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I would encourage everybody to attend the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada at least once. Even if radical self expression isn't your thing, the Art Cars are really something else! (google Burning Man Art Cars) This is where I saw my first Tesla, back in 2007.
There is officially no branding or commerce sanctioned at Burning Man, though you can pay a lot of money for an air conditioned luxury camp, complete with Segways, and hang out with Silicon Valley Billionaires. In fact, so many massively influential entrepreneurs have embraced the creativity of the festival, that a strong argument can be made that it has changed the world. Seriously. I'm really hoping it is back for 2022, and that I can be there.
I'd read about an American company that was going to electrify a Lotus Elise from the British CAR Magazine sometime in the mid-1990's. So few automobile start-ups make it anywhere, that I didn't pay it a lot of attention. Most companies never got further than a concept car, which usually didn't even make it through the road test without breaking down or catching fire.
But this was pretty cool; a sports car devoid of any badging or logos sitting in the middle of the desert. Tesla appeared to be a 'different kind of car company', to borrow a line from GM's ill-fated Saturn division. It wasn't even the most unusual location to find a Tesla Roadster, as Musk also launched one into space. Maybe that's what Saturn should have done, but they probably didn't think of it!
A friend of mine bought one of the first production roadsters in 2010 and brought it to the Coffee & Cars that I was organizing at Distinctive Collection. I got to take it for a spin. The first thing that you notice is the acceleration which was every bit as fast as the Spykers, Astons and Bentleys that I was selling. It handled and stopped well too.
Later in the summer I was in Monterey for the vintage car week, and both Tesla and Fisker had stands at Pebble Beach. They were both showing their sedans, along with sports cars and convertible concepts. There was a lot of interest in all of them. When I got back to Calgary I told Tony Dilawri, the Dealer Principal at Distinctive, that we should get one of the franchises. In my wisdom I suggested that Fisker would be the better bet because they were Hybrids, not full electrics, and better suited to our location. Not that we could have got Tesla if we wanted to, as the distribution network bypassed the dealers.
We did get the Fisker franchise. They were anxious to market the car as an exciting luxury object - not as efficient transport. They had a very racy advertising campaign, and we even did a lingerie shoot with the cars on the 8th Avenue mall (which I sadly didn't attend). We sold a handful of Fisker Karmas, then the company ran into trouble. The battery maker, 123 Technologies, went bankrupt, and took Fisker with it - so the story goes. I suspect there is more to it than that. The assets were sold to the Chinese company Wanxiang, that continued production under the name Karma Revero. Bob Lutz started retrofitting unsold Karmas with Corvette ZRI engines and giving them the truly awful name VLF Destino. Neither car could be called a sales success. Sorry Tony!
Fisker has a new company with a pair of EVs, the production of which has been 100% farmed out to Magna. Fisker made a big splash announcing solid state batteries, then abruptly cancelled the project. They are re-inventing themselves as a car company that doesn't build their own cars. Henrik Fisker, who's main claim to fame was designing the BMW Z8 and Aston Martin DB9, has great ideas - but it takes more than that to create a sustainable automobile company. It is not easy and many noble efforts have got buried under regulatory hurdles and enormous R&D costs.
Forward to 2014, and I am with Porsche. They do a great job with training the front-line staff for the dealerships. For every model launch they book a significant portion of a large luxury resort and fly in all the sales people, service writers and managers for in-depth training. There are classroom sessions, road tests, and comparison drives with other cars. They bring in the factory racing car drivers to instruct. For the managers they fly you to Germany, strap you in the passenger seat of a GT3, and a factory driver slides the car around the track at Leipzeg - forever quashing any notion that you might be a good driver.
For the mid-life refresh of the Panamera we were put up at the Montage in Park City Utah which is super fancy, though not my kind of place. They had a Tesla Model S for comparison. We drove all the cars from Park City to the Sundance Mountain Lodge, which Robert Redford made famous with his film festival. That is my kind of place(!), and is in my 'Top 3 Resorts' along with the Post Hotel in Lake Louise and the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, CA.
About the Tesla, I commented to one of the instructors something like, "so that Model S is fast isn't it?" His reply was, "we can keep up to it with the Panamera Turbo S if we use launch control!". I was just floored. Porsche Turbo Ss with their AWD, PDK gearboxes, and launch control were always the fastest. And the Tesla wasn't even trying.
Then I looked around the interior. Full size tablet, internet browsing, Google Earth navigation, surround hd cameras - It made the infotainment in the Panamera look like somebody's high school project. That's when it became clear we had just been disrupted, and Tesla had just changed everything.
I had the loan of a Tesla Model 3 Performance for the better part of last week, from the same guy who let me drive the Roadster 10 years earlier (thanks Mike). I took the kids to school and drove it to Canmore and back to check out the charge rates of their new V3 250kW supercharger. The complete review is here. I broke the video into sections as I am long winded. The last part, which I call Tesla Math, goes into all the numbers.
To start with, I got an email from Tesla saying "Driver Access Granted - You can start, lock, unlock and locate this car through the Tesla app". I downloaded the app, and the car appeared on my phone. When Mike met me his key was paired with my phone, and that's all the car needed - I didn't use a physical key. As long as I had my phone (and it was charged) the car would do anything I wanted, including move by remote control. To charge at the supercharger, I just plugged it in, and the car looked after itself (and billed Mike!)
I don't understand the technology behind this, and came to the simple conclusion that the car is smarter than I am.
When I used the autopilot, I didn't touch the steering wheel often enough for the car's liking, and it disabled the feature, and wouldn't enable it for the rest of the journey. Even if I shut it off and restarted - It gave me a time out! The car was training me on how to drive it properly. Now my vintage Land Rover won't do what I want half the time either, but at least I can try to fix it.
I couldn't help thinking about the HAL 2000 in Kubrick's '2001 A Space Odyssey', "I'm sorry Lawrence but I can't do that". I'm just hoping the Tesla that Musk put into space doesn't come back from Saturn and decide that Humans are too stupid and are all crappy drivers, and it needs to take control...
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