 Thank God we're in Morro Bay. God, we're so close. In point two miles, take the right towards Morro Bay Boulevard. It better be like literally like right here, otherwise we're screwed. This is not good. We're at one mile. Now turn right onto Chester Avenue. What was that? I don't know. Can you spit out your gum? Man. I'm sorry dude. You know how many comments I just spared you on YouTube? A thousand. The electric motor. Here was the strength of men's backs, the muscles of their animals, and the power of the water wheel in one package. Here was a light that was to show the way to one of the most significant single developments the world had ever seen. The electrification of nearly all human endeavor. Hey, I'm Chris, and I just took delivery of a Tesla Model S. I'm experiencing it for basically the first time here. It's a little discombobulating if you've ever been in any other car in your life, because nothing is the same. You have a 17-inch touchscreen and nothing else in the center console. You have a big LCD right in front of you, and that's about it. Everything is controlled through those two things, plus a few buttons on the steering wheel. Tell me about the decision to go with this giant touchscreen. Elon and myself decided early on that we didn't need to make a pretty radical change on the interior of cars, and that the thing that we both hated, the screens in general that we had seen at that point, were they just small and the interaction with them sucked? We've seen a lot of really unique kind of experimentations in forward-thinking design language for electric vehicles, as if that an electric vehicle needed to be something really crazy for it to be adopted. When we set out to design Model S, it was really about understanding the marketplace, the type of people that we were going to capture beyond the early adopters, who we knew were already engaged and were already clamoring for this type of technology. So I just signed my life away. If anything happens to this car, you will not be hearing from me again. We're going to Santa Barbara. That's the first leg of this journey. We're going from LA up to the Bay Area. I don't know how it's going to go, so on that note, let's get this show on the road. Oh my God! That is not normal acceleration. You know there's that feeling, that natural accelerometer in your butt? You guys know what I'm talking about. That accelerometer is in full effect right now, and I'm feeling great joy at the amount of acceleration that this vehicle is capable of. We've been warned by Tesla staff that taking too much advantage of the acceleration capabilities of this vehicle will impact range negatively, which makes sense. It has that seat of your pants, sort of visceral feeling of raw performance and acceleration. If you're into sports cars, if you're into performance cars, this is not a car that's going to disappoint. Come on, bring your Ferraris, bring your Lamborghinis. Let's do this. I've driven my fair share of performance vehicles in my lifetime, and this definitely feels like a performance vehicle. The Tesla folks were pointing out that the batteries, which weigh about a thousand pounds, are mounted very, very low in the car, actually below the axles, which gives the car an extremely low center of gravity. So we are in scenic Santa Barbara. It's really beautiful here. We have about 130 miles left of range on the Tesla right now. I'm feeling the burn. I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning, Central Time, so I need as much caffeine as I can get. We are going to crash in Morro Bay tonight, which is the last place we can plug the car in. Hopefully the 130 miles that we have on the gauge are enough to make it. Wish us luck. This place is like Walgreen. What do I do with this thing? Nice. We've been going through the mountains here north of Santa Barbara for a few minutes, and we had kind of a scare because we started with way more miles on our range meter than we did miles to go to Morro Bay, which is our final destination for the night. But then as we went up through the mountains, the range kept going down and down and down, and we got to the point where it became questionable whether we were going to make it. But fortunately, the car has something called regenerative braking slash coasting. It has both. There is a center-mounted speedometer that has a gauge on it that switches between green and orange, depending on whether you're feeding power into the batteries or sucking power out. So like if you let off the gas, it goes into the green zone, which means that you're actively feeding. It's using regenerative power to feed energy back into the battery. So we had 99 miles on our range, and then we started coasting downhill. We got to the top of the mountain, we started going back down, and I watched you climb back to about 108, and we're down to 83 miles to go now, so I think we're going to be okay. Please follow the road for 12 miles. I am kind of freaking out. I decided YOLO. I'm guiding us onward to Morro Bay, our original final destination, and we're going to just hope that we make it. God, we're so close. I'm trying very hard. I'm modulating the accelerator to try and keep us so we're not burning juice. Okay, it just went to red, which is probably bad, I'm guessing. It's limiting the performance of the car based on how much battery you have left. So in other words, I can't smoke BMWs anymore until I recharge. One mile. Oh, yes, EV. Now turn right onto Chester Avenue. I think this has been the most exhilarating experience of my life. We're actually connected to the one and only EV charger in this entire lot. We are using an adapter because Tesla actually doesn't use a standard charging port, the same one that's used by the LEAF and the Bolt and a lot of other EVs. So the car comes with an adapter that you connect so that you can charge it off a standard port. For every hour that we leave this thing on charge, it's going to put 18 miles in the batteries. We need to get to 250, which means this thing definitely needs to stay on charge all night. It's morning in Morro Bay. It's cold. I'm hungry. But the good news is that the Tesla is almost fully charged. We had it on charge for about 11 and a half hours, and we're close to full. We have about 240 miles in range. So making it to Gilroy theoretically anyway should not be a problem. So we're going to hit the road. I'm hoping to get some breakfast and some coffee. That would be amazing. I'm going to see if we can make it to Gilroy. We are in Big Sur, which is absolutely beautiful. I've never seen any place in the world quite like it. This is completely insane. We have 158 miles of range, allegedly, according to the car. We're about 112 miles to our destination, which is Gilroy, where the superchargers are located. So I think we're going to make it, especially since we're already up in the mountains. So that means we have a lot of downhill, which means a lot of regen. This is a very, very curvy place, probably the curviest I've ever been on. It's a place to really get a sense of how this car handles for real, as opposed to being on straight expressways. And it's doing extraordinarily well, as I kind of expected it would because of the low center of gravity, all those batteries way low on the car. It really sticks to the road. And it's three-wheel drive, which is the drive of choice for people who really like performance cars. I have no complaints. I'm standing in front of Tesla's proprietary superchargers here in a strip mall in Gilroy, California, which is about 70 miles away from San Francisco. That is our final destination for the day. We're going to take about a half hour of charge. That's not going to get the battery completely charged, but it'll take us to the halfway point thereabouts. So it's going to be about 125 miles of range. It's more than enough. These chargers cannot be used by other EVs. These are proprietary to Tesla, which is bad for other EVs, but good for Tesla because they charge a lot faster. So this is going to take about a half hour. It means we have some time to kill. Should I talk? No? I'll be the first to admit I had a lot of skepticism about this car and about Tesla in general. And the last two days have really proven to me that this is a livable car. You know, you can take it from LA to San Francisco. Granted, we had a couple of close calls. We had a few white-knuckle moments, but we made it. So yeah, I'm impressed. And let's be honest, for $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, whatever you're paying for this thing, not to mention a year or two, wait, you better be impressed. It better be a really good car. We have over 100 miles left on range since we left Gilroy. I have to tell you, as a car guy, it's really hard to imagine first of all that an EV can be like an emotionally charged driving experience. You know, EVs are a tough sell, I think, particularly for car nuts. But the performance is there. It feels like it was designed and engineered by car guys. The handling is fantastic. And it's a heavy car. Going through the curves of Big Sur, going up and down the mountains, it was great. But that being said, there's still a long wait list. That's problem number one. And problem number two, the infrastructure isn't there. They still need to install hundreds of these superchargers nationwide. And in general, the EV infrastructure has to get better, both in cities and in rural areas. So that's a challenge over the next few years. And fortunately, because the wait list is a few years long, that gives me time to get on right now and hopefully get my car in time for everything to be ready.