Recently, got a chance to drive Tesla Model S P85D. I guess it was luck by chance, was eyeing to drive a tesla from a long time, and then came the day. I entered the showroom with a couple of my friends, was not sure if  they would allow me to drive the car, but Tesla’s test product specialist broke all my assumptions and directly handed over the key to me. Some times things come very easy to you. We drove for 40 minutes around the city, thats the longest test drive I’ve ever took in an EV.

Needless to say, its one of the best car out there, due to the dual electric motors, torque is instant and acceleration is somewhat terrifying, 0 – 60 in 3.2 sec, can easily put a Ferrari to shame. The 17 inch screen sometimes took off the attention while driving but I think over a period of time one gets adjusted to it. The only thing which troubled me was the breaking, I never drove a car with regenerative breaking before and was not expecting the breaks to behave like that, but we made it through.

There were some moments when the car surprised me, one of them happened while changing lanes at high speeds, possibly the first glimplse of the new autopilot feature. The steering wheel had a haptic/vibrational feedback which was kind of very intuitive. While backing up the car for parking, the screen showed augment lanes on the rare camera feed, was something very helpful.

I must say that it was a great experience overall, tesla’s staff was very good and the car was crazy, they have put so much science into one car. All these years, everybody used to like the noise and drama of gas powered cars but Model S with its subtly of handling 700 horse powers is surely changing perceptions around Electric Vehicles. Here’s a short video of the day in the car.