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Right Hand Drive Roadster
- Thread starter AndrewBissell
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- Roadster
Dave comes clean
Big congrats to Andrew on your new car. I think I may have seen it in the store the other day in person.
So, now it's my turn.
I know some people were wondering why I was involved with this forum for so long - was I just an enthusiastic fan, trying to help the technology get established or (as has been suggested) am I working for the company? Well, now it's time to reveal all... In actual fact it's been a long time coming but now we have right hand drive and the wait is over.
So Monday came and it was time for the big day. Off to London to pick up the car - and it couldn't have gone more smoothly. A couple of hours later and I was on the M4 (and showing a BMW M3 who was boss :smile
.
And here she is - a fusion red Sport.
I would have told you guys sooner, but... I've been busy :biggrin:
Anyway, it's maundy Thursday, it's Easter - four day weekend coming up. Time to make tracks. :tongue:
Big congrats to Andrew on your new car. I think I may have seen it in the store the other day in person.
So, now it's my turn.
I know some people were wondering why I was involved with this forum for so long - was I just an enthusiastic fan, trying to help the technology get established or (as has been suggested) am I working for the company? Well, now it's time to reveal all... In actual fact it's been a long time coming but now we have right hand drive and the wait is over.
So Monday came and it was time for the big day. Off to London to pick up the car - and it couldn't have gone more smoothly. A couple of hours later and I was on the M4 (and showing a BMW M3 who was boss :smile
.And here she is - a fusion red Sport.
I would have told you guys sooner, but... I've been busy :biggrin:
Anyway, it's maundy Thursday, it's Easter - four day weekend coming up. Time to make tracks. :tongue:
Attachments
Re: Right Hand Drive Roadster announced for Q1 2010
@dpeilow
Congratulations to you too! Seems we were both dark horses...
I am really pleased that you also have a Roadster. It's great news.
Have fun this long weekend - I'll be thinking of you while my Roadster languishes in the Store getting final fitting of accessories.
Andrew
@dpeilow
Congratulations to you too! Seems we were both dark horses...
I am really pleased that you also have a Roadster. It's great news.
Have fun this long weekend - I'll be thinking of you while my Roadster languishes in the Store getting final fitting of accessories.
Andrew
Re: Right Hand Drive Roadster announced for Q1 2010
I thought people might be amused by the attached picture - I swear I didn't set it up. Literally 20 minutes after I first drove the car, I parked it, and then the G-wiz pulled over and parked in front. Makes a great contrast pic - the least and most powerful electric cars in the UK, face-to-face...
I thought people might be amused by the attached picture - I swear I didn't set it up. Literally 20 minutes after I first drove the car, I parked it, and then the G-wiz pulled over and parked in front. Makes a great contrast pic - the least and most powerful electric cars in the UK, face-to-face...
Attachments
Actually guys, I'd better really come clean. The new pictures of me and the RHD were just too good an April Fools gag to miss :smile:
When I saw Andrew post his story at around midnight last night, I thought I'd been pipped at the post. Turns out one of us was telling the truth.
But I'm disappointed that a few of you saw through my scam. In fact more people believed the trans-Atlantic bridge story that I posted last year. Should I be worried? :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:
In fact I did get to take the London press car out earlier in the week for a few hours and what great fun it was. Full story to come soon.
When I saw Andrew post his story at around midnight last night, I thought I'd been pipped at the post. Turns out one of us was telling the truth.
But I'm disappointed that a few of you saw through my scam. In fact more people believed the trans-Atlantic bridge story that I posted last year. Should I be worried? :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:
In fact I did get to take the London press car out earlier in the week for a few hours and what great fun it was. Full story to come soon.
So, as promised, here’s the real story about last week.
As some of you may know, Rachel Konrad is now based in the UK as Tesla are building up their European HQ just outside London. One Mr TEG tipped me off about this last weekend, so I sent Rachel an email to see how she was settling in to life in the UK. Having been in contact for a long while (if I recall correctly our first conversation was about what to do about Jeremy Clarkson) I’d managed to miss meeting her both when I was in California and at the Frankfurt Motor Show by a day on both occasions. Anyway, Rachel replied and invited me over to the store – which was lucky, as I already had the day off work.
So Monday came and I headed up to Knightsbridge. That was the morning the New Zealand long tailpipe story broke, so I knew one of the usual bugbears would be on the agenda :smile: We had a good chat about the past year’s events and the company direction and to cut a long story short, I’m more enthused than ever about the progress the company is making and also the way sales are going on this side of the Pond.
But enough of the chit-chat, I’m sure you want to know about the car...
Well, when I arrived I saw the red press car that you will remember from the RHD launch publicity parked outside the store charging. I didn’t think anything of it, but completely unexpectedly Rachel said that I could take it for a drive. “Just bring it back by 5, well quarter past will be ok”. Well, that was definitely a nice surprise – but, you’ve just been given the keys to a very fast sports car, it’s 3pm on a Monday afternoon and you’re in central London, what do you do? Work out how far you can get in an hour and call the boys, of course! The conversation went something like this:
“Hi Nick.”
“Hi.”
“Are you at work or home at the moment?”
“Work, why?”
“I’m in the area and heading over to your place.”
“Oh, ok. Well, I had a bit of a late lunch...”
“I’ve got a Tesla.”
“I’m leaving now.”
So I started the car and headed out of town towards Heathrow. First impressions of the car over the 2008 were very good: The build is better, the dash layout is a big improvement and having the touchscreen at your fingertips instead of by your knee is far safer. Of course, having the steering wheel on the correct side doesn't go amiss either...
It was difficult to tell how well it performed at first – the number of tourists around Knightsbridge oblivious to any car, yet alone a quiet one, prevents testing the performance in the local streets. This was only a temporary problem.
Those of you who know the route between central London and the airport will know that after a few miles the busy London streets turn into the M4 motorway, passing through Chiswick on a raised, two lane 40mph section before opening up to a 70mph three lane section. Going though the 40mph section in traffic, I had a BMW M3 right up my backside – you know the type, there’s a car in front of me but still they want to drive right through you. Well you know what’s coming next. Speed limit ends, road opens up to three lanes, Dave engages the warp drive. The M3 tried to follow me but he quickly receded into a distant blur. He gave it two seconds before sheepishly pulling back into the middle lane, pretending he never wanted to play. All this and I never broke the speed limit
I thought the original Roadster was quick, but the mid-range pick up on the Sport is something else again.
One thing I noticed on this occasion when compared to my other short drives in the UK is that it now seems everyone wants to race you. Whether this is through the publicity reaching home over the past year, or just because the car I was driving was bright red I couldn’t say, but anything from a Ford Mondeo to a battered old 7.5 ton truck was trying to beat me off the lights. Of course, they had no chance.
So I arrived at Nick’s place a few minutes before he did. Just time to check charge level (the previous driver must have really ragged it, as I used less mileage than the computer predicted) and whether there was a charging cable in the boot (there wasn’t). The car certainly draws looks – the crowd of kids across the road were curious, but didn’t see fit to ask anything.
Anyway, Nick arrived back and there was no time to waste. Now it’s fair to say that a good proportion of my friends are car nuts (e.g. up to 20 of us head to Le Mans each year) and Nick is one of the biggest petrolheads I know, so I was particularly pleased that he could see the car. What he didn’t expect was for me to give him the keys. Remembering what it was like to get behind the wheel of VP12 two years ago, now it was my turn to initiate an EV virgin :smile: The effect is still as potent now as it was then.
We headed off for a local stretch of road that is normally quite quiet. Within half a mile I heard “I love this car”, then we got onto a fast stretch and it was “I want one of these”, followed by (and this I really didn’t expect) “that [motor] noise is amazing”. We drove around for ten minutes and then headed back – illusions well and truly shattered. Let me tell you, the EV grin is alive and well.
All too soon it was time to head back to the store. Nick wanted to ride along with me (despite it meaning he would have to make his own way home) and we had a bit of fun with an M6 and a Quattroporte. One last red light before arriving back at Cheval Place allowed us to show a clean pair of heals to both :biggrin:
For me, this was the first time I’ve been able to see the power this car has on someone else. You can tell people about it until the cows come home, but they only truly believe when they’ve experienced it for themselves. Now that my friends have heard how much fun the car is to drive from a second source, all the others want a piece of the action. It just goes to show – if certain motoring “journalists” have an agenda, they can’t stop the word spreading at a grass roots level. We need to show the car fans one-by-one if necessary - seeing is believing, as they say.
As an aside, when we got back to the store Nick wanted to look around. Present were a couple of customer cars being prepped for delivery (I’m pretty sure Andrew’s was one of them) and a couple in for service from as far afield as France and the Netherlands. At the back was the custom green car which was seen at the Royal Automobile Club and now at Goodwood. This colour is gorgeous, no photos have done it justice. It’s by far the nicest of the greens that have been seen to date and I really hope it can become part of the standard range. I’ll show it here, but by the time I’d got back to the store my normal phone with the good quality camera was dead from being used as a sat-nav (not expecting to be driving anywhere, I hadn’t charged it that day and I was not familiar with the roads in that part of London). You’ll have to make do with the Blackberry photos instead.
Big thanks again to Rachel and Don for letting me borrow the car. We had a blast. If I have one complaint, it’s this: I’d almost weaned myself off the feeling of driving it, but after being behind the wheel again for an hour I was on a complete high for the next couple of days to the point of losing sleep! You guys are pushing a class A drug – they’ll surely ban it as soon as word gets out :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:
Oh - finally - sorry to the innocent who fell for the April Fool's gag. To coin a phrase: Cost of buying dinner for disappearing on my day off, £40; amount of time taken to write up this story, 1 hour; getting vfx back for pulling the wool over the eyes of the forum, priceless. :wink:
As some of you may know, Rachel Konrad is now based in the UK as Tesla are building up their European HQ just outside London. One Mr TEG tipped me off about this last weekend, so I sent Rachel an email to see how she was settling in to life in the UK. Having been in contact for a long while (if I recall correctly our first conversation was about what to do about Jeremy Clarkson) I’d managed to miss meeting her both when I was in California and at the Frankfurt Motor Show by a day on both occasions. Anyway, Rachel replied and invited me over to the store – which was lucky, as I already had the day off work.
So Monday came and I headed up to Knightsbridge. That was the morning the New Zealand long tailpipe story broke, so I knew one of the usual bugbears would be on the agenda :smile: We had a good chat about the past year’s events and the company direction and to cut a long story short, I’m more enthused than ever about the progress the company is making and also the way sales are going on this side of the Pond.
But enough of the chit-chat, I’m sure you want to know about the car...
Well, when I arrived I saw the red press car that you will remember from the RHD launch publicity parked outside the store charging. I didn’t think anything of it, but completely unexpectedly Rachel said that I could take it for a drive. “Just bring it back by 5, well quarter past will be ok”. Well, that was definitely a nice surprise – but, you’ve just been given the keys to a very fast sports car, it’s 3pm on a Monday afternoon and you’re in central London, what do you do? Work out how far you can get in an hour and call the boys, of course! The conversation went something like this:
“Hi Nick.”
“Hi.”
“Are you at work or home at the moment?”
“Work, why?”
“I’m in the area and heading over to your place.”
“Oh, ok. Well, I had a bit of a late lunch...”
“I’ve got a Tesla.”
“I’m leaving now.”
So I started the car and headed out of town towards Heathrow. First impressions of the car over the 2008 were very good: The build is better, the dash layout is a big improvement and having the touchscreen at your fingertips instead of by your knee is far safer. Of course, having the steering wheel on the correct side doesn't go amiss either...
It was difficult to tell how well it performed at first – the number of tourists around Knightsbridge oblivious to any car, yet alone a quiet one, prevents testing the performance in the local streets. This was only a temporary problem.
Those of you who know the route between central London and the airport will know that after a few miles the busy London streets turn into the M4 motorway, passing through Chiswick on a raised, two lane 40mph section before opening up to a 70mph three lane section. Going though the 40mph section in traffic, I had a BMW M3 right up my backside – you know the type, there’s a car in front of me but still they want to drive right through you. Well you know what’s coming next. Speed limit ends, road opens up to three lanes, Dave engages the warp drive. The M3 tried to follow me but he quickly receded into a distant blur. He gave it two seconds before sheepishly pulling back into the middle lane, pretending he never wanted to play. All this and I never broke the speed limit
I thought the original Roadster was quick, but the mid-range pick up on the Sport is something else again.
One thing I noticed on this occasion when compared to my other short drives in the UK is that it now seems everyone wants to race you. Whether this is through the publicity reaching home over the past year, or just because the car I was driving was bright red I couldn’t say, but anything from a Ford Mondeo to a battered old 7.5 ton truck was trying to beat me off the lights. Of course, they had no chance.
So I arrived at Nick’s place a few minutes before he did. Just time to check charge level (the previous driver must have really ragged it, as I used less mileage than the computer predicted) and whether there was a charging cable in the boot (there wasn’t). The car certainly draws looks – the crowd of kids across the road were curious, but didn’t see fit to ask anything.
Anyway, Nick arrived back and there was no time to waste. Now it’s fair to say that a good proportion of my friends are car nuts (e.g. up to 20 of us head to Le Mans each year) and Nick is one of the biggest petrolheads I know, so I was particularly pleased that he could see the car. What he didn’t expect was for me to give him the keys. Remembering what it was like to get behind the wheel of VP12 two years ago, now it was my turn to initiate an EV virgin :smile: The effect is still as potent now as it was then.
We headed off for a local stretch of road that is normally quite quiet. Within half a mile I heard “I love this car”, then we got onto a fast stretch and it was “I want one of these”, followed by (and this I really didn’t expect) “that [motor] noise is amazing”. We drove around for ten minutes and then headed back – illusions well and truly shattered. Let me tell you, the EV grin is alive and well.
All too soon it was time to head back to the store. Nick wanted to ride along with me (despite it meaning he would have to make his own way home) and we had a bit of fun with an M6 and a Quattroporte. One last red light before arriving back at Cheval Place allowed us to show a clean pair of heals to both :biggrin:
For me, this was the first time I’ve been able to see the power this car has on someone else. You can tell people about it until the cows come home, but they only truly believe when they’ve experienced it for themselves. Now that my friends have heard how much fun the car is to drive from a second source, all the others want a piece of the action. It just goes to show – if certain motoring “journalists” have an agenda, they can’t stop the word spreading at a grass roots level. We need to show the car fans one-by-one if necessary - seeing is believing, as they say.
As an aside, when we got back to the store Nick wanted to look around. Present were a couple of customer cars being prepped for delivery (I’m pretty sure Andrew’s was one of them) and a couple in for service from as far afield as France and the Netherlands. At the back was the custom green car which was seen at the Royal Automobile Club and now at Goodwood. This colour is gorgeous, no photos have done it justice. It’s by far the nicest of the greens that have been seen to date and I really hope it can become part of the standard range. I’ll show it here, but by the time I’d got back to the store my normal phone with the good quality camera was dead from being used as a sat-nav (not expecting to be driving anywhere, I hadn’t charged it that day and I was not familiar with the roads in that part of London). You’ll have to make do with the Blackberry photos instead.
Big thanks again to Rachel and Don for letting me borrow the car. We had a blast. If I have one complaint, it’s this: I’d almost weaned myself off the feeling of driving it, but after being behind the wheel again for an hour I was on a complete high for the next couple of days to the point of losing sleep! You guys are pushing a class A drug – they’ll surely ban it as soon as word gets out :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:
Oh - finally - sorry to the innocent who fell for the April Fool's gag. To coin a phrase: Cost of buying dinner for disappearing on my day off, £40; amount of time taken to write up this story, 1 hour; getting vfx back for pulling the wool over the eyes of the forum, priceless. :wink:
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This is so true. It's why drivers like Earl and myself have so many miles. You just have to open it up to open eyes. Thankfully the car just plain lives up to it's hype.
We are talking about have every Tesla owner go to their local Nissan dealership and giving rides to the sales and management teams. That way they will have that feeling of potential excitement in them as the sell the future. It's astonishing how many questions they have.
I certainly deserve this. My wife has weened me of practical jokes so my guard was down and my own deception made it all the easier to be taken in. :redface:
Right-Hand-Drive Roadster - a set on Flickr
I'm glad to see they left the charging port on the left side. Makes so much more sense for parallel parked curbside charging.
What camera and lens did you use to obtain such a magnificent photo!
I didn't take these, just posted them. I'm sure Tesla hired a professional photographer.
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