72 Hours With A Tesla

It’s that time again, folks—get out your pitchforks, fire up the torches, and get ready to blast off some hate mail; we’re going to talk about a car. [GASP!] That’s right, a car in Truck Trend—what has the world come to? And y’all thought our SUV coverage was bad. Really, though, if you don’t care to read a little bit about an American-built, five-passenger hatchback that zips from 0-60 mph in less than 2.5 seconds, just flip the page now—it’ll save us all the headache.

 

- Jason Gonderman

Before we go too far down the rabbit hole, we should first get a little backstory—a preface, if you will. If you flip over to page 60, you’ll see our first up-close-and-personal look at Tesla’s long-awaited and poorly concealed Semi. Seriously, we’ve known it was coming for years. Anyway, after receiving an invitation to the grand unveiling at the company’s Hawthorne, California, design studio, we were also offered a bit of seat time in one of the its flagship products, a Model S, so that we could familiarize ourselves with the product and its capabilities before seeing the truck. For the opportunity, Tesla asked nothing in return. Needless to say, I pulled the boss card and a shiny red P100D was sitting in front of my house two days later.

My short time with the car was extremely eye-opening. I’m a gearhead, a lover of all things fast and loud. I’ve driven the family of Dodge Hellcats, been behind the wheel of an ACR Viper, and have had my eyeballs plastered to the back of my skull by a Nismo GT-R. And the unbelievable part is that none of those vehicles come close to the brutality with which the Model S accelerates. With a sticker price of $162,000 and a claimed power rating of 762 hp and 687 lb-ft of torque, it’s the most expensive and powerful production vehicle that I’ve borrowed during my career.