The all-electric Tesla Model S sedan is brilliant, beautiful, as user-friendly as a smartphone, fast as hell, quieter than C-Span, American made and years ahead of its luxury-sedan competition. But it isn’t perfect. I see things I would change. Those jazzy polished-zinc door handles, for example, part of the cabin’s circumnavigating bands of alloy and leather, weren’t shaped for human hands. The 17-inch capacitive touch screen panel that dominates the forward cabin still seems clumsily placed—design by procurement. I expect Tesla’s next-generation touch screen and graphical user interfaces to be fused across the forward cabin bulkhead like a bandit’s mask.

Nor would I be a class traitor if I could get something more intimate from Tesla’s color and trim department. I suppose it would be un-Buddhist to wish for diamond-pleat suede? These 12-way power adjustable seats are upholstered like high-tech dentist’s chairs.

Sometimes I miss the intimacy of a conventional, wraparound cockpit with a cabin-dividing center console. I long for it like a missing limb. The Model S doesn’t require driveline tunnels, prop shafts or torque tubes. Not even the new all-wheel-drive models, because there are two traction motors, one fore and one aft. The floor pan is as flat as a sheet of plywood and about the same size.

Here’s another problem: You can forget which of the enormous storage compartments you’ve put your groceries in: the front, where there is no occupying combustion motor; or the rear, where there is no evidence of a battery pack. I propose programming the daytime running lights to indicate with a single flash, forward or rear, to remind owners which end was opened last. Make it part of the proximity-approach routine. About 200 milliseconds ought to do.

2015 Tesla Model S is close to brilliant

I would also like some sort of welcoming musical refrain as I approach the car. Maybe the theme from “Shaft.” Can you dig it? And, obviously, such a feature could be programmed according to the driver’s personal calendar (multiple drivers, really) that is synced to the car, as well as music in the cloud, on the Apple Watch, Pandora preferences, Netflix “Recently Watched” list and maybe—it’s theoretically possible—whether you’re ovulating. Perhaps some Jimmy Buffett, m’dear? I’ve got a lot of good ideas.

Mostly, though, what I have is awe. The Model S is a daring public experiment in automotive vision that has the impudence to make the finest, fastest luxury cars feel like Edwardian antiques. I know a lot of gear heads. The only ones who don’t think the Model S is the best in the world haven’t driven one.

Here is a report from the field: My wife took some veterinarians to lunch in the P85D, and all they could talk about was the car’s one-pedal operation. Due to its strong regenerative braking, when the driver eases off the pedal, the car slows down immediately, often rendering the use of the friction brakes unnecessary. That’s so great, she said. Why aren’t all cars like that? Why, indeed?

I was more interested in what it did when you didn’t lift. This particular version of the car, the P85D, is the company’s exuberant drag bot, with two mighty AC induction motors, producing together 691 hp and 687 pound-feet of torque, bonging electrons from an 85 kwh battery pack. What strikes me about this arrangement is how it must have been future-proofed years ago, because the surrounding packaging was almost undisturbed. Interior room is undiminished by the second motor. The front trunk, the “frunk,” gives you a little over one cubic foot of capacity (2.3 cubic feet).

In a lighthearted moment, engineers created two Acceleration modes for the P85D: “Sport” and “Insane.” There is actually a little slider icon. Among its party tricks, the P85D can go from what I’ll call “standing there” to “going like hell” (100 mph) in a breathless, jaw-clenching eight seconds. It’s Six Flags over Silicon Valley. In the one-eighth mile, the P85D just buries elite super four-seaters such as the Ferrari FF and the Porsche Panamera Turbo.

Drag race: Tesla Vs. Bentley Continental

These demonstrations weren’t the point, says Tesla TSLA, +4.42% . The idea of the dual-motor cars was to make the Teslas more attractive in Snowbelt markets. Uh-huh. Setting that aside, the acceleration of the Tesla is a singular automotive experience. And it’s not all vanity. The battery that can discharge electrons so hard can soak up them up pretty fast, too. Tesla lists an EPA-rated range of 253 miles per charge (the nonperformance model, the 85D, lists 270). At any one of the company’s nearly 200 supercharging stations in North America, the car can regain 50% charge in 20 minutes. By the way, there is no charge for supercharging.

And the nice thing about the Model S is that it keeps getting better even when in the driveway. Last month, Tesla said it would send the first batch of autopilot-enabling software to late-model customer cars. The data comes over the air, downloading over 3G mobile networks. As of last year, all Teslas have a suite of radar, sonar and optical sensors as standard equipment.

The first tranche of functions amount to a kind of super cruise control, giving the cars the ability to follow roads, adjust for traffic and automatically brake to avoid an accident. The more tantalizing prospect lies ahead, when cars will be able to park or put themselves away and be summoned by smartphone.

Little things: With the key fob in your pocket, you never have to lock or unlock the Model S. You approach, the door handles pop out. You sit down and put it in gear and drive off. You don’t have to start the car, or stop it. After a few days in a Tesla, the experience of firing up some hunk of piston-flapping metal in the driveway—the anxious burr of an internal combustion in cold-start mode—seems a massive step backward.

With the P85D, the future is coming at us faster than ever.