Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s new superfast plug-in car promises free motoring forever
A network of ‘superchargers’ along major routes will enable drivers to top up the battery of the Tesla S in just half an hour. And the company promises this fuel will be free – forever. The high-performance car already leaves rivals standing with acceleration speeds of 0-60 miles an hour in five point four seconds – faster than an Aston Martin roadster. Now Musk intends to compete equally hard on the financial front, to achieve his vision of saving the planet from global warming by making the internal combustion engine extinct.
Promise
Country director for UK and Ireland Georg Ell told Fi ‘We can make this promise because we know that landlords will want to host our charging points. They look clean and futuristic and they will attract the sort of customers who drive our beautiful cars’. One supercharger has already been installed in East London, and Tesla promises the UK capital will soon be ‘peppered’ with the free charging points.
The company is also looking for landlords to host them in other major cities such as Edinburgh, Manchester and Bristol. Each top-up provides enough power for a further 300 miles (531 kilometres). The car’s touchscreen control panel displays the supercharger locations on a map and shows the best route to the next ‘filling station’ – there are 41 already in western Europe. Ell predicts that anyone ordering a new Tesla S this summer for delivery in late autumn ( each car is built to order and takes four months) will be able to drive free of charge to a Christmas holiday or ski-ing destination in Western Europe or Scandinavia by the end of 2014.
Free for all
Not only Tesla S drivers will benefit – the superchargers could also potentially be used by other plug-in cars such as the Nissan Leaf and BMW’s latest models. Ell insists the top-ups will be funded out of rental revenue and drivers will never have to pay for the energy. That will be some consolation to eco-conscious motorists who make the investment in a plug-in car. (It costs £50,000 to £86,000 to own a new Tesla S.) What’s more, the UK Government is totally funding the cost of installing home chargers to a maximum value of £1,000 through grants from the Energy Saving Trust http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/Travel/Electric-vehicles/Domestic-charging-point-grants
Driving experience
The car itself looks like a conventional luxury vehicle and drives like a spacecraft – gliding silently, with all the controls activated by the touch of one toe or one finger. Torque, acceleration and regenerative braking give it a sporty feel. The smooth, soundfree ride makes it all too easy to exceed the speed limit or to hit unwary pedestrians. So Tesla have worked hard on safety features and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of America has voted the Tesla S the safest car ever built, with a five-star rating in very category. Elon Musk is a father of five and believes that family motoring should be safe and comfortable as well as ecologically sound. So the interior is spacious and seats five adults, with the option of an extra two child-sized seats in the back. Even with seven seats there is ample luggage space in the ‘frunk’ or ‘froot’ – the boot/trunk that occupies the space usually taken by a traditional car engine.
Hack attack
The large touchscreen dominates the dashboard and software controls every function – even those such as opening the sunroof that could more easily be operated using a switched or push-button. Georg Ell regards this as an advantage, and boasts that the Tesla S is programmed to check for upgrades and download them automatically, so that that drivers constantly have the latest features without needing to buy a new car or even book a service. He is relaxed about the news that a group of Chinese students has succeeded in hacking a Model S car, making it sound its horn and getting in to its internal controls. It happened at the Syscan conference in Beijing, where a prize of $10,000 was offered for cracking the Tesla Model S system. ” We welcome interventions such as this that can alert us to any vulnerabilities in a spirit of co-operation” he says, stressing that the ‘hack’ was done as a controlled experiment. Another feature is the airport shuttle service. Catch a plane from London Heathrow and Tesla will store your car free of charge and take you to and from the airport just over a mile away from their West London HQ. Test drives are proving popular but sales figures for the UK are not yet available since the right-hand-drive model was launched only a few weeks ago.
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Fi – will be canvassing the opinions of some leading automotive thinkers on the economics and the sense behind the new electro cars.
Heaven – or handling hell. A big two ton Rolls -Royce can drift around a corner in luxurious, and consummate ease but these big batteries on wheels, with some serious heating issues may yet have some way to go.
Some test driving experts have their reservations, Tesla may have solved those so we will ask those experts for their thoughts. At the moment Tesla have goodwill and environmental momentum behind them. What do you think?
Free fuel? Nothing in life is free, the devil and the cost is in the small print.
Let’s see what our experts say.
