When people talk about electric cars one of the first manufacturers sure to be mentioned is Tesla, the company that is owned by Elon Musk. Musk didn’t establish the company which was founded in 2003 by two American entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He joined the following year when the founders were looking for venture capital funding.
A few years back Mr Musk revealed how he bought the name Tesla from a man in Sacramento for 75,000 dollars. Sounds like lot of money for a name, but then Elon Musk had by then made big money by selling his shares in PayPal.
Tesla isn’t just a cool-sounding name picked randomly. It’s a nod to Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-born inventor and electrical engineer, who came up with many electrical innovations
Born in 1856 in Croatia, Tesla made a significant impact on the world of electricity. Despite dying in poverty in 1943, his name lives on through Tesla Motors.
We have had various electric vehicles in Ireland over the decades, like bread vans and milk floats, but the Nissan Leaf was one of the first mass-market cars to go on sale here in 2010. Tesla has been operating in Ireland since 2017 and last week I drove their latest model, the Tesla Y.
It was only my second time to drive a Tesla, the first was in the smaller Model 3 a few years back. It’s a very comfortable car to drive and travel in, but much different than your regular petrol, diesel or any other electric car.
Externally it’s a very impressive car to look at. I have seen a white version which really stood out, while my test car last week came in a dark blue colour, which was a bit more discreet. But no shortage of white in the interior. It was so bright I was tempted to get out my sun glasses from the summer section of my wardrobe. The seats are white and you get a lovely touch of white all along the dash.
There is no key/fob to gain entry, you use a credit-card size Tesla card which means the door handles will release when you approach the car if the card is on your person. There is no stop-start button or handbrake, you simply drive away once the access card is located near where the gear lever would be in a regular car.
The dash in the Tesla has a very minimalist look to it. The majority of the controls are on the huge infotainment screen that dominates the dash. I don’t think I have ever seen a car with so few buttons. Just two very small ones on the steering wheel and two to open the front doors.
There is decent space in the boot and you also get 117 litres of space in the Frunk, both of which can be opened from that ‘Jack of all Trades,’ the infotainment screen. It’s a massive motor and plenty of power in that 75kWh battery. It’s also very safe as you can see on the infotainment screen images of the cars that overtaking you or coming in the opposite direction.
Tesla encourage prospective customers to check out their cars online, but they do have two showrooms, at Fota Junction Retail Park in Cork and in the Sandyford Industrial Estate in Dublin, just behind the Beacon Clinic, where you can ‘kick some tyres’ and also take a test drive.
Electric cars are getting a bad press right now, mainly due to cars not delivering on the range promised by manufacturers. Well the Tesla Y delivers with their promised range and you should get approximately 520km on a full charge in the long-range version. They have five super charger sites around the country, but of course you can also charge the car at other charging outlets. The official range claimed is 533km, but definitely no range anxiety in this Tesla.
As you get a card rather than a key/fob with a Tesla I thought you couldn’t use the hazard lights to find your parked car in a huge car park. But I’m old school and with Tesla everything can be done by downloading their app.
