You know that sudden start you get on certain high-thrills roller coasters where it pulls you, screaming with glee, from a dead-stop up to face-blasting speeds in one smooth, blink-and-you-miss-it motion? That’s what driving the Tesla Model S feels like. Pulling out of the Tesla parking lot where I picked up my car for the week – a decked-out, multi-coat red Performance edition – I flexed my right foot 45 degrees and felt my guts get pinned to the driver’s seat, a serotonin-drenched mix of adrenaline, joy, and G-forces washing over my body. I knew right then that it was going to be a good week.

“ What if the car itself is a gadget?

Clean Sheet

The multi-coat red paint job is exquisite in person.

She's a Looker

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In-N-Out

“ At the end of your journey, simply put it in “Park,” get out, and walk away.

Meet the Model S key. It never has to leave your pocket.

Touch the Future

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“ Why isn't a car that’s this cutting-edge packing 4G/LTE hardware?

Hello, dashboard 2.0.

Forward Thinking

Say hello to the front trunk, or "frunk."

“ Tesla pushes out over-the-air updates that add new functionality to the car.

More Like Model YES

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“ I started hoping for red lights so that I’d get a new chance to sprint from 0-60.

The charge port is hidden behind the left taillight.

Giving Up Gas

The Model S door handles automatically extend from the car when you approach. Otherwise, they retract into the body to maximize aerodynamics.

“ Could the Model S be convenient enough to warrant giving up a gas station on every corner of America for?

Fight the Power

“ My 50-amp circuit put about 30 range miles back into the Model S per hour, so every morning I’d wake up to a full charge.

A look at Tesla's Supercharger that puts 150 range miles back into the car in 20 minutes.

“ I could’ve driven my family from IGN’s office in San Francisco to Disneyland in Southern California – and back – at a cost of zero dollars.

Climate Change

“ The Model S simultaneously triggers gadget lust, geek pride, and egotistical patriotism.

If you drive a Tesla, does it become the single best gadget in your life?Though you may not have seen a Model S with your own eyes just yet as Tesla continues to pump out the all-aluminum cars from its San Francisco Bay Area-based plant at a rate of 20,000 per year (unsurprisingly, they’re almost a daily sight near IGN’s downtown San Francisco offices), you’ve probably heard about them. The company bet its entire future on the seven-passenger Model S after ceasing production on its first model, the two-seat Roadster supercar (2008-2012), and that bet appears to be paying off. It’s the Motor Trend Car of the Year – unanimously. Automobile Magazine Car of the Year It can’t be that good. Can it?Can it?The first of many fascinating things about the Model S is that it’s a “clean sheet” car, i.e. it was designed from a blank piece of paper with no preexisting platforms or guidelines to work off of. The primary fruit of this idea is that it means Tesla’s “fuel tank” – an inches-thick armored battery pan that contains all of the car’s 7000-or-so lithium-ion cells – sits in the bottom of the car, lowering the center of gravity to supercar levels for incredible handling and facilitating fast access by Tesla for service or replacement. Or, as we'll cover later, battery swapping.It also means no engine, exhaust, or transmission. Translation: cargo volume that, when you look in the car, seems to warp time and space. The “frunk” (Tesla’s clever term for “front trunk”) is by itself as big as my Infiniti coupe’s entire (pathetic) trunk, the rear space is minivan-size, and the middle seat in the back is a legit place to be thanks to the flat floor granted by the lack of transmission tunnel.Meanwhile, nearly every non-headlight light bulb is an LED, the air suspension lowers itself automatically at 55mph, and the front-end has a world-beating drag coefficient of 0.24, according to Tesla. Translation for it all: maximum efficiency.All of this is only aided by the Model S’s stunning good looks. Part Aston Martin and part Jaguar, the Tesla is very easy on the eyes, if a bit conservative by supercar standards. It looks great on the road, in a parking lot, in your garage, wherever. My almost-fully-loaded $101,820 test car looked especially slick with its luscious multi-coat red paint job, biggest-range 265-mile EPA-rated battery Tesla offers, Performance package, Tech package (GPS navigation, Xenon headlights, power rear liftgate, and more), 21-inch wheels, and a panoramic glass roof. It’s a long way to go from the $63,570 base price, for sure, and whether or not you’d want the cheaper version with the smaller, 200-mile battery is debatable. It all depends on your driving habits.You’ll feel all that tech before you even get in the car. The Model S’s door handles live inside the body for maximum aerodynamics, and extend outwards to present themselves to you automatically as you approach the car with the key fob in your pocket (they require a manual touch to extend them if you don’t have the Tech package). It’s a luxurious and high-tech sight that never, ever gets old. Since it only works for the person with the key on their person, you feel like a spell-casting wizard when the car only responds to you and no other passersby.After a week of this I couldn’t believe how archaic it felt to get in and out of my traditional gas-powered vehicle, with its metal key, its clutch, its parking brake, and its ignition. Tesla’s way is just so…simple. And convenient.That’s not even the extent of it. Tesla also has a smartphone app that lets you preheat or precool the Model S cabin from wherever you are, honk the horn (to locate it in a parking lot and/or mess with your friends), and track its location via GPS (to make sure the valet attendant hasn’t run off with it). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test this out because Tesla ties the app to the owner’s MyTesla account, which isn’t set up with company cars. But I would imagine I’d use this daily for the climate controls alone.It’s hard not to notice the centerpiece of the Model S once you get in it: the 17-inch touchscreen dashboard that looks like an iPad ate another iPad. It’s gorgeous, responsive, and smart. The UI design is familiar in a Mac-like way, with a home row of icons at the top that take you to frequent car functions like navigation, energy usage, music, browser, and backup camera. The bulk of the screen in the middle is home to either one or two windows – your choice – that you can arrange the contents and placement of. Energy usage on top, music on bottom? Web browser in one jumbo-sized pane? Do whatever makes you happy.Speaking of the web browser, it’s excellent overall, but it was a tad sluggish in my testing, whether I was browsing IGN or scrolling through my Twitter feed. Not enough to siphon its usefulness or dampen my enthusiasm for its inclusion, but enough to make me wish that something punchier than the Nvidia Tegra 3 graphics chip was powering the display. It’s also fed by the car’s always-on 3G cellular data connection which, while effective, leads me to wonder why a car that’s this cutting-edge isn’t packing 4G/LTE hardware. Hopefully Tesla offers an upgrade path for existing owners. I quite enjoyed the built-in Slacker Internet radio that the 3G connection affords, however.Meanwhile, a locked bottom row of icons accesses key car controls, such as the sunroof, charging, headlights, and climate controls. You learn your way around this very quickly, and it’s all very easy to deal with even when driving.The interior bears mentioning as well. It’s spartan. In fact, it almost looks like an Apple store inside. It might take you aback at first, what with no center console, but this “negative space” quickly becomes a strength. Purses fit in the storage area between the front seats, while the aforementioned rear middle seat is viable thanks to the lack of a hump in the floor. A small cubby beneath the touchscreen dashboard proved useful for sunglasses and my toll transponder, though it would be nice if I had an area where I could securely lock those items (the extremely small glovebox is suitable for documents only).Of course, in the semi-likely event you think a 17-inch screen in the middle of your car would be a dangerous distraction for the driver, know that Tesla has thought of that. Nearly every major operational function of the Model S can be handled without taking your eyes off of the road and instrument cluster directly in front of you thanks to the customizable steering wheel scroll wheels and buttons. Even the sunroof can be opened and closed with the scroll wheels. Voice commands are also on tap, but for some reason I had little luck getting any of them to work.The Tesla Grin. That, I’ve learned, is what Tesla owners call the irrepressible smile you and your passengers get when you put your right foot down in one of these four-wheeled lightning bolts. And it’s a real thing. I couldn’t wipe the kid-on-Christmas-morning look off my face all week, and I saw the same reactions on everyone I took for a ride. IGN co-workers couldn’t stop talking about it after a spirited lunch run. My neighbors were all floored; I probably gave the same tour of the car five times. I learned that I had to build extra time into my trips in order to account for this curiosity and excitement, both from those who knew of the car and those who didn’t. Popping the frunk in particular tended to elicit surprised gasps. All were shocked by the car’s eerie silence, and no one was prepared for the effortless, linear tug of the acceleration.Ah yes, that acceleration. You get 100% of the torque at 0mph in the Model S because of the electric motor, and the pull is so smooth and so sudden that I started seeing plaid, as if going to Ludicrous speed in the movie Spaceballs. Hyperbole aside, it genuinely is as stunning as it is thrilling. No gears means no shifting by computer or human, which means even comparable gas-powered cars get torched (search “Corvette vs. Tesla” on YouTube ). It’s almost disturbingly easy to get to 90mph even when you’re not trying. Friends will be impressed, spouses may be terrified (trust me on that one), and no one will prevent you from merging into your desired freeway lane ever again. I even saw a few other Model S’s while I was out driving, and each time we exchanged a satisfying, “Yeah, you know what I’m talking about!” smile and wave.You lower your WH/mi number largely through one-pedal driving. Though the Model S isn’t the first car to offer regenerative braking – that is, the electric motor uses the car’s own inertia to slow itself down and put energy back into the battery when you lift the foot off the accelerator – it is the first to do it to this extent. You can adjust this between “Normal” and “Low” via a button on the touchscreen dashboard, but the latter eliminates most of the gains of regen. It’s not unlike taking your foot off the gas in a traditional manual-transmission car in second gear at about 30mph; you can feel it slowing down without the use of the brake. In the Model S, you quickly get used to it such that you only need to use the brake pedal in sudden stops or to actually hold the car at a complete stop (and yes, when the car is doing heavy regen-sourced slowing, the brake lights automatically come on to alert those behind you). Besides, again, maximizing your efficiency – seeing a pattern with that yet? – the welcome side effect of this is that your brake pads last much, much longer.But does all of this come at a cost? Could the Model S be convenient enough to warrant giving up a gas station on every corner of America for? When I first brought the Tesla home, I wasn’t sure our relationship was going to work out, despite the unbelievable lust at first sight. My home is a rather old one, and as such its garage door opening is small. I also live on a tight street with cars always parked in every available space. Because of all this, I back my current car in, as it makes it far easier to pull out later.When I exited my garage and tried again, going in forwards this time, it went much better despite still having to manually fold each mirror in (my use case aside, it’s a disappointing omission that a car of this price and size lacks power auto-folding mirrors and parking sensors). Better, the charge port and the wall outlet were now right next to each other, and thanks to the high-def backup camera, I was able to confidently back out of my garage without worrying about hitting cars parked on the street.Once that hiccup was resolved, I never had another problem. My 50-amp circuit put about 30 range miles back into the Model S per hour, so every morning I’d wake up to a full charge. That means a nine-hour charge time if I pulled into the garage running on fumes…er, sparks, but really, how often would that happen? It is worth noting that if this is something that concerns you, Tesla sells a $1200 high-power wall connector that will double the charge time to 60 miles/hour. And if you don’t have a high-power outlet of some sort and don’t want to spend a few hundred bucks to put one in, you can charge at a decent clip from a 220v dryer outlet. You could do a standard 110v outlet too, but that only charges at a near-unusable 2 miles per hour.The Superchargers, it’s worth noting, are free. Think about that for a moment. I could’ve driven my family from IGN’s office in San Francisco to Disneyland in Southern California – and back – at a cost of zero dollars. (Note to self: WHY DIDN’T I DO THIS?!) So far the Superchargers are only on the coasts, but the company has announced a massive expansion that will make cross-country travel possible via these free-to-use Superchargers by the end of the year. And the Superchargers are solar-powered, meaning they actually put more energy back into the grid than they take out. I didn’t get a chance to try one, but reams of anecdotes from Model S owners on various message boards suggest they work as advertised. you can switch out your battery at a Tesla charging station for a fully powered one, then get yours back (fully charged up again, of course) on your way home. Unlike the Superchargers, this service isn’t free, but it is fast. RV parks and other public charging stations are an option as well, though you’ll have to build in significant time to account for longer charging cycles there and map your route ahead of time. That requires a substantial commitment compared to a regular internal combustion engine (ICE) car, for sure. It is the biggest issue to consider when thinking about bringing this car into your life.The highest compliment I can possibly pay Model S is the same as when I first got the iPhone: I took it for granted very, very quickly. Before I knew it, I was accepting Model S’s advances and conveniences as the daily norm. Zero emissions, maniacal acceleration, physics-defying cargo space, and an operating cost roughly 4-6 times less than a comparable gas-powered car. It’s packed with great technology, and it upgrades itself on a regular basis. It does all this without any major caveats – aside from its price tag as well as not being as convenient as gas-powered cars for long road trips at this stage of Tesla’s existence. But at least those road trips are free. And no gas power means no oil changes, no fuel system flushes, no tune-ups, no transmission work. None of that. It’s also the safest car in the world.After one week, it became clear that the Model S is, hands-down, the best gadget you could possibly have in your life outside of your quintessential smartphone of choice. And, astoundingly, this is only the 1.0 version. Remember how quickly the iPhone evolved, for instance, and it’s almost terrifying (in a good way) to imagine what the 2.0 of this car will be capable of. Tesla has repeatedly indicated plans to build a $35k mid-sized electric sedan that’s a bit smaller (think BMW 3 series) in about 3-4 years from now. If they pull that off while building upon the Model S’s successes and (few) failures – and at this stage there’s no reason to doubt what they’re capable of – then God help the rest of the automotive industry. And my wallet.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. He was lucky enough to own his dream car – a 1982 DeLorean – for 12 years. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , on IGN , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.