I was asked about this car so often that it became a peculiar meme. "Have you tested the Tesla yet? When are you going to tell us about Tesla? And finally, I got my hands on a Tesla Model S 85D.
There is nothing super-innovative about the idea of a luxury electric car itself. The main thing is marketing. It's not enough to hire a talented engineer named Jeffrey Brian Strobel and make a cool electric car, stuffing it with various technologies. The main difficulty is to create an obsessive desire in a person to own such a car. And if he can't afford it, it doesn't matter. Let him be interested. Is reading. Watches videos on Youtube. He dreams of taking a ride. He tells his friends.
Tesla Motors knows a lot about marketing technologies and communications. And an infinitely wide audience showing interest, plus PR moves like the discovery of all patents, is a direct path to decent funding.
There is an opinion that Tesla Motors is a grandiose financial pyramid in every sense of the word. Indeed, the project has not only a cool idea, but also money, big, very big money. And the more money there is, the more fantastic Mr. Musk's projects become. An electric car traveling five hundred kilometers on a single charge? Nonsense, a private space truck is much cooler. With a new battery factory, Tesla is no longer a car manufacturer — an energy company! The society is wide-eyed, looking at the new super-effects from "iron man", and I'm standing in the parking lot of Geneva Airport and twirling a toy car with a logo in the form of a stylized letter T on the hood.
This is the key. No, not to the understanding of the structure of the world, not to the unraveling of the marketing genius, but to the Tesla Model S 85D car, which has already greeted me by smoothly pushing out the massive handles hitherto deepened in the door panels.
Surprisingly, it turned out to be easier to get a Tesla for the test in Geneva than in Moscow. There are no official Tesla dealers in Russia. As a result, the car for the special test was provided by the largest European luxury car rental company Elite Rent-A-Car, or to be precise, its branch in Switzerland.
Externally, Tesla does not look like an American car. She has something of the Italians, something of the British, something of the Japanese. At the same time, Tesla's chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, despite his German name, was born in America. Before moving to Musk, he worked at Volkswagen, headed the California design studios GM and Mazda. Franz is a master of spectacular concepts. Tesla, which appeared four years ago at the time of its release, was similar to a concept car. Low-profile tires on 19-inch wheels. Piled up for the sake of aerodynamics of the body struts. Frameless doors. The already mentioned sliding door handles (it immediately seems that they will be in our climate if you wash the car every six months)…
Over the years, deprived of some memorable and unique design solutions, the appearance of Tesla has become more familiar, and the car is almost invisible in the motley European flow.
But here in the salon again there are associations with the concept car. The "electronic" dashboard is still okay, now they put them even on small cars, but how do you like the giant, 17-inch Full-HD in the center of the T-shaped console?
The combination of the rectangle of the screen with polygonal shapes underlying interior solutions looks impressive, but not very harmonious.
Plastic is almost everywhere sewn into the skin, but where it is visible, for example, on the central armrest, its material seems rough; holes for USB connectors seem to be cut with an electric jigsaw.
The steering wheel switches of lights, wipers and driving modes, as well as the door control units of power windows, are taken from Mercedes, as it seems, and the steering wheel. Concept car… But let's not find fault with the little things: for an American car, the Tesla interior is beautiful and high-quality. But not very practical — there are no pockets in the doors, the sliding armrests on the central box overlap the cup holders in the extended position.
My Tesla is from the first batches, and instead of a box in place of the central tunnel, there is a carbon fiber-lined niche for things, but putting something heavy there is risky. With sharp maneuvers, acceleration and braking, the camera flew out of there like a cork from a bottle.
There are only two ”mechanical" keys on the console — this is the emergency button and the glove compartment opening.
The fitting of seats and mirrors is carried out in the same way as on any modern car. All other settings are sewn into the "tablet" on the console. In the future, cars are waiting for total gadgetization, and the guys from Tesla caught this trend among the first. Indeed, the twirlers and buttons on the console have long looked like an anachronism. Pensioners and housewives deftly handle the user-friendly interface of modern tablets and smartphones. Tesla is no different from them…
The simplicity of the interface makes the car settings simple and understandable for anyone. There are no strange abbreviations or incomprehensible abbreviations, but there is a choice of language (Russian is not on the list, alas. Not yet?)
In addition, there is a text or visual hint for each setting, it's very easy to change something. For example, the toggle switch of the “Creep" parameter is signed as "the car moves slightly forward when the brake pedal is released”.
In another section, you simply move your fingers along the picture with the roof of the car, and the glass hatch moves away exactly as much as you desired.
The "tablet" is based on a mobile computer on the Nvidia Tegra 3 platform with the Ubuntu operating system, so it works quickly and without "brakes".
Each Tesla has a built-in internet connection. Also, the latest versions of the “firmware" come to the car via the Internet. To do this, however, it is desirable to stick" to WiFi — so the process will be faster.
The update brings not only bug fixes, but also new features, such as autopilot, which became available last fall. Unfortunately, I failed to test this system — for obvious reasons, the rental office did not ”roll out" this update.
The navigation component is Google maps in all its glory. Using such a navigator in the car turned out to be unexpectedly inconvenient, the screen turns out to be overloaded with information. Fortunately, the navigator is displayed in a more digestible form on the dashboard.
Touch climate control turned out to be convenient — its interface is constantly present on the screen. Under the screen, the device is clearly "not from this opera." This is a taximeter! The car is also used as a VIP taxi.
Screens can be combined, for example, by displaying a browser and maps at the same time. The browser itself is fully functional and fast.
There are a lot of car settings, you can not only set up a children's lock, but also "flash" into the system of a radio remote from gates or barriers.
The rear view camera has active markings and excellent resolution - like an action camera. Moreover, the system shows the distance to obstacles in centimeters, which is very useful, given the low landing and poor visibility. The dashboard screen has a diagonal of 12.3 inches and a resolution of 1280 by 480 pixels. The filling is from the same Nvidia company.
At first, the principle of the panel organization is not obvious, but when you start driving, everything falls into place: here is the navigator on the left, in the middle the radar shows in 3D format the location of other vehicles and road signs. On the right is an adjustable zone where, with the help of a wheel on the steering wheel, you can output a media player or route computer data, as well as adjust the parameters of the climate control unit.
The rear seat has a good margin for legroom. The shoulders are also spacious — if you remove the central armrest fixed with a belt in the trunk, then you can sit down with three people — there is enough space. The only drawback is the combination of a low ceiling, an understated seat cushion and a high floor (batteries are hidden under it) forces you to sit with your knees raised high. For a taxi — not the best option. It can also be noted that there is no rear climate zone and heated seats.
Someone calls the Model S a sedan, someone calls it a four-door coupe, but in fact it is a five-door hatchback. There is a roomy luggage compartment behind the rear door that rises with the help of an electric drive. Under the folding polik there is a deep drawer into which optional rear child seats installed against the course of movement can be removed. The backs of the rear seats can be folded in the proportion of 60 to 40, but it does not work perfectly flat floor - there is a step.
There is another luggage compartment under the front hood. The total volume of the two trunks is more than 860 liters, which is more than that of business class sedans like the Audi A6 or BMW 5er. But the trunks, perhaps, are not the main advantage of the Tesla Model S 85D.