Productivity-murdering bottlenecks are a common feature in cities with century-old transport networks all around the world. They are the roads that make people late for everything: job interviews, parole registrations, dates, and life-saving medical treatment.
Sydney has many of these time vortexes. On top of death and taxes, there are two other certainties about life in the city: conversations about the property market, and the occasional complete and utter disintegration of the metropolitan transport network.
It was one such occasion the first working morning I was driving the Tesla Model S. There had been an accident on a major artery across town and I found myself idling on one of these bottlenecks, right after the school drop-off. It was 800m long and would take me 20 minutes to traverse.
People who are obsessed with road safety and anyone who works in insurance may disagree, but I thought this was a great time to try the autopilot feature, which is a major software addition to the car this year.
Switch the feature on, set it to follow the nearest vehicle by a single car length, and sit back as the Model S magically becomes one with the traffic queue, creeping and nudging forward all by itself. All you have to do is trim the steering.
(I did hover a foot over the brake most of the time, self-driving car virgin that I was. And yes, I had tested it a bit before trying it in the busy traffic.)
The autopilot is the latest showpiece technology feature to roll out for the Model S. Just like system updates to your mobile phone, Tesla improves the car with regular software upgrades.
Elon Musk’s Tesla has deservedly built a reputation for taking the car industry in huge leaps forward in technology terms, dismantling the boundaries of petrol-fuel combustion engines with rechargeable batteries, with the vision being consumers slowly getting weaned off the enormous component of the heavy-emission global economy built around the motor car.
Good for them. Go planet Earth, et cetera.
Talking to people about Tesla cars, though, I’ve found that in equal measure both people who love environmentalism and those who detest the whole idea of taking care of the planet like hearing about the car. Tesla has tapped people’s curiosity.
What’s also clear from almost every single conversation I’ve had about my couple of days with the Model S is that the company is missing a big sales trick. After driving it for only a short time I found the most surprising characteristic of the Model S was not in any of the technological gizmos. It was the driving experience.
Put crudely, most people think an electric-powered car would drive like a tricked-up sewing machine. But the Tesla is big, fast, and fun – a beast of a machine that makes your daily drive a joy.
It’s five metres long and has a curb weight 150kg either side of 2100kg, depending on which version you plump for. But they all hit 100km/h in around 4 seconds. The realization that you’re truly in something different comes from the instant power delivery, with 100% of the torque under your foot 100% of the time. Blink, and you’re at 50km/h.
In a world where we’ve grown used to high-rev, go-nowhere first pushes on the accelerator, even in high-performance sedans, the Tesla makes petrol cars seem like they were put together in the dark.
Once you gain confidence in the handling – the best parallel is that it takes about as long to get used to as the basic features on a new phone – you can enjoy the technology perks.
Music
A good start is the button under your thumb on the wheel that allows you to ask the car for any song you feel like listening to at that moment. Let’s try Monkey Wrench, by the Foo Fighters:
That feature is thanks to a built-in Rdio subscription. Yes, it downloads whatever you want to listen to from the internet.
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