I feel like one of the first pilots of jet-powered aircraft. They immediately knew that they were flying the future: there could be no going back to pistons and propellers.

Today I drove the car that, for me, spells the end of the piston engine for performance cars.

The car was the all-electric Tesla, and its performance – and the way it achieved that performance – was just so extraordinary that I am almost lost for words. That a start-up car company has created such a vehicle is simply unprecedented in the last century of automotive development.

For the Tesla is not just a sports car with incredible performance (0-100 km/h in the fours) but also a car that redefines driveability. Simply, it has the best throttle control of any car I have ever driven.

Trickle around a carpark at 1000 (electric) revs and the car drives like it has a maximum of just a few kilowatts available. It’s the pussy cat to end all pussy cats: Grandma could drive it with nary a concern in the world. Put your foot down a little and the car seamlessly accelerates: heavy urban traffic, just perfect.

But select an empty stretch of bitumen and mash your foot to the floor and expletives just stream from your mouth as the car launches forward with an unbelievable, seamless and simply immensely strong thrust.

There are no slipping clutches, no flaring torque converters, no revving engines, no gear-changes – just a swishing vacuum-cleaner-on-steroids noise that sweeps you towards the horizon. The acceleration off the line and up to 100 km/h or so is just mind-boggling – especially as it’s accompanied by such undemonstrative effort. The car will do it again and again and again, all with the same phenomenal ease that makes this the winner of any traffic lights grand prix you’re ever likely to meet.

And it’s not just off the line. Want to quickly swap lanes? Just think about it and it’s accomplished. 

In fact drive the car hard and you start assuming that this is the only mode – outright performance. But then enter that carpark, or keep station with other traffic, and you’re back to driving an utterly tractable car – in fact, one for whom the word ‘tractable’ is irrelevant. Combustion engines are tractable or intractable; this car’s electric motor controller just apportions its electron flow as required, in an endlessly seamless and subtle variation from zero to full power.

It’s not just the acceleration that is revolutionary. The braking – achieved primarily through regen – has the same brilliant throttle mapping, an approach that immediately allows even a newcomer to progressively brake to a near-standstill at exactly the chosen point.

A seamless, elastic and fluid power delivery that no conventional car can come remotely close to matching; a symphony on wheels to be played solely with the right foot; an utterly smooth and progressive performance than can be explosive or docile, urgent or somnambulant – literally, a driveline that completely redefines sports cars.

There’s no going back – my driving life is now changed forever.

Footnote: the Tesla drive was courtesy of Simon Hackett of the ISP, Internode.

• » Comments (21)

At the end of all AutoSpeed articles is a reader rating system – you can give any article a score from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). As you’d expect, AutoSpeed publisher Web Publications has internal data analysis and display of these reader ratings – now totalling literally hundreds of thousands of scores.

By importing the data into a spreadsheet, I can rank all our articles in terms of numbers of ratings, averaged ratings for individual articles, and so on. I can also see changes over time in the average reader ratings for specific articles.

The other day a reader proposed that, if an article suggests to people ideas they don’t want to hear, they are more likely to give it a low score. So in other words, instead of rating articles on the basis of the quality of journalism, expression, innovative ideas (etc) that are presented, they just rate it on the basis of whether or not they agree with it.

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

Today I was lucky enough to drive an interesting car.

A 2003 model AMG Mercedes Benz E55, it comes standard with a supercharged 5.4 litre, 3-valves-per-cylinder V8 boosted by a Lysholm compressor spinning at up to 23,000 rpm and pushing air through a water/air intercooler.

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

From here:

Although sometimes attributed to Mark Twain – because it appears in his posthumously-published Autobiography (1924) – this should more properly be ascribed to Disraeli, as indeed Twain took trouble to do: his exact words being, ‘The remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.’

And there are no greater ‘damned lies’ than readership or circulation figures for magazines and other publications. To give you an idea, often when a print magazine quotes ‘readership’, they triple or even quadruple their actual sales figures. Why? Because they assume each copy is read by three or four people!

In the same way – or even, come to think of, much worse ways – web sites quote all sorts of figures for their readership.

AutoSpeed’s figures are logged by Google. I can look at our daily figures, weekly figures, annual figures – or even figures for the content, section by section. Further, through internal Web Publications data, I can view readership numbers, article by article. Finally, I can also see the number of reader ratings for each article, and what those ratings are.

• » Continue reading or Comments (19)

As I have said in the past, AutoSpeed’s internal data generates a daily referrers’ list, where I can see discussion groups and other web pages from which readers are coming.

I read the referrers’ list (and then follow many links) at least a couple of times a day. It tells me, indirectly, which are our most popular articles for that day, and even more importantly, it also shows me how well each article is understood.

Huh – ‘how well it is understood’?

Well, the sad truth is that many AutoSpeed articles are completely misunderstood by readers. But again, that’s useful to me – if my writing hasn’t been clear enough, or the photos of sufficient quality, then I get to see the outcome expressed loud and clear.

But there’s nothing I can do about wilful ignorance.

• » Continue reading or Comments (11)

Regular readers will know that I am a voracious consumer of second hand books.

eBay, the Lifeline BookFest (no less than a million second-hand books for sale, and all proceeds benefitting charity!), bookshops (both new and used), garage sales – the sources are endless.

The other day one of the books that lobbed into my post office box was an orphan – a single volume of one of the Newnes Motor Repair sets of the 1950s – and perhaps the early 1960s. The book – Volume 3 of probably a 6 volume set – covers commercial vehicles, tractors and general car repairs (but the latter only the subject titles from ‘B’ to ‘E’).

I was browsing it, looking at the different designs of the (mostly) British vehicles when something suddenly hit me.

The names!

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

I hate to sound negative but long experience has taught me that if a reader emails that they have a great story for us, the very high likelihood is that it will never happen.

About once every two weeks I get an email.

Hi, I’ve invented a new type of turbo. I am sure you’d like to cover it.

Or,

I’ve developed a breakthrough fuel – you make it yourself. You should do a story on it.

Or, even,

You haven’t done a new car test on my car – it’s a XYZ. Would you like to drive it?

On the off-chance that something will actually eventuate, I always email back a semi-polite reply.

But then the turbo man doesn’t want to send me any real-world test results, or the person who makes their own fuel suddenly goes very quiet, or the person with the new car lives in remote, outback Western Australia.

• » Continue reading or Comments (0)

It’s a new year – so what do we have coming up in AutoSpeed?

In short, it looks to be a great year.

First-up, we’ll be continuing our ‘How to Electronically Modify Your Car’ series. At this stage the series has about 15 parts – it may grow a little. By reading those stories, you can be taken from knowing literally nothing about electronically modifying a car to the stage where you can confidently make changes to analog and digital signals, and understand how car systems can be altered.

In the second half of the year we expect to cover an innovative development in DIY electronics that will put the power of making major, custom electronic modification of cars into the hands of everyone. It’s a development that has been more than 12 months of work in the making, and one that I think is enormously exciting. More on this as we get closer to launch.

• » Continue reading or Comments (16)

This is the last blog post for this year, and this week’s edition of AutoSpeed is the last until January 6.

It’s been an interesting year, not least because in response to reader requests, we’ve been again testing more new cars.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I think that when testing cars, nearly all journalists are way too soft in their criticisms. I mean, to make just a simple point – by definition, half of all new cars should be rated below average and half should be above average.

But read most car tests and you’ll find that nearly all cars are said to be way above average!

I also think that journalists – and especially enthusiasts’ magazines and TV shows – need to in part be blamed for the absurd direction that some manufacturers have taken with their cars.

The car that this year amazed me the most was the Ford FG Falcon.

The model that I would think sells the best – the XR6 – was incredibly off the pace in the things that matter to most purchasers. All I can say is: what on earth was Ford thinking when they set the priorities?

I wrote about this when the car was first released – see The New Falcon – Mostly Irrelevant and the ironic The Ideal Car for the Times - but the car’s reality was even worse than I’d guessed.

• » Continue reading or Comments (28)