 to our video team, who absolutely killed it with this piece, and hopefully you all agree. And hopefully you brought questions for me here today. All you need to do is tweet at us. We have a hashtag. It's TeslaQA, and we'll pick that up. Sam, I have the lovely and wonderful Sam Schaffer with us here, who is going to be feeding me questions. Sam, do we have anything for you? Yeah, right off the bat we have PastorS88 from Twitter asks, how is the interior space? Is it roomy? Yes, it is very, very roomy. And Tessa actually talked about this specifically with me, the fact that by eliminating all the controls inside the car, they were kind of able to open it up a bit. And it is really cavernous. It's probably one of the more, I think, roomy sedans I've ever been in sitting in the driver's seat. I didn't actually sit in the rear seats, which was a bit of an oversight in retrospect. But from the front, it's a really, really roomy ride. Cool. All right, let's see what else. We have a couple more here off the bat. This question was asked by two different people. Does the large LCD screen become distracting at night? Is it usable at night? Is it usable in the day when the sun shines on it? Oh, yeah, that's a great question. In the daytime, I didn't have any problem with daylight viewability. And this is something that is an issue for more and more cars now, because we're seeing a lot of vehicles move to LCD instrument clusters and larger and larger LCDs in the center stack. And last year, I took a look at the Cadillac XTS, which has what Cadillac calls Q. And it's a little bit like what Tesla's trying to do, where they replace all the instruments with a single LCD. And they have a big LCD in the center. And I didn't really have any problems with daylight viewability there. And I certainly didn't in the Tesla. And I don't know if that's just that they're using good LCDs or if it's that the hoods that they have on the instrument clusters kind of block that light of its combination of both. But there was never an issue in the daylight. And also, I think that the backlights are very strong, which also helps. At night, however, at first, it was way too bright for me. What it does is it has an auto adjustment where at a certain time at night, I think it might be tied to sunset. I'm not sure. But at some point, it goes from a day mode to a night mode, where all the colors change. So the base map in Google Maps is dark gray. It turns into night mode, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, it's like dark gray instead of white. So that helps. But the default backlight strength was too high at night. So there was this huge light hitting my face while I was trying to drive. But I was able to turn that down, and it wasn't an issue after that. There's a dial on the screen that you can easily just turn on the brightness. Yeah, it's just a slider. You go into Settings, there's a slider. You turn it down, you're all set. OK. So there was another part to this question. With such large screen on the dash, do you find it distracting enough to turn it off? Do you find it distracting at night or too much glare during the day? Did you find yourself searching for things on there, or is the system pretty well thought out? It depends on the screen and the function. Basic things like the radio and the climate controls, which are permanently docked at the bottom of the screen, are easy to find. And after a few hours, I was able to pretty much hit them without even looking. But when you get into the settings of the car, there's a thing called creep mode, which is kind of a weird name. I don't know if you've heard of it. A creep mode, when it's enabled, when you take your foot off the brake, it creeps like a regular automatic car. And when you turn it off, it just sits there like a manual. If you want to go in and change functions like that, you have to dig in and look around. But hopefully you're not accessing those while you're driving anyway. Right. So it really isn't that big of a deal. And the web browser is just a web browser. The soft keyboard that comes up at the bottom of the screen has a very simple layout. The keys are huge. They're easy to press. I didn't have any problem with missed presses. Is it a standard QWERTY keyboard? It is a standard QWERTY keyboard. And there's a separate toggle for getting into symbols. OK. But yeah, the bottom line is that after two days of driving the car, there was never really a point while I was actually in motion that I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to find something I needed in the screen. But one thing that kept vexing me, and my video crew can attest to this, one of the things that was a continual problem was the fact that I would get in, and the doors would lock, or I would lock the doors, or something would happen, and then they would want to get in the passenger seat, and the car was locked. And the door handles completely retracted. Right, right, right, right. And then the only way to let them into the car is to go a couple menus deep, and then you find there's an overhead view of the car with all the different lock toggles available to you. And then you can unlock the doors. So it would take a good 10 seconds to get them into the car. There's no switch on the door? No. No, I don't think so. It's just window controls, I think. I'm trying to picture the interior of the car. I don't think there's a physical switch for the locks. So yeah, I kept doing that. And I think it got them a little frustrated with me. And what about just opening the door from the inside, like leaning over? Yeah, you could do that, or you could pull the fob out of your pocket and double click one of the buttons to unlock the doors. That's another option. But I just ended up using the screen. Not the fastest function in the world, but then again, it's not something you need to do while you're driving. Right. All right, let's move on. Paul from Twitter says, when will the Supercharger network be available in Europe? Hopefully this isn't Paul Miller. Otherwise, he's cheating. In Europe, I don't know, to be very honest with you. I know that they're concentrating on the US right now, and they have a lot of work to do there, because they want to get to 100 stations by 2015, and they only have, what I want to say, eight or 10 right now. And they're just on the coast. They have a few on the West Coast, and I think two or three on the East. Those are regular charging stations or the Supercharger stations? Those are Superchargers. So the way Tesla described it to me is they want to get to an H formation, so that they'll have Superchargers all down the West Coast, Superchargers all down the East Coast, and then a bar across the country that allows you to get across without having to plan a stop at a level two charger, and then get a hotel and let it charge overnight. But they're a long way from that. They have no Superchargers in the middle of the country right now. So the only way to do a cross-country trip is to, like I said, plan a route along level two chargers, which take a lot longer. But as for Europe, I don't know. There might be some information on Tesla's site about that, but I'm afraid I don't know offhand. OK. So this is sort of a question relating. Gas stations are everywhere. So if traditional cars run out of gas, run out of fuel, a gas station is nearby. Have you felt any anxiety about running out of electricity and not being near a place to charge it? Yeah. Yeah. If you watch our video, there's a prominent section in it where, I'm sorry, is the Hangout OK? I just got a note that it might not be active right now. Or is it active? I think it should be. OK. Sorry. Yeah, there's a prominent section in our video where we very nearly run out of juice trying to get to Morro Bay, California, which was our night one stop. We had a two-day trip. And our night one trip was through a place called Morro Bay, which is about halfway up the Pacific coast of California. And yeah, we got there with one mile left of range, and I was sweating bullets. I was not comfortable for a few minutes there. We had driven past San Luis Obispo about 15 or 20 miles before we got to Morro Bay. And I'm sure that we could have found a level two charger there. And we were kind of deciding. We were right on the bubble with the range. And we were like, well, should we stop? Should we keep going? And we decided to just forge ahead. And yeah, it was very, very close. This is sort of a question coming from me. Does it have the reserve tank? Now some cars technically have that, whatever it is. Is there something like that in the Tesla, where it reserves something in case you come into that sort of emergency? Well, what Tesla told us is that when you get to zero range, you're not necessarily just going to die on the side of the road. There have been tales of Model S owners and drivers who pushed it beyond zero. We didn't get to that point. We didn't want to get to that point. But one thing that does happen is when you get close to zero, I think it starts happening around 20 miles of range, you get this dashed orange line in the instrument cluster that indicates an amount of power that you can't push the motor beyond, and that's because the battery isn't capable of it anymore, or at least not safely. And that orange line keeps going down and down and down as you get closer to zero range. And then you get to the point right around zero miles to go where you can just barely accelerate. And that's the point that we got to by the time we hit the level two charger in Morro Bay. So it sort of caps the car and really condenses what energy you have left. Right. Yeah, you're not going to be racing Porsche Panameras when you get close to zero range, unfortunately. But to answer your original question, yes, you can probably push it past zero, but I certainly would not want to be the guy that has to do that. Right. OK. This is from YouTube. J. Fedor asks, what is the platform that the touch screen's running on? Is it based on Android? Or what is it? As far as I know, the car's UI is some custom solution on top of real time OS or Linux. It's not Android, but I can tell you that the center cluster is running on a Tegra 3, and I believe the instrument cluster is running on a Tegra 2. And let's put it this way. I think that the car would benefit from a Tegra 4, because especially in the web browser, which was a little laggy, again, like I said in the piece, I don't believe that a driver should ever have access to a web browser while rolling, while stopping. And you do, in the Tesla you do, right? Yeah, especially a bad one, which this one was. But I do think that in terms of performance, maybe it's just the size of the display and the resolution. I don't really know. But for whatever reason, it performed very poorly, especially on a really design intensive site like the Verge. So yeah, they would probably benefit from a hardware upgrade. Is that attributed to the network connection, or you think it's strictly the hardware? It's the hardware, yeah. Because you could let the site load completely, and then it'll still lag. Yeah, like swipe around, and it's really laggy. And also, it doesn't appear to support any kind of video, HTML5 or Flash. So if you want to watch the Tesla, in your Tesla, to do something really meta, you just can't, unless you bring a laptop or a tablet along with you. Wow. All right. This question's from Sam Zebian from YouTube. How fast did you guys push the car? Fast in the field of style. How fast? This is going to be kind of a cop-out answer. But the short answer is I don't know. Because there were definitely a few straightaways along the PCH that were completely empty and devoid of cars, where we opened it up. But I was so focused on paying attention to the road ahead of me and my surroundings that I wasn't actually looking at the speedometer. So the short answer is I don't know. But the car, it feels like when you put the accelerator to the floor, it feels like the car will just propel itself forever, and eventually you'll hit the speed of light. And then some weird relativity stuff will happen, and time will bend. It's insane. The car feels unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life. In terms of performance, right, and thrust and torque. Yeah, not because it's, I mean, I've been in some very fast cars. But the way the car accelerates is very foreign. Because it's so smooth and so linear throughout the entire range of acceleration and speed. There's no traditional torque curve like in an internal combustion engine. So it feels very weird. Even if you're accustomed to a car that can do 0 to 60 in under five seconds. All right. We've got plenty more questions to go through here. This is from Sam Hector on YouTube. What's next for Tesla? Interim updates to the sedan or diversifying it to SUVs and other types of vehicles? The first thing you're going to see, well, it's anybody's guess, really. Because they were, like I said in the piece, they were actually really secretive about what was going on in the design studio in LA. But it's pretty widely understood that their next thing is the Model X. They've been showing it off for a while now. They have the concept version of it in the design studio. What is the Model X? The Model X is their SUV. And the really notable thing about this SUV is that it has these so-called Falcon wings. Where instead of having four doors that open to the side, like a normal SUV, the doors open straight up. Kind of like a gull wing. Like a McLaren doors? A McLaren is a swing wing, right? Or is it a gull wing? I can't remember. Me neither. Is it like a DeLorean where they open this way? Or a Lamborghini sort of straight? It's kind of unlike anything. The closest approximation I can think of would be a Mercedes SLR. But the difference is that instead of the door being a single piece that opens straight out like this, the door goes across the top of the roof and is hinged along the edge where it turns down along the side of the vehicle. So that when the doors raise, they crease and come together so that they're not opening up. So the long and short of it is that you can drive the car into a really tight parking space. And you don't have to worry about having to open the doors because they go straight up. And there's also just one on each side. So when you open the door, it opens up the entire side of the SUV. So there's an insane amount of like, it's super easy to get big boxes in and out. It's super easy to walk in and out of it. So is it technically the size of a four door and the two doors on the side are just one piece? Well, yes. Each door is the size of two traditional doors. So it covers the front and back of the vehicle. And the Model X is a very sleek looking SUV. The closest approximation I would give you would be like a BMW X6. Well, I'm trying to think. I'm going to Google some pictures here. Oh, I see. So it's? Yeah, a BMW X6 would be the closest, I think. But it's a little more utilitarian than that. I think there's a little more cargo space. The X6 has been widely panned for having no cargo space. That's not the case with this vehicle. So yeah, that's their next project. And then after that, I'm sure that you're going to see some updates with the Model S. And they also kind of hinted that they're looking for ways to get into a more affordable car. Yeah, that was someone's next question, too. Is there a timetable to bring the prices down to Prius level? Yeah, for the Model S, I don't think that's necessarily their goal. It's definitely a premium vehicle. It feels really premium inside and out. But you look at things like the Nissan Leaf, and even the Chevy Volt, and the Mitsubishi Niav, I think it's called. There's obviously a demand and an interest in lower cost, maybe smaller EVs. And that's something that when I talked to Franz von Holzhausen, he definitely indicated that that's something that they're interested in pursuing longer term, and they're kind of exploring ways to do that. But the next project is the Model X. In terms of updates to the Model S, one thing that Franz noted to me is that because of the touch screen, it's very future-proof. And I mentioned before that I think it could benefit from an upgraded Tegra 4, and it's 3G instead of LTE, runs on ATTs, 3G networks. But that aside, all your firmware updates to the motor software, and the touch screen software, and the instrument cluster software, all that comes over the air just like a smartphone, which is totally unique in the car world. Nowhere else does this ever happen. So you'll wake up in the morning, you'll go out to your car, it'll be like, hey, we downloaded a new firmware overnight, do you want to apply it? And you just apply it. And there are release notes and everything. It's really cool. So in that regard, the car is very future-proof. And they're still adding features to the car. A perfect example is that creep mode I talked about earlier. That was not there when the car launched. Drivers requested it, so they just added it in a firmware update, which is pretty neat. So relating to that question directly, Ashwin Rajani, sorry if I butchered your name, from Twitter is asking, how does the technology in the Model S compare to other techie cars? Audi with Google Earth, BMW iDrive, Ford SYNC, Mercedes, et cetera? Very good question. In terms of the overall capability of the car, excuse me, of the ICE, the center console, the electronics of the car, I would put it about a half step beyond the most advanced systems from mainstream manufacturers on the market right now. Those being Audi and iDrive primarily. But they're all kind of in that same mix. The cars have their own cellular data connections. Audi and BMW just upgraded to LTE or in the process of doing so. Tesla is not yet. But obviously, it's hard to ignore the fact that there's no other car in the market that has this giant touchscreen. So that certainly sets Tesla apart. And I had a long round table with Audi executives at CES earlier this year. And it definitely was ingrained in my mind at how badly these traditional car manufacturers have been, have feel wronged and burned over the years by government regulators, both in the US and abroad. It's such a heavily regulated industry, the car business, for obvious reasons. Safety. That it's very difficult for them to do really anything. And I think they're a little gun shy about doing really radically different things. Because of the regulations? Right. Right. With human computer interaction and just in general, the way the driver interacts with the car. Tesla, I think, felt unburdened by that gun shyness because they're new to this business. And like I said in the piece, I don't think that regulators have really caught up with how far ahead Tesla skated from the puck. So they're doing these insane things with this giant touchscreen, like the browser, that I just don't think the Department of Transportation ever considered. They never thought that this would be something they had to contend with. So I think that over the course of the next 10 years, to get back to your original question, I think you're going to see the old guard car companies, the BMWs, the Fords, the Mercedes of the world, you're going to see them incrementally catch up to what Tesla is doing in terms of interface. And you're going to see Tesla kind of like, I don't want to say stagnate, but you're going to see them kind of level out as the regulations catch up with them. And so I don't think they're going to have that radical interface advantage forever. But right now, they're certainly a half step ahead. They're ahead. OK. And the same person from Twitter, not Oshwin, says, is there any way to integrate smartphone apps into the center stack? Google, Nav, Spotify, RDO, Mog, Pandora. Yeah, another good question. So in the most recent firmware update, they just added a screen of apps. It's like an app drawer, basically, like you would find on Android or anything else. Are they installed in the console themselves or from your phone? They're, well, Tesla has not talked about how that's going to work exactly, but it's pretty apparent that they're going to end up having a way to install extra apps in the car. Because right now, they have Slacker, but it's obvious that they want RDO, they want Spotify, they want all these things, and the car has smartphone integration, but not to the same extent that Ford Sync does, or GM's, what is it called, MyLink, I think, is what GM uses. So it's not to that level of smartphone integration. In Tesla, you can connect the phone and Bluetooth and all that jazz, but it's not like you have all these apps on the phone that are tightly integrated with the center console right now. But the impression I get is that they're going to end up having apps that are installed in the dash, and then maybe they'll talk to the phone in some way. I don't know. But I think that the center console for Tesla is going to be the primary point of interaction. OK, cool. Let's move on. Someone asked, let me find this question here. Be honest, Chris, would you own a Model S or an M5? Both? Is that a valid answer? The M5 is a really stellar vehicle in many ways. I mean, the short answer to your question is I would own an M6 Grand Coupe after seeing it at a couple auto shows recently. But the M5 is a really amazing car with a really amazing engine and a lot of great things going for it. I think that the Model S is also an amazing car, but the infrastructure isn't quite there yet to make it practical for every way that you would traditionally use a car. It's obviously great for urban and suburban trips, but it's still at the point right now where a planning and cross country trip would be a really, or even like a state to state trip would be like a really stressful thing. And you don't always want to have to worry about that. And I'm really, really hopeful that through a combination of government subsidy and private investment, they're going to get to the point in the next three, five, or 10 years where that infrastructure will be there. And things like Tesla superchargers are going to be a major part of that. But today, if someone put a gun to my head, it would have to be an M5, I think. But believe me, the Model S is right in the mix. And if I could have both, I certainly would. Cool. Does the electric, this is coming from George on Twitter. Does the electric motor make the whirling sound, and does it feel a bit disoriented to hear that sound instead of an engine? It's a really quiet car in terms of mechanical noise. I think that at very low speed with the windows down, you get some of that Jetsons sound. But when you're at speed on the highway, especially with the windows up, even with the windows down, just like a regular car, unless you're driving a diesel 18-wheeler, the prevailing sound that you're hearing is not the engine, but the road noise and the wind noise. And the Model S is the same way. There was another question relating to that. This is from InnerSlice on Twitter. How quiet is the car? What's the cabin noise like at highway speeds? Yes, it's a quiet car. I don't know how much sound insulation they put in it. And I don't know if there's any interplay. To be honest, I don't know if they do active noise cancellation, which is kind of a hot feature in cars these days, you're seeing a lot of cars do this thing where there's a microphone that's detecting the ambient noise, and then it's emitting sound from the speakers to cancel that noise out. I don't know if the Model S does that, to be honest. But it's certainly not a loud car. I used to own a Lotus Elise, which is the car that the Tesla Roadster was based on. And that was a very, I mean, first of all, it was a gas. And it's not apples to apples, because it had a gas engine in it, but the engine in that car was like six inches behind your head. And so if you were driving for more than a few miles, I actually wore earplugs when I would drive it from stage to stage, because you'd just go deaf otherwise. But that is not a problem in the Model S, needless to say. OK. This is coming from Mobile Don on Twitter. Out of the 265 quoted mileage, what do you reckon most people actually get? So first of all, I should point out that Tesla has a total of three different battery capacities for the Model S. We tested the largest battery, which is an 85 kilowatt hour. But they also have a 40 and I believe a 65. And that affects the price of the car, obviously, tremendously. Because I think that the base 40 kilowatt hour is like 57K. And the car we tested was, I added it up, and it's somewhere around 100K. So big difference in price. But if you get the 85 kilowatt hour, then you'll get the 265. And in the real world, I think you will probably get realistically 240 to 250 would be my guess. But one of the reasons, and I pointed this out in our piece, one of the reasons that we really took a big range hit, I think, is because first of all, we were really being liberal with the accelerator. Two, we were driving up and down the mountains nonstop. And, Gren, you get some regen on the way down, which is putting power back into the battery. But it's not perpetual motion machines. You're not getting the same amount of energy on the way down that you're taking out of the battery on the way up. So that was a hit. And we had a ton of cargo in the car. We had like a billion cameras and other things. And other humans. Right. So we got, I think, somewhere around probably 220 when all of a sudden, done. But I think that the average person is going to get more than that. OK. This is coming from Curtis Cook on Google+. Pretty good question. How does the state inspection process go? Can you just take it to a local mechanic and have them test it? That is a very good question. And that varies from state to state. I honestly don't know at all how that works. I know that California is a lot more strict for that sort of thing than most states. But I'm sorry, I don't know. And to be honest, it's possible that not all states have figured that out. And maybe some states don't even care because it's a zero emission vehicle. So in Michigan, where I was raised, the inspections always centered around the amount of crap that the exhaust was putting out. And that's not an issue with the Model S. So check with your state. OK. So Anthony Keller from Google+. Chris Ziegler, what, if anything, did you miss about the Tesla after returning it and going back to internal combustion? Oh, the linear acceleration. The ability to be on the highway. I think that as a driver, there's a certain amount of confidence that comes with knowing that you can kind of accelerate your way out of any situation. And that's something that always kind of lingers in the back of my mind when I'm driving a car that doesn't really accelerate, like the car that I personally own right now, which I don't like. And that isn't a problem with the Model S at all. So not having access to that seemingly limitless and linear acceleration, I think, is the thing that I missed the most about the car. The thing that I missed the least is not having the charging situation, in a nutshell. It's going to be a long time until, if there were superchargers every 25 miles around the country, it would be a complete non-issue. Because everywhere you went, you would just plug it in and you'd be fine. But until that happens, there's always going to be at least a little bit of doubt as to whether. You're always going to have to think about it. Which is a problem. As the owner of a gas car, that's not something that you ever think about. It might be something that you occasionally think about if you're driving a diesel. Because not all gas stations have diesel. But as a gas car owner, it's just a complete non-issue because there are gas stations everywhere. So until that's solved, that is going to be the thing that I missed the least about driving a EV, for sure. That just made me think of a question. We have to pay for gas. Do you have to pay to charge the vehicle? At superchargers, no. But the level two charging situation varies from city to city and from state to state. In Morro Bay, there was one level two charger there. And by the way, if we had pulled up and the charger was in use, we would have been completely hosed. Which I'm just now thinking about Jordan, one of our video guys actually just brought it up with me. But that was a free charger. Not all level two chargers are free. Like here in Chicago, Walgreens, and I think they do this elsewhere too, Walgreens, the drugstore company, has installed free level two chargers at a lot of their stores. So if you drive an EV, you can just park up and plug in while you go in. But if you go into a lot of parking garages in the city, there are level two chargers that are like little kiosks with credit card readers. And you need to pay to charge. But the superchargers are free, which is one of the really awesome things about them. Of course, if you're driving any EV other than a Tesla, it doesn't do you any good, whereas level two chargers are pretty universal. But yeah, it just varies from location to location. OK. This is coming from Interslice again on Twitter. 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds. How about 0 to 100? Just how severely is range going to be depleted, screeching away from stoplights in the city? A lot. I was warned on several occasions that being liberal with the accelerator would have a significant impact on our range. And I think it did, just because we fell so far short of 265 going from LA to Monroe Bay. 0 to 100 time, I don't know. Tesla probably has an official number on their site. But I can tell you. Let's put it this way. Even if we did do a 0 to 100 run on a public road, I wouldn't tell you. It's just not legal. OK. This is coming from AshaGun on Twitter. Since the engine is totally different, this is a good question, is maintenance different? Do you have to change the coolant, oil filters, et cetera? That is a great question. Yeah. We brought this up with the PR people at Tesla. And it's close to a zero maintenance car. One thing that I didn't bring up in the piece is that if you open up the hood, it's just another trunk. There's nothing user serviceable in there. It's just an empty space where you can put in luggage. And we did use it for luggage. The only thing you can access in there is the windshield washer fluid, just like any other car. And we were told that there's some fluid or lubricant or something that needs to be changed once every 12 years, I think. But apart from that, I think they recommend a yearly checkup where you just take the car in and they look it over and do whatever to it. But in terms of user service, it's basically zero. It's windshield washer fluid and power. That's about it. That's pretty interesting. OK. What else? Let me check here. As much as this is coming from Noah Ammar on YouTube, as much as I like the Tesla S, I feel that this car will get an initial press bump and then slowly fade away. Do you think the Tesla S is the car that will make electric cars viable for normal America? Not yet. But I think what's very important about Tesla, even if the Model S is not ultimately the car that pushes the world over the hump on EVs, what's important about the company is the fact that they're being really aggressive about pushing the EV agenda and making sure that it's in the public eye and talking about it constantly and talking to people like us who are bringing you stories about it. And so people are aware of the EV initiatives and they're aware of the infrastructure issues. Because Tesla would be the first to admit, there's a ton of money and time and energy that needs to go into building out this infrastructure to make it truly viable. And so I think just having Elon Musk and Tesla being so aggressive about pushing the EV agenda is what matters more than the Model S itself. And I was talking earlier about the old guard car companies being a lot more conservative in general. And that's certainly true with EVs too. Companies like Ford and GM do have EVs in their lineups, but they don't try to market them as mainstream cars. And at least in GM's case, they're pushing extended range EVs, also known as hybrids, like the Volt and now the Cadillac ELR. They're a great concept, but they still rely on gas. And the range is a small fraction of what you get on a Model S. So in terms of pushing a true EV infrastructure and agenda, Tesla is really leading the way. And I think that that message is much more important than the car itself. OK. All right, we'll take a couple more. This is again from Raj. He's got some great questions. Is there a built-in voice command? If so, how well does it work? Else, can Siri or Google Voice be used? Can you integrate Siri with it, or does it have its own proprietary system? Yeah, there's a built-in voice recognition system that they just, if I'm not mistaken, they just recently added it in a firmware update. I don't think that it's shipped with the car. It's new. And they admitted to me on the spot. They were like, look, we know that voice recognition isn't perfect, we're playing with it, we just added this. We didn't test it much, but it did fail to recognize it. The problem with most of these voice recognition systems in cars is that you don't know off the bat what it can recognize, and then you need to go through a process to have it list out possible commands to you, and then it becomes more trouble than it's worth. I wasn't able to get it to do anything interesting. I got a lot of unrecognized command. I pressed the button and it said unrecognized command at the bottom of the instrument cluster. But it's new, and unlike a lot of other systems where they probably aren't going to update the way the voice recognition works, and even if they did, you'd have to take it in the dealer to get the firmware updated. With this car, it's just an over-the-air update. So they could theoretically make it better than it is right now. OK, so that's one of Tesla's big things, is they could just push updates over the air unlike any other manufacturer can. Right. OK, let's see. What else do we have here? Did you feel as intimate and connected, this is coming from Lyndon on Twitter, did you feel as intimate and connected with the Model S as you would with your favorite manual shifting vehicle? No. No, I didn't. No, I mean, if you compare this to, well, like the Lotus Lisa that I was talking about before, you definitely feel like you're part of the machine. Whereas with the Model S, and frankly with any car where you're not shifting yourself, you feel a little more like you're being taken for a ride. And I think that we were testing the performance model which has a bunch of things that make it a sportier experience. And it definitely felt like a sporty car. But did it feel like a sports car? I would say no. It just felt like a very sporty sedan. And yeah, I don't think it's possible for an EV to ever achieve that level of connection with the driver. And my guess is that unless they're banned, which they probably will be in California at some point in the future, unless they're banned, there will always be at least a niche market for gasoline vehicles, even after EVs and extended range EVs take over, for that very reason. The fact that there's an enthusiast slash hobbyist aspect to it that you can't get from an EV. But that being said, I think that Tesla did about the best job it possibly could connecting the driver to the car short of having a manual. Even though it's probably one of the most technologically advanced cars you've ever been in and driven, you don't feel intimate with it as you do a regular stick shift car. No, yeah. I don't think that technology really has anything to do with it. You can drive. Again, going back to the Lotus Elise, it's a very raw car. There's no technology in it. It's got a crappy aftermarket radio and a button to turn the lights on and off and a manual transmission, and that's about it. In fact, I think that in many ways, technology is opposed to feeling connected with the car. Because systems kick in for you, like stability control is a great example of that, traction control. And there are things happening that you're not actively controlling yourself. And that's not an issue with a really old school manual car. OK, makes sense. This question's coming from Michael Voss on Twitter. What kind of tires does it come with? It comes with tires. They're low profile. I think that they're not like run flats or anything. I don't believe so. I'm getting it mixed up in my mind, because I just had a discussion with the chief engineer of the Cadillac ELR, and he was talking about tires. And I don't want to get it mixed up. But I can tell you that they're extremely low profile. I think that the high end wheel on the Model S, if you option it, is a 20 inch. So as you can imagine, it's going to be a very low profile tire. But I don't know the manufacturer. I don't know the stats on it. I'm sorry. But that should be on Tesla's site. That should be in their specs section. Yeah. This is coming from InterSlice on Twitter. Would you want a manual in the Tesla Model S, or is the automatic beneficial to the overall system? Yeah, I don't think. I mean, they could. I'm sure they could find a way to MacGyver a manual. It's counter to what they're trying to do. And I'm sure that you'd be sacrificing a great deal of efficiency for that. The bottom line is that if a manual is that important to you, this is probably not the car for you. And BMW went through this same heartburn where they got their electronic manuals so good and so efficient that they were faster shifting than a manual and more efficient and better in every way, even for their performance vehicles. But you still have these old school people who just say, just give me a manual. So they actually had to go back and engineer a manual for the new M5 and M6. And you can actually spec them in. By default, you get the electronic manual. But if you want to spec in the manual, you can. But of course, those are internal combustion cars. So I think it makes a lot less sense in something like the Model S. And I don't think you're ever going to see that. OK. To preserve long-term battery life, does it need to be fully charged, depleted, or can it be topped up randomly? How do you treat the battery on this thing? Right. Yeah, there are a couple different charging modes on the car that you can choose between. One's called standard. One's called max range. And I think that the standard mode is better for the longevity of the battery than the max range. But if you absolutely need to top out the battery, you can put it into max range mode and get a little extra juice out of it. But apart from that, I didn't look through the instruction manual for the car. But Mark, the engineer that we talked to in Gilroy, California, where the superchargers are located, he had just picked up his Model S from the factory. And he had said that there were no battery conditioning recommendations for the car that he had been told. And to be fair, lithium ion batteries are pretty low maintenance compared to like NiCads and nickel metal hydrides. So that doesn't necessarily surprise me. It's possible that my guess, my instinct is that if you treat the battery the same way you treat a laptop battery, to get maximum life out of that, you're probably going to get some extra life out of the car's battery pack as well. But we weren't told any guidelines for that. OK. All right. Let's wrap this up. We've got one more question here. Has anyone asked about the public perception about Tesla? Did anyone recognize the car when you were driving it? Oh, yeah. We got recognized nonstop, which really surprised me. Because I don't think of most human beings as being car fanatics. And they can't tell a Ferrari from a Lamborghini. Well, you also did drive it through California, right? So you'd expect? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that they're much more familiar with low mission vehicles in general, and Tesla specifically, since it's a California company. But it still shocked me just how many people everywhere knew what we were driving. Either knew what it was or wanted to know what it was. Interesting. I pulled into a gas station, ironically, of course. Yeah, why? And this guy at another pump came over and he was like, holy crap, what is this? This is a beautiful car. And people, I mentioned in the piece, a guy in a pickup truck pulled up next to me on the expressway and started honking his horn and giving the thumbs up. It was awesome. We were in a pullout in Big Sur doing a photo shoot. And a family came up with their kids. And they were like, hey, can I put my son in the car? Can you play around with it? So everyone was just really, really excited about it, which surprised me. Because it is a very attractive car. But it isn't like a bright green Tesla Roadster. It doesn't have that level of grabbiness. It doesn't grab your eyeballs like that does. So yeah, I was a little surprised. Let's put it this way. It's a first world problem. If you're a Tesla driver and you're getting a lot of people asking you what your car is, that is a first world problem. True. All right, cool. Chris, thanks for hanging out literally and right here with us. Yeah, and thanks everyone for your questions. We got some good ones for sure. I just want to make it a point. If you like what you saw here, we are The Verge. We have a YouTube channel. It's youtube.com slash theverge. And if you like what you saw, definitely subscribe to our channel.
 to our video team, who absolutely killed it with this
 piece, and hopefully you all agree.
 And hopefully you brought questions for me here today.
 All you need to do is tweet at us.
 We have a hashtag.
 It's TeslaQA, and we'll pick that up.
 Sam, I have the lovely and wonderful Sam Schaffer with us
 here, who is going to be feeding me questions.
 Sam, do we have anything for you?
 Yeah, right off the bat we have PastorS88 from Twitter asks,
 how is the interior space?
 Is it roomy?
 Yes, it is very, very roomy.
 And Tessa actually talked about this specifically with
 me, the fact that by eliminating all the controls
 inside the car, they were kind of able to
 open it up a bit.
 And it is really cavernous.
 It's probably one of the more, I think,
 roomy sedans I've ever been in sitting in the driver's seat.
 I didn't actually sit in the rear seats, which was a bit of
 an oversight in retrospect.
 But from the front, it's a really, really roomy ride.
 Cool.
 All right, let's see what else.
 We have a couple more here off the bat.
 This question was asked by two different people.
 Does the large LCD screen become distracting at night?
 Is it usable at night?
 Is it usable in the day when the sun shines on it?
 Oh, yeah, that's a great question.
 In the daytime, I didn't have any problem with daylight
 viewability.
 And this is something that is an issue for more and more
 cars now, because we're seeing a lot of vehicles move to LCD
 instrument clusters and larger and larger LCDs in the
 center stack.
 And last year, I took a look at the Cadillac XTS, which has
 what Cadillac calls Q. And it's a little bit like what
 Tesla's trying to do, where they replace all the
 instruments with a single LCD.
 And they have a big LCD in the center.
 And I didn't really have any problems with daylight
 viewability there.
 And I certainly didn't in the Tesla.
 And I don't know if that's just that they're using good LCDs
 or if it's that the hoods that they have on the instrument
 clusters kind of block that light of its
 combination of both.
 But there was never an issue in the daylight.
 And also, I think that the backlights are very strong,
 which also helps.
 At night, however, at first, it was way too bright for me.
 What it does is it has an auto adjustment where at a certain
 time at night, I think it might be tied to sunset.
 I'm not sure.
 But at some point, it goes from a day mode to a night
 mode, where all the colors change.
 So the base map in Google Maps is dark gray.
 It turns into night mode, essentially.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, it's like dark gray instead of white.
 So that helps. But the default backlight strength was too high
 at night.
 So there was this huge light hitting my face while I was
 trying to drive.
 But I was able to turn that down, and it wasn't an issue
 after that.
 There's a dial on the screen that you can easily just turn
 on the brightness.
 Yeah, it's just a slider.
 You go into Settings, there's a slider.
 You turn it down, you're all set.
 OK.
 So there was another part to this question.
 With such large screen on the dash, do you find it
 distracting enough to turn it off?
 Do you find it distracting at night or too much glare during
 the day?
 Did you find yourself searching for things on there,
 or is the system pretty well thought out?
 It depends on the screen and the function.
 Basic things like the radio and the climate controls, which
 are permanently docked at the bottom of the screen, are easy
 to find.
 And after a few hours, I was able to pretty much hit them
 without even looking.
 But when you get into the settings of the car, there's a
 thing called creep mode, which is kind of a weird name.
 I don't know if you've heard of it.
 A creep mode, when it's enabled, when you take your
 foot off the brake, it creeps like a regular automatic car.
 And when you turn it off, it just sits there like a manual.
 If you want to go in and change functions like that, you have
 to dig in and look around.
 But hopefully you're not accessing those while you're
 driving anyway.
 Right.
 So it really isn't that big of a deal.
 And the web browser is just a web browser.
 The soft keyboard that comes up at the bottom of the screen
 has a very simple layout.
 The keys are huge.
 They're easy to press.
 I didn't have any problem with missed presses.
 Is it a standard QWERTY keyboard?
 It is a standard QWERTY keyboard.
 And there's a separate toggle for getting into symbols.
 OK.
 But yeah, the bottom line is that after two days of driving
 the car, there was never really a point while I was
 actually in motion that I was concerned that I wasn't going
 to be able to find something I needed in the screen.
 But one thing that kept vexing me, and my video crew can
 attest to this, one of the things that was a continual
 problem was the fact that I would get in, and the doors
 would lock, or I would lock the doors, or something would
 happen, and then they would want to get in the passenger
 seat, and the car was locked.
 And the door handles completely retracted.
 Right, right, right, right.
 And then the only way to let them into the car is to go a
 couple menus deep, and then you find there's an overhead
 view of the car with all the different lock toggles
 available to you.
 And then you can unlock the doors.
 So it would take a good 10 seconds to
 get them into the car.
 There's no switch on the door?
 No.
 No, I don't think so.
 It's just window controls, I think.
 I'm trying to picture the interior of the car.
 I don't think there's a physical switch for the locks.
 So yeah, I kept doing that.
 And I think it got them a little frustrated with me.
 And what about just opening the door from the inside,
 like leaning over?
 Yeah, you could do that, or you could pull the fob out of
 your pocket and double click one of the buttons to unlock
 the doors.
 That's another option.
 But I just ended up using the screen.
 Not the fastest function in the world, but then again,
 it's not something you need to do while you're driving.
 Right.
 All right, let's move on.
 Paul from Twitter says, when will the Supercharger network
 be available in Europe?
 Hopefully this isn't Paul Miller.
 Otherwise, he's cheating.
 In Europe, I don't know, to be very honest with you.
 I know that they're concentrating on the US right
 now, and they have a lot of work to do there, because they
 want to get to 100 stations by 2015, and they only have,
 what I want to say, eight or 10 right now.
 And they're just on the coast.
 They have a few on the West Coast, and I think two or three
 on the East.
 Those are regular charging stations or the
 Supercharger stations?
 Those are Superchargers.
 So the way Tesla described it to me is they want to get to
 an H formation, so that they'll have Superchargers all
 down the West Coast, Superchargers all down the East
 Coast, and then a bar across the country that allows you to
 get across without having to plan a stop at a level two
 charger, and then get a hotel and let it charge overnight.
 But they're a long way from that.
 They have no Superchargers in the middle of the
 country right now.
 So the only way to do a cross-country trip is to, like
 I said, plan a route along level two chargers, which take
 a lot longer.
 But as for Europe, I don't know.
 There might be some information on Tesla's site
 about that, but I'm afraid I don't know offhand.
 OK.
 So this is sort of a question relating.
 Gas stations are everywhere.
 So if traditional cars run out of gas, run out of fuel, a
 gas station is nearby.
 Have you felt any anxiety about running out of electricity
 and not being near a place to charge it?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 If you watch our video, there's a prominent section in
 it where, I'm sorry, is the Hangout OK?
 I just got a note that it might not be active right now.
 Or is it active?
 I think it should be.
 OK.
 Sorry.
 Yeah, there's a prominent section in our video where we
 very nearly run out of juice trying to get to
 Morro Bay, California, which was our night one stop.
 We had a two-day trip.
 And our night one trip was through a place called Morro
 Bay, which is about halfway up the Pacific
 coast of California.
 And yeah, we got there with one mile left of range, and I
 was sweating bullets.
 I was not comfortable for a few minutes there.
 We had driven past San Luis Obispo about 15 or 20 miles
 before we got to Morro Bay.
 And I'm sure that we could have found a
 level two charger there.
 And we were kind of deciding.
 We were right on the bubble with the range.
 And we were like, well, should we stop?
 Should we keep going?
 And we decided to just forge ahead.
 And yeah, it was very, very close.
 This is sort of a question coming from me.
 Does it have the reserve tank?
 Now some cars technically have that, whatever it is.
 Is there something like that in the Tesla, where it reserves
 something in case you come into that sort of emergency?
 Well, what Tesla told us is that when you get to zero
 range, you're not necessarily just going to die on the side
 of the road.
 There have been tales of Model S owners and drivers who
 pushed it beyond zero.
 We didn't get to that point.
 We didn't want to get to that point.
 But one thing that does happen is when you get close to zero,
 I think it starts happening around 20 miles of range, you
 get this dashed orange line in the instrument cluster that
 indicates an amount of power that you can't push the motor
 beyond, and that's because the battery isn't capable of it
 anymore, or at least not safely.
 And that orange line keeps going down and down and down
 as you get closer to zero range.
 And then you get to the point right around zero miles to go
 where you can just barely accelerate.
 And that's the point that we got to by the time we hit the
 level two charger in Morro Bay.
 So it sort of caps the car and really condenses what energy
 you have left.
 Right.
 Yeah, you're not going to be racing Porsche Panameras when
 you get close to zero range, unfortunately.
 But to answer your original question, yes, you can probably
 push it past zero, but I certainly would not want to be
 the guy that has to do that.
 Right.
 OK.
 This is from YouTube.
 J. Fedor asks, what is the platform that the touch
 screen's running on?
 Is it based on Android?
 Or what is it?
 As far as I know, the car's UI is some custom solution on
 top of real time OS or Linux.
 It's not Android, but I can tell you that the center
 cluster is running on a Tegra 3, and I believe the
 instrument cluster is running on a Tegra 2.
 And let's put it this way.
 I think that the car would benefit from a Tegra 4,
 because especially in the web browser, which was a little
 laggy, again, like I said in the piece, I don't believe
 that a driver should ever have access to a web browser while
 rolling, while stopping.
 And you do, in the Tesla you do, right?
 Yeah, especially a bad one, which this one was.
 But I do think that in terms of performance, maybe it's
 just the size of the display and the resolution.
 I don't really know.
 But for whatever reason, it performed very poorly,
 especially on a really design intensive site like the Verge.
 So yeah, they would probably benefit from a hardware upgrade.
 Is that attributed to the network connection, or you
 think it's strictly the hardware?
 It's the hardware, yeah.
 Because you could let the site load completely, and then
 it'll still lag.
 Yeah, like swipe around, and it's really laggy.
 And also, it doesn't appear to support any kind of video,
 HTML5 or Flash.
 So if you want to watch the Tesla, in your Tesla, to do
 something really meta, you just can't, unless you bring a
 laptop or a tablet along with you.
 Wow.
 All right.
 This question's from Sam Zebian from YouTube.
 How fast did you guys push the car?
 Fast in the field of style.
 How fast?
 This is going to be kind of a cop-out answer.
 But the short answer is I don't know.
 Because there were definitely a few straightaways along the
 PCH that were completely empty and devoid of cars, where we
 opened it up.
 But I was so focused on paying attention to the road ahead
 of me and my surroundings that I wasn't actually looking at
 the speedometer.
 So the short answer is I don't know.
 But the car, it feels like when you put the accelerator to
 the floor, it feels like the car will just propel itself
 forever, and eventually you'll hit the speed of light.
 And then some weird relativity stuff will happen, and time
 will bend.
 It's insane.
 The car feels unlike anything I've ever
 experienced in my life.
 In terms of performance, right, and thrust and torque.
 Yeah, not because it's, I mean, I've been in some very
 fast cars.
 But the way the car accelerates is very foreign.
 Because it's so smooth and so linear throughout the entire
 range of acceleration and speed.
 There's no traditional torque curve like in an internal
 combustion engine.
 So it feels very weird.
 Even if you're accustomed to a car that can do 0 to 60 in
 under five seconds.
 All right.
 We've got plenty more questions to go through here.
 This is from Sam Hector on YouTube.
 What's next for Tesla?
 Interim updates to the sedan or diversifying it to SUVs and
 other types of vehicles?
 The first thing you're going to see, well, it's anybody's
 guess, really.
 Because they were, like I said in the piece, they were
 actually really secretive about what was going on in the
 design studio in LA.
 But it's pretty widely understood that their next
 thing is the Model X. They've been showing
 it off for a while now.
 They have the concept version of it in the design studio.
 What is the Model X?
 The Model X is their SUV.
 And the really notable thing about this SUV is that it has
 these so-called Falcon wings.
 Where instead of having four doors that open to the side,
 like a normal SUV, the doors open straight up.
 Kind of like a gull wing.
 Like a McLaren doors?
 A McLaren is a swing wing, right?
 Or is it a gull wing?
 I can't remember.
 Me neither.
 Is it like a DeLorean where they open this way?
 Or a Lamborghini sort of straight?
 It's kind of unlike anything.
 The closest approximation I can think of would be a
 Mercedes SLR.
 But the difference is that instead of the door being a
 single piece that opens straight out like this, the
 door goes across the top of the roof and is hinged along
 the edge where it turns down along the side of the vehicle.
 So that when the doors raise, they crease and come together
 so that they're not opening up.
 So the long and short of it is that you can drive the car
 into a really tight parking space.
 And you don't have to worry about having to open the doors
 because they go straight up.
 And there's also just one on each side.
 So when you open the door, it opens up the
 entire side of the SUV.
 So there's an insane amount of like, it's super easy to get
 big boxes in and out.
 It's super easy to walk in and out of it.
 So is it technically the size of a four door and the two
 doors on the side are just one piece?
 Well, yes.
 Each door is the size of two traditional doors.
 So it covers the front and back of the vehicle.
 And the Model X is a very sleek looking SUV.
 The closest approximation I would give you would be like a
 BMW X6.
 Well, I'm trying to think.
 I'm going to Google some pictures here.
 Oh, I see.
 So it's?
 Yeah, a BMW X6 would be the closest, I think.
 But it's a little more utilitarian than that.
 I think there's a little more cargo space.
 The X6 has been widely panned for having no cargo space.
 That's not the case with this vehicle.
 So yeah, that's their next project.
 And then after that, I'm sure that you're going to see some
 updates with the Model S. And they also kind of hinted that
 they're looking for ways to get into a more affordable car.
 Yeah, that was someone's next question, too.
 Is there a timetable to bring the prices
 down to Prius level?
 Yeah, for the Model S, I don't think that's
 necessarily their goal.
 It's definitely a premium vehicle.
 It feels really premium inside and out.
 But you look at things like the Nissan Leaf, and even the
 Chevy Volt, and the Mitsubishi Niav, I think it's called.
 There's obviously a demand and an interest in lower cost,
 maybe smaller EVs.
 And that's something that when I talked to Franz von
 Holzhausen, he definitely indicated that that's
 something that they're interested in pursuing longer
 term, and they're kind of exploring ways to do that.
 But the next project is the Model X. In terms of updates
 to the Model S, one thing that Franz noted to me is that
 because of the touch screen, it's very future-proof.
 And I mentioned before that I think it could benefit from an
 upgraded Tegra 4, and it's 3G instead of LTE, runs on ATTs,
 3G networks.
 But that aside, all your firmware updates to the motor
 software, and the touch screen software, and the instrument
 cluster software, all that comes over the air just like a
 smartphone, which is totally unique in the car world.
 Nowhere else does this ever happen.
 So you'll wake up in the morning, you'll go out to your
 car, it'll be like, hey, we downloaded a new firmware
 overnight, do you want to apply it?
 And you just apply it.
 And there are release notes and everything.
 It's really cool.
 So in that regard, the car is very future-proof.
 And they're still adding features to the car.
 A perfect example is that creep mode I talked about
 earlier.
 That was not there when the car launched.
 Drivers requested it, so they just added it in a firmware
 update, which is pretty neat.
 So relating to that question directly, Ashwin Rajani,
 sorry if I butchered your name, from Twitter is asking,
 how does the technology in the Model S compare to other
 techie cars?
 Audi with Google Earth, BMW iDrive, Ford SYNC,
 Mercedes, et cetera?
 Very good question.
 In terms of the overall capability of the car, excuse
 me, of the ICE, the center console, the electronics of
 the car, I would put it about a half step beyond the most
 advanced systems from mainstream manufacturers on
 the market right now.
 Those being Audi and iDrive primarily.
 But they're all kind of in that same mix.
 The cars have their own cellular data connections.
 Audi and BMW just upgraded to LTE or in the process of
 doing so.
 Tesla is not yet.
 But obviously, it's hard to ignore the fact that there's
 no other car in the market that has this giant touchscreen.
 So that certainly sets Tesla apart.
 And I had a long round table with Audi executives at CES
 earlier this year.
 And it definitely was ingrained in my mind at how
 badly these traditional car manufacturers have been, have
 feel wronged and burned over the years by government
 regulators, both in the US and abroad.
 It's such a heavily regulated industry, the car business,
 for obvious reasons.
 Safety.
 That it's very difficult for them to do really anything.
 And I think they're a little gun shy about doing really
 radically different things.
 Because of the regulations?
 Right.
 Right.
 With human computer interaction and just in
 general, the way the driver interacts with the car.
 Tesla, I think, felt unburdened by that gun shyness
 because they're new to this business.
 And like I said in the piece, I don't think that regulators
 have really caught up with how far ahead Tesla
 skated from the puck.
 So they're doing these insane things with this giant
 touchscreen, like the browser, that I just don't think the
 Department of Transportation ever considered.
 They never thought that this would be something they had
 to contend with.
 So I think that over the course of the next 10 years,
 to get back to your original question, I think you're going
 to see the old guard car companies, the BMWs, the
 Fords, the Mercedes of the world, you're going to see
 them incrementally catch up to what Tesla is doing in terms
 of interface.
 And you're going to see Tesla kind of like, I don't want to
 say stagnate, but you're going to see them kind of level out
 as the regulations catch up with them.
 And so I don't think they're going to have that radical
 interface advantage forever.
 But right now, they're certainly a half step ahead.
 They're ahead.
 OK.
 And the same person from Twitter, not Oshwin, says, is
 there any way to integrate smartphone apps into the
 center stack?
 Google, Nav, Spotify, RDO, Mog, Pandora.
 Yeah, another good question.
 So in the most recent firmware update, they just added a
 screen of apps.
 It's like an app drawer, basically, like you would find
 on Android or anything else.
 Are they installed in the console themselves or from
 your phone?
 They're, well, Tesla has not talked about how that's going
 to work exactly, but it's pretty apparent that they're
 going to end up having a way to install extra
 apps in the car.
 Because right now, they have Slacker, but it's obvious that
 they want RDO, they want Spotify, they want all these
 things, and the car has smartphone integration, but
 not to the same extent that Ford Sync does, or GM's, what
 is it called, MyLink, I think, is what GM uses.
 So it's not to that level of smartphone integration.
 In Tesla, you can connect the phone and Bluetooth and all
 that jazz, but it's not like you have all these apps on the
 phone that are tightly integrated with the center
 console right now.
 But the impression I get is that they're going to end up
 having apps that are installed in the dash, and then maybe
 they'll talk to the phone in some way.
 I don't know.
 But I think that the center console for Tesla is going to
 be the primary point of interaction.
 OK, cool.
 Let's move on.
 Someone asked, let me find this question here.
 Be honest, Chris, would you own a Model S or an M5?
 Both?
 Is that a valid answer?
 The M5 is a really stellar vehicle in many ways.
 I mean, the short answer to your question is I would own
 an M6 Grand Coupe after seeing it at a couple
 auto shows recently.
 But the M5 is a really amazing car with a really amazing
 engine and a lot of great things going for it.
 I think that the Model S is also an amazing car, but the
 infrastructure isn't quite there yet to make it practical
 for every way that you would traditionally use a car.
 It's obviously great for urban and suburban trips, but it's
 still at the point right now where a planning and cross
 country trip would be a really, or even like a state
 to state trip would be like a really stressful thing.
 And you don't always want to have to worry about that.
 And I'm really, really hopeful that through a combination of
 government subsidy and private investment, they're going to
 get to the point in the next three, five, or 10 years where
 that infrastructure will be there.
 And things like Tesla superchargers are going to be a
 major part of that.
 But today, if someone put a gun to my head, it would have
 to be an M5, I think.
 But believe me, the Model S is right in the mix.
 And if I could have both, I certainly would.
 Cool.
 Does the electric, this is coming from George on Twitter.
 Does the electric motor make the whirling sound, and does
 it feel a bit disoriented to hear that sound
 instead of an engine?
 It's a really quiet car in terms of mechanical noise.
 I think that at very low speed with the windows down, you get
 some of that Jetsons sound.
 But when you're at speed on the highway, especially with the
 windows up, even with the windows down, just like a
 regular car, unless you're driving a diesel 18-wheeler,
 the prevailing sound that you're hearing is not the
 engine, but the road noise and the wind noise.
 And the Model S is the same way.
 There was another question relating to that.
 This is from InnerSlice on Twitter.
 How quiet is the car?
 What's the cabin noise like at highway speeds?
 Yes, it's a quiet car.
 I don't know how much sound insulation they put in it.
 And I don't know if there's any interplay.
 To be honest, I don't know if they do active noise
 cancellation, which is kind of a hot feature in cars these
 days, you're seeing a lot of cars do this thing where there's
 a microphone that's detecting the ambient noise, and then
 it's emitting sound from the speakers to
 cancel that noise out.
 I don't know if the Model S does that, to be honest.
 But it's certainly not a loud car.
 I used to own a Lotus Elise, which is the car that the
 Tesla Roadster was based on.
 And that was a very, I mean, first of all, it was a gas.
 And it's not apples to apples, because it had a gas engine in
 it, but the engine in that car was like six
 inches behind your head.
 And so if you were driving for more than a few miles, I
 actually wore earplugs when I would drive it from stage to
 stage, because you'd just go deaf otherwise.
 But that is not a problem in the Model S, needless to say.
 OK.
 This is coming from Mobile Don on Twitter.
 Out of the 265 quoted mileage, what do you reckon most people
 actually get?
 So first of all, I should point out that Tesla has a
 total of three different battery
 capacities for the Model S.
 We tested the largest battery, which is an 85 kilowatt hour.
 But they also have a 40 and I believe a 65.
 And that affects the price of the car, obviously,
 tremendously.
 Because I think that the base 40 kilowatt hour is like 57K.
 And the car we tested was, I added it up, and it's somewhere
 around 100K.
 So big difference in price.
 But if you get the 85 kilowatt hour,
 then you'll get the 265.
 And in the real world, I think you will probably get
 realistically 240 to 250 would be my guess.
 But one of the reasons, and I pointed this out in our piece,
 one of the reasons that we really took a big range hit,
 I think, is because first of all, we were really being
 liberal with the accelerator.
 Two, we were driving up and down the mountains nonstop.
 And, Gren, you get some regen on the way down, which is
 putting power back into the battery.
 But it's not perpetual motion machines.
 You're not getting the same amount of energy on the way
 down that you're taking out of the battery on the way up.
 So that was a hit.
 And we had a ton of cargo in the car.
 We had like a billion cameras and other things.
 And other humans.
 Right.
 So we got, I think, somewhere around probably 220 when all
 of a sudden, done.
 But I think that the average person is going to
 get more than that.
 OK.
 This is coming from Curtis Cook on Google+.
 Pretty good question.
 How does the state inspection process go?
 Can you just take it to a local mechanic and
 have them test it?
 That is a very good question.
 And that varies from state to state.
 I honestly don't know at all how that works.
 I know that California is a lot more strict for that sort
 of thing than most states.
 But I'm sorry, I don't know.
 And to be honest, it's possible that not all states
 have figured that out.
 And maybe some states don't even care because it's a
 zero emission vehicle.
 So in Michigan, where I was raised, the inspections always
 centered around the amount of crap that the
 exhaust was putting out.
 And that's not an issue with the Model S. So check with
 your state.
 OK.
 So Anthony Keller from Google+.
 Chris Ziegler, what, if anything, did you miss about
 the Tesla after returning it and going back to internal
 combustion?
 Oh, the linear acceleration.
 The ability to be on the highway.
 I think that as a driver, there's a certain amount of
 confidence that comes with knowing that you can kind of
 accelerate your way out of any situation.
 And that's something that always kind of lingers in the
 back of my mind when I'm driving a car that doesn't
 really accelerate, like the car that I personally own
 right now, which I don't like.
 And that isn't a problem with the Model S at all.
 So not having access to that seemingly limitless and linear
 acceleration, I think, is the thing that I missed the most
 about the car.
 The thing that I missed the least is not having the
 charging situation, in a nutshell.
 It's going to be a long time until, if there were
 superchargers every 25 miles around the country, it would
 be a complete non-issue.
 Because everywhere you went, you would just plug it in and
 you'd be fine.
 But until that happens, there's always going to be at
 least a little bit of doubt as to whether.
 You're always going to have to think about it.
 Which is a problem.
 As the owner of a gas car, that's not something that you
 ever think about.
 It might be something that you occasionally think about if
 you're driving a diesel.
 Because not all gas stations have diesel.
 But as a gas car owner, it's just a complete non-issue
 because there are gas stations everywhere.
 So until that's solved, that is going to be the thing that I
 missed the least about driving a EV, for sure.
 That just made me think of a question.
 We have to pay for gas.
 Do you have to pay to charge the vehicle?
 At superchargers, no.
 But the level two charging situation varies from city to
 city and from state to state.
 In Morro Bay, there was one level two charger there.
 And by the way, if we had pulled up and the charger was
 in use, we would have been completely hosed.
 Which I'm just now thinking about Jordan, one of our video
 guys actually just brought it up with me.
 But that was a free charger.
 Not all level two chargers are free.
 Like here in Chicago, Walgreens, and I think they do
 this elsewhere too, Walgreens, the drugstore company, has
 installed free level two chargers
 at a lot of their stores.
 So if you drive an EV, you can just park up and plug in
 while you go in.
 But if you go into a lot of parking garages in the city,
 there are level two chargers that are like little kiosks
 with credit card readers.
 And you need to pay to charge.
 But the superchargers are free, which is one of the
 really awesome things about them.
 Of course, if you're driving any EV other than a Tesla,
 it doesn't do you any good, whereas level two chargers are
 pretty universal.
 But yeah, it just varies from location to location.
 OK.
 This is coming from Interslice again on Twitter.
 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds.
 How about 0 to 100?
 Just how severely is range going to be depleted,
 screeching away from stoplights in the city?
 A lot.
 I was warned on several occasions that being liberal
 with the accelerator would have a significant impact on
 our range.
 And I think it did, just because we fell so far short of
 265 going from LA to Monroe Bay.
 0 to 100 time, I don't know.
 Tesla probably has an official number on their site.
 But I can tell you.
 Let's put it this way.
 Even if we did do a 0 to 100 run on a public road, I
 wouldn't tell you.
 It's just not legal.
 OK.
 This is coming from AshaGun on Twitter.
 Since the engine is totally different, this is a good
 question, is maintenance different?
 Do you have to change the coolant, oil
 filters, et cetera?
 That is a great question.
 Yeah.
 We brought this up with the PR people at Tesla.
 And it's close to a zero maintenance car.
 One thing that I didn't bring up in the piece is that if you
 open up the hood, it's just another trunk.
 There's nothing user serviceable in there.
 It's just an empty space where you can put in luggage.
 And we did use it for luggage.
 The only thing you can access in there is the windshield
 washer fluid, just like any other car.
 And we were told that there's some fluid or lubricant or
 something that needs to be changed once every 12 years,
 I think.
 But apart from that, I think they recommend a yearly
 checkup where you just take the car in and they look it
 over and do whatever to it.
 But in terms of user service, it's basically zero.
 It's windshield washer fluid and power.
 That's about it.
 That's pretty interesting.
 OK.
 What else?
 Let me check here.
 As much as this is coming from Noah Ammar on YouTube, as much
 as I like the Tesla S, I feel that this car will get an
 initial press bump and then slowly fade away.
 Do you think the Tesla S is the car that will make
 electric cars viable for normal America?
 Not yet.
 But I think what's very important about Tesla, even if
 the Model S is not ultimately the car that pushes the world
 over the hump on EVs, what's important about the company is
 the fact that they're being really aggressive about
 pushing the EV agenda and making sure that it's in the
 public eye and talking about it constantly and talking to
 people like us who are bringing you stories about it.
 And so people are aware of the EV initiatives and they're
 aware of the infrastructure issues.
 Because Tesla would be the first to admit, there's a ton
 of money and time and energy that needs to go into building
 out this infrastructure to make it truly viable.
 And so I think just having Elon Musk and Tesla being so
 aggressive about pushing the EV agenda is what matters more
 than the Model S itself.
 And I was talking earlier about the old guard car
 companies being a lot more conservative in general.
 And that's certainly true with EVs too.
 Companies like Ford and GM do have EVs in their lineups, but
 they don't try to market them as mainstream cars.
 And at least in GM's case, they're pushing extended
 range EVs, also known as hybrids, like the Volt and now
 the Cadillac ELR.
 They're a great concept, but they still rely on gas.
 And the range is a small fraction of what you get on
 a Model S. So in terms of pushing a true EV
 infrastructure and agenda, Tesla is
 really leading the way.
 And I think that that message is much more important than the
 car itself.
 OK.
 All right, we'll take a couple more.
 This is again from Raj.
 He's got some great questions.
 Is there a built-in voice command?
 If so, how well does it work?
 Else, can Siri or Google Voice be used?
 Can you integrate Siri with it, or does it have its own
 proprietary system?
 Yeah, there's a built-in voice recognition system that they
 just, if I'm not mistaken, they just recently added it in a
 firmware update.
 I don't think that it's shipped with the car.
 It's new.
 And they admitted to me on the spot.
 They were like, look, we know that voice recognition isn't
 perfect, we're playing with it, we just added this.
 We didn't test it much, but it did fail to recognize it.
 The problem with most of these voice recognition systems in
 cars is that you don't know off the bat what it can
 recognize, and then you need to go through a process to
 have it list out possible commands to you, and then it
 becomes more trouble than it's worth.
 I wasn't able to get it to do anything interesting.
 I got a lot of unrecognized command.
 I pressed the button and it said unrecognized command at
 the bottom of the instrument cluster.
 But it's new, and unlike a lot of other systems where they
 probably aren't going to update the way the voice
 recognition works, and even if they did, you'd have to take
 it in the dealer to get the firmware updated.
 With this car, it's just an over-the-air update.
 So they could theoretically make it better than it is
 right now.
 OK, so that's one of Tesla's big things, is they could just
 push updates over the air unlike any other
 manufacturer can.
 Right.
 OK, let's see.
 What else do we have here?
 Did you feel as intimate and connected, this is coming from
 Lyndon on Twitter, did you feel as intimate and connected
 with the Model S as you would with your favorite manual
 shifting vehicle?
 No.
 No, I didn't.
 No, I mean, if you compare this to, well, like the Lotus
 Lisa that I was talking about before, you definitely feel
 like you're part of the machine.
 Whereas with the Model S, and frankly with any car where
 you're not shifting yourself, you feel a little more like
 you're being taken for a ride.
 And I think that we were testing the performance model
 which has a bunch of things that make it a sportier
 experience.
 And it definitely felt like a sporty car.
 But did it feel like a sports car?
 I would say no.
 It just felt like a very sporty sedan.
 And yeah, I don't think it's possible for an EV to ever
 achieve that level of connection with the driver.
 And my guess is that unless they're banned, which they
 probably will be in California at some point in the future,
 unless they're banned, there will always be at least a niche
 market for gasoline vehicles, even after EVs and extended
 range EVs take over, for that very reason.
 The fact that there's an enthusiast slash hobbyist
 aspect to it that you can't get from an EV.
 But that being said, I think that Tesla did about the best
 job it possibly could connecting the driver to the
 car short of having a manual.
 Even though it's probably one of the most technologically
 advanced cars you've ever been in and driven, you don't feel
 intimate with it as you do a regular stick shift car.
 No, yeah.
 I don't think that technology really has
 anything to do with it.
 You can drive.
 Again, going back to the Lotus Elise, it's a very raw car.
 There's no technology in it.
 It's got a crappy aftermarket radio and a button to turn the
 lights on and off and a manual transmission,
 and that's about it.
 In fact, I think that in many ways, technology is opposed to
 feeling connected with the car.
 Because systems kick in for you, like stability control is
 a great example of that, traction control.
 And there are things happening that you're not actively
 controlling yourself.
 And that's not an issue with a really old school manual car.
 OK, makes sense.
 This question's coming from Michael Voss on Twitter.
 What kind of tires does it come with?
 It comes with tires.
 They're low profile.
 I think that they're not like run flats or anything.
 I don't believe so.
 I'm getting it mixed up in my mind, because I just had a
 discussion with the chief engineer of the Cadillac ELR,
 and he was talking about tires.
 And I don't want to get it mixed up.
 But I can tell you that they're extremely low profile.
 I think that the high end wheel on the Model S, if you
 option it, is a 20 inch.
 So as you can imagine, it's going to be a
 very low profile tire.
 But I don't know the manufacturer.
 I don't know the stats on it.
 I'm sorry.
 But that should be on Tesla's site.
 That should be in their specs section.
 Yeah.
 This is coming from InterSlice on Twitter.
 Would you want a manual in the Tesla Model S, or is the
 automatic beneficial to the overall system?
 Yeah, I don't think.
 I mean, they could.
 I'm sure they could find a way to MacGyver a manual.
 It's counter to what they're trying to do.
 And I'm sure that you'd be sacrificing a great deal of
 efficiency for that.
 The bottom line is that if a manual is that important to
 you, this is probably not the car for you.
 And BMW went through this same heartburn where they got
 their electronic manuals so good and so efficient that
 they were faster shifting than a manual and more efficient
 and better in every way, even for their performance vehicles.
 But you still have these old school people who just say,
 just give me a manual.
 So they actually had to go back and engineer a manual for
 the new M5 and M6.
 And you can actually spec them in.
 By default, you get the electronic manual.
 But if you want to spec in the manual, you can.
 But of course, those are internal combustion cars.
 So I think it makes a lot less sense in something like the
 Model S. And I don't think you're ever going to see that.
 OK.
 To preserve long-term battery life, does it need to be
 fully charged, depleted, or can it be topped up randomly?
 How do you treat the battery on this thing?
 Right.
 Yeah, there are a couple different charging modes on
 the car that you can choose between.
 One's called standard.
 One's called max range.
 And I think that the standard mode is better for the longevity
 of the battery than the max range.
 But if you absolutely need to top out the battery, you can
 put it into max range mode and get a little
 extra juice out of it.
 But apart from that, I didn't look through the instruction
 manual for the car.
 But Mark, the engineer that we talked to in Gilroy,
 California, where the superchargers are located, he
 had just picked up his Model S from the factory.
 And he had said that there were no battery conditioning
 recommendations for the car that he had been told.
 And to be fair, lithium ion batteries are pretty low
 maintenance compared to like NiCads and nickel metal
 hydrides.
 So that doesn't necessarily surprise me.
 It's possible that my guess, my instinct is that if you
 treat the battery the same way you treat a laptop battery,
 to get maximum life out of that, you're probably going to
 get some extra life out of the car's battery pack as well.
 But we weren't told any guidelines for that.
 OK.
 All right.
 Let's wrap this up.
 We've got one more question here.
 Has anyone asked about the public perception about Tesla?
 Did anyone recognize the car when you were driving it?
 Oh, yeah.
 We got recognized nonstop, which really surprised me.
 Because I don't think of most human beings as being car
 fanatics.
 And they can't tell a Ferrari from a Lamborghini.
 Well, you also did drive it through California, right?
 So you'd expect?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 And I'm sure that they're much more familiar with low
 mission vehicles in general, and Tesla specifically, since
 it's a California company.
 But it still shocked me just how many people everywhere
 knew what we were driving.
 Either knew what it was or wanted to
 know what it was.
 Interesting.
 I pulled into a gas station, ironically, of course.
 Yeah, why?
 And this guy at another pump came over and he was like,
 holy crap, what is this?
 This is a beautiful car.
 And people, I mentioned in the piece, a guy in a pickup
 truck pulled up next to me on the expressway and started
 honking his horn and giving the thumbs up.
 It was awesome.
 We were in a pullout in Big Sur doing a photo shoot.
 And a family came up with their kids.
 And they were like, hey, can I put my son in the car?
 Can you play around with it?
 So everyone was just really, really excited about it, which
 surprised me.
 Because it is a very attractive car.
 But it isn't like a bright green Tesla Roadster.
 It doesn't have that level of grabbiness.
 It doesn't grab your eyeballs like that does.
 So yeah, I was a little surprised.
 Let's put it this way.
 It's a first world problem.
 If you're a Tesla driver and you're getting a lot of people
 asking you what your car is, that is a first world problem.
 True.
 All right, cool.
 Chris, thanks for hanging out literally and right
 here with us.
 Yeah, and thanks everyone for your questions.
 We got some good ones for sure.
 I just want to make it a point.
 If you like what you saw here, we are The Verge.
 We have a YouTube channel.
 It's youtube.com slash theverge.
 And if you like what you saw, definitely
 subscribe to our channel.