The Tesla Model S may be widely revered and critically acclaimed, but like any new disruptive technology or product, it faces no shortage of critics who remain skeptical that electric cars are the wave of the future. In turn, there are also no shortage of articles which provide first-hand accounts of what driving a Tesla is like in a gasoline dominated autotomotive market.
In a clever flip of the script, Tibor Blomhall, writing for Tesla Club Sweden, put together an amusing first-hand account detailing what it’d be like to drive a gasoline powered car in an automotive market dominated by electric vehicles.
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The recap reads and flows exactly how your typical “My first experience with a Tesla” story would read, and the result really highlights the advantages of the Tesla purchasing and driving experience.
First up, Blomhall highlights the counter-intuitive process of buying cars from an automotive dealership.
We sat us in the loaner car at the car salesman’s office. Automakers do not sell the cars themselves, only through independent car repair shops as middlemen. It may sound like a bad omen to buy the car from a car repair shop that you want to visit as seldom as possible. But you apparently can’t buy the car directly from the manufacturer but must go through such intermediaries. The seller was very ”pushy” and tried to convince us to buy the car very forcibly, but the experience is perhaps better elsewhere.
Next, Blomhall circuitiously and adeptly draws attention to the benefits of an electric-powered motor.
So we sat in the car and pressed the START button. The car’s gasoline engine coughed to life and started to operate. One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated as if something was broken, but the seller assured us that everything was as it should. The car actually has an electric motor and a microscopically small battery, but they are only used to start the petrol engine – the electric motor does not drive the wheels. The petrol engine then uses a tank full of gasoline, a fossil liquid, to propel the car by exploding small drops of it. It is apparently the small explosions that you hear and feel when the engine is running.
The petrol engine consists of literally hundreds of moving parts that must have tolerance of hundredths of a millimeter to function. We begun to understand why it is car repair shops that sell the cars – they might hope for something to break in the car that they can mend?
And in a clever twist on ‘range axiety’, the article coins the phrase ‘cost anxiety’, which it defines as the fear associated with blowing through your wallet on expensive gasoline.
All in all, the entire post is well worth a read, especially for Tesla enthusiasts who remain committed to convincing their friends that the status-quo of gasoline powered cars is all kinds of antiquated.
Even Elon Musk a few months back gave the post some much-deserved props.
Very funny post of a Tesla owner test driving a gasoline car http://t.co/Tq2vNM5UnG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2015
