who groan that both companies are losing money and the merger won’t help. Such doubts about Musk are like asking the Wright brothers in 1899 why they were fiddling with bicycle parts.

Tesla Model 3 prototype sightings have gone dark for almost 2 months now and none have emerged since the official ‘pencil down’ on the design last month… until now. The last sighting was of the black matte prototype being displayed at Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters in July.

The P100D Model S with Ludicrous mode will propel the car to 60 miles per hour in just 2.5 seconds. Tesla's Model X sport utility vehicle will get there in 2.9 seconds. The bigger, 100-kilowatt-hour batteries also provide the first official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency range of more than 300 miles on a charge.

These speeds are crazy fast, matched only by sold-out supercars with tiny production runs: Ferrari’s $1.4 million LaFerrari, Porsche’s $845,000 918 Spyder, and Bugatti’s $2.3 million Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse. Tesla’s new Model S, at $134,500, is just as quick as any vehicle on the road. Even its seven-seat SUV beats the McLaren 675LT.

It’s starting to feel very ‘complete’ now, the Model S. Of course there are niggles. The instrument screen wantonly displays irelelvant information, AutoPilot remains imperfect (why does it need to sit so left-biased in the lane?) and there’s the cubby hole lid’s appetite for fingers.

However, there’s all the performance we could realistically need, sensible and accurate range, an overall deeper sense of quality and what many EV-curious folk have been crying out for: a more competitive, accessible finance option. The 60D won’t become your new darling of YouTube drag races, but it’s the best all-round Model S yet.

The ability to turn your vehicle into a hotspot is particularly useful to passengers. They will be able to use their own mobile devices (tablets, laptops, etc.) with the vehicle’s service plan. The feature will become increasingly important as Tesla’s vehicle become autonomous, especially with the autonomous car-sharing service Elon Musk announced in his ‘Master Plan Part Deux’.

People will start treating Tesla’s vehicles like an extension of their home, where there’s already Wi-Fi, and do the same things they would be doing there, but while the vehicle is transporting them to a location. While it is expected that Tesla’s media features will be adapted to self-driving technology, it is also expected that the passengers will still want to use their mobile devices. That’s when a hotspot becomes useful.