This is a Tesla moment. It wasn’t the Roadster, nor the Model S, nor the Model X — it’s the Model 3 that matters, the practical EV for the masses that Elon Musk intended to eventually be able to make all along. This car has been a solid decade in the making.
But somehow, it all feels a little anticlimactic.
It’s not that the car isn’t awesome. Truthfully, I don’t really know if it’s awesome, because I got just the briefest imaginable test drive this evening — a few fleeting seconds ripping around Tesla’s Design Studio in Hawthorne, California in the back seat with two other journalists along for the ride. And therein lies the anticlimax: after 60 seconds inside the car, give or take, it’s basically going away until we’re singing Christmas carols in 2017. I was obviously hoping to spend a little more time with what could be Tesla’s greatest accomplishment.
And with the real car still that far out, there’s the matter of this being a prototype. Elon Musk himself has said that we’re going to see a refined, more production-ready version of the Model 3 down the road. With a year and a half to go until the first deliveries are promised, the company has plenty of time to make changes.
By Chris Ziegler, TheVerge, SouthFloridaReporter.com, April 1, 2016
