Gadgetory

I'm out in the field today for a very special unboxing the Tesla Model S oh yeah and this is Mikey look it's a little baby Tesla all right up tempting Johnny Law let's get to the specs the Tesla Model S is an all-electric car built to compete head-on with gas powered vehicles design wise it's gorgeous talk about a head turner I saw people taking pictures of me while I was driving it down the freeway in Silicon Valley because there's no engine under the hood there's extra storage up front which Tesla employees jokingly call the Franck there's a regular trunk too and there's also an option for an all-glass panoramic roof the entire thing is made of lightweight heat and UV blocking glass I drove the signature performance model in this gorgeous red with black interior unfortunately this model is sold out and you can't get this pink color anymore if you want to Tesla Model S in another color they start at 49 thousand dollars fifteen thousand more than the all-electric Nissan Leaf there are three battery options the largest is 85 kilowatt hours which will supposedly get up to 300 miles on a single charge driving at 55 miles per hour which no one does the base model still goes twice as far as the leaf 140 miles per charge charging is simple just find an outlet there are adapters for 110 volt or 240 volt outlets and you can get a high-powered wall charger to top off the car faster to help reduce your range anxiety even more Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk just announced these new behemoths superchargers that charge superfast there are six in California now with many more coming you'll be able to pull over at one on a long road trip and charge up for free now what you're here for the tech on the inside check out this 17 inch of multi-touch display in the dash which controls most of the cars functions Ted Marin Dino of Tesla Motors gave me a walk through the touchscreen is sort of segmented in a few segments we have a status bar along the top which tells us temperature battery so this battery indicator here is the actual battery indicator this is that's the range that is gonna give you a shortcut to look at charging so if you tap it it'll bring open a image of the car it's color-coded to your car it's also has the wheels and the roof that's on this car nice in fact even if you turn on your turn indicator it'll turn the turn indicator on you'll see the heaters go on and the same thing if you flash the headlights just kind of fun things like that oh wow that's super geeky I love it the status bar in the app are static they're always there as is this sort of vehicle controls bar down here which has our climate control and some of the controls for the car these two pieces are we can we can move and play around with we can swap them from from top to bottom that way we can maximize whatever's on top to take up the the whole screen this is Google Maps yeah so this car uses Google Maps so if you have our connectivity package meaning if you have the native internet in the car you'll get Google Maps and this isn't our navigation per se but it does give you a view of the car our location and a lot of the features that go along with Google Maps and we can we can maximize this to take advantage of all this beautiful screen real estate we have multi-touch on the screen so unique you can squeeze or pinch we can also switch to a satellite view and have a really nice beautiful view of the of the terrain and you can zoom in and out all the things you're used to doing on Google Maps the company is still working out details but there will be some kind of option for a 3G data connection from Tesla personally I'm surprised there aren't more details about a data plan yet and I'm a bit disappointed that a car shipping in 2013 won't have 4G when it comes to performance I am not disappointed the base model s has 362 horsepower and 325 foot-pounds of torque the performance edition bumps that up to 416 horsepower and 443 pounds of torque that'll do 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds the Model S is a pleasure to drive Tesla says it's meant to compete with the BMW 5-series and the Audi a6 I can definitely see it in that company although I find the German cars a little bit more responsive and the BMW still do have better road feel there are a few oddities like the steering column borrowed from Mercedes which puts the cruise control lever annoyingly above the turn signal lever also the side pillars are huge visibility is not good in this car but luckily you can put your rear and side views in the 17 inch display while you're driving then you can see anything you want and no other luxury sedan will give you the Tesla Model S's most outstanding feature complete silence if you want one of your own be prepared to put down $5,000 now and wait about a year or more for yours to Iraq what that should give you plenty of time to get over the car you already have