Gadgetory

think I'd run row bag and we're so close in point two miles take the round right towards Morro Bay Boulevard it better be like literally like right here otherwise we're screwed it's not a good gret one mile now turn right onto Chester Avenue what was that um keep it out you go man I'm sorry dude you have any comments I just spared you on YouTube a thousand the electric motor here was the strength of Lin's backs the muscles of their animals and the power of the waterwheel in one package here was a light that was to show the way to one of the most significant single developments the world had ever seen the electrification of nearly all human endeavor hey I'm Chris and I just took delivery of a Tesla Model S I'm experiencing it for basically the first time here a little discombobulating if you've ever been in any other car in your life because nothing is the same you have a 17 inch touchscreen and nothing else in the center console you have a big LCD right in front of you and that's about it everything is controlled through those two things plus a few buttons on the steering wheel tell me about the decision to go with this giant touchscreen ilana myself decided early on that we need to make a pretty radical change on the interior of cars and that the thing that we both hated the screens in general that we hadn't seen to that at that point where they just small and the interaction with them sucked we've seen a lot of really unique kind of experimentations in forward-thinking design language for electric vehicles as if that an electric vehicle needed to be something really crazy for it to be adopted when we set out to design Model S was really about understanding the marketplace the the type of people that we were going to capture beyond the early adopters who we knew were already engaged and we're already clamoring for this type of technology so I just signed my life away if anything happens to this car you will not be hearing from me again we're going to Santa Barbara that's the first leg of this journey we're going from LA up to the Bay Area I know how it's going to go so on that note let's get this show on the road oh my god that is not normal acceleration you know there's that that that feeling that like natural accelerometer here but you guys know what I'm talking about that accelerometer is in full effect right now and I'm feeling great joy at the amount of acceleration with this vehicles capable of you've been warned by Tesla staff that taking too much advantage of the acceleration capabilities of this vehicle will impact range negatively and which makes sense it has that that seat of your pants the visceral feeling of raw performance and acceleration if you're in the sports cars and funer performance cars this is not a car that's going to disappoint bring your Ferraris bring your Lamborghinis let's do this I've driven my fair share of performance vehicles in my lifetime and this definitely feels like a performance vehicle the Tesla folks were pointing out that the batteries which weigh about a thousand pounds are mounted very very low in the car actually below the axles which gives the car an extremely low center of gravity so we are in scenic Santa Barbara it's really beautiful here we have about 130 miles left of rain on the Tesla right now I'm feeling the burn woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning Central Time so I need as much caffeine as I can get we are going to crash in Morro Bay tonight which is the last place we can plug the car in hopefully the hundred thirty miles that we have on the gauge are enough to make it was just luck what do I do with this thing nice we've been going through the mountains here north of Santa Barbara for a few minutes and we had kind of a scare because we started with way more miles on our Range meter than we did miles to go to Morro Bay which is our final destination for the night but then as we went up through the mountains the range kept going down and down and down and we got to the point where I became questionable whether we were going to make it but fortunately the car has something called regenerative braking / coasting it has both there is a center mounted speedometer that has a gauge on it that switches between green and orange depending on whether you're feeding power into the batteries or sucking power out so like if you let off the gas it goes into the green zone which means that you're actively feeding it's using regenerative power to feed energy back into the battery so when we had 99 miles on our range and then we started coasting downhill we got to the top of the mountain we started going back down and I watched you climb back to about 108 and we're down to 83 miles to go now so I think we're going to be okay please follow the road for 12 miles I am kind of freaking out I decided Yolo I'm guiding us onward tomorrow Bay our original final destination and we're gonna just hope that we make it we're so close I'm trying very hard I'm modulating the accelerator to try and keep us so we're not burning juice okay it just went to red just probably bad I'm guessing it's limiting the performance of the car based on how much battery you have left so in other words like I can't smoke BMWs anymore until I recharge right one mile oh yes Eevee now turn light on to chance to having it I think this has been the most exhilarating experience of my life we're actually connected to the one and only evey charger in this entire lot we are using an adapter because Tesla actually doesn't use a standard charging port the same one that's used by the leaf and the bolt a lot of other V's so the car comes with an adapter that you connect that you can charge it off a standard port for every hour that we leave this thing on charge is going to put 80 miles in the batteries we need to get to 250 which means this thing definitely needs to stay on charge all night it's morning in Morro Bay it's cold I'm hungry but the good news is that the Tesla is almost fully charged we headed on charge for about eleven and a half hours and we'll close to full we have about 240 miles of range so making it to Gilroy theoretically anyway should not be a problem you're going to hit the road I'm hoping to get some breakfast and some coffee that would be amazing we're going to see if we can make it to Gilroy we are in Big Sur which is absolutely beautiful I've never seen any place in the world quite like it this is completely insane we have 158 miles of range allegedly according to the car about 112 miles to our destination which is Gilroy where the superchargers are located so I think we're going to make it especially since we're already up in the mountains so that means we have a lot of downhill which means a lot of regen this is a very very curvy place probably the curviest I've ever been on it's a great place to really get a sense of how this car handles for real as opposed to being on you know straight expressways and it's doing extraordinarily well as I kind of expected it would because of the low center of gravity all those batteries way low on the car really sticks to the road and it's rear-wheel drive which is the the drive of choice for people who really like performance cars I have no complaints I am standing in front of Tesla's proprietary superchargers here in a strip mall in Gilroy California which is about Sunday miles away from San Francisco that is our final destination for the day we're going to take about a half hour of charge that's not going to get the battery completely charged but it'll take us to the halfway point there abouts there's gonna be about 125 miles of range it's more than enough these Chargers cannot be used by other EVs these are proprietary to Tesla just bad for other EVs but good for Tesla because they charge a lot faster so this is going to take about a half hour means we have some time to kill should I talk No I'll be the first to arrive had a lot of skepticism about this car and about Tesla in general and the last two days have really proven to me that this is a livable car you know you can you can take it from LA San Francisco granted we had a couple close calls we had a few white-knuckle moments but we made it so yeah I'm impressed and let's be honest for 50 60 70 thousand dollars but if you're paying for this thing not to mention your or to wait you better be impressed that'd be a really good car you have over 100 miles left on range since we left Gilroy I have to tell you as a car guy it's really hard to imagine first of all that an e V can be like an emotionally charged driving experience you know V's are a tough sell I think particularly for car nuts but the performance is there it feels like it was designed and engineered by car guys the handling is fantastic and it's a heavy car going through the curves of Big Sur going up and down the mountains it was great but that being said there's still a long wait list that's problem number one and problem number two the infrastructure isn't there they still need to install hundreds of these superchargers nationwide and in general the e V infrastructure has to get better both in cities and in rural areas so that's a challenge over the next few years and fortunately because the wait list is a few years long that gives me time to get on right now and hopefully get my car in time for everything to be ready you