"We are NOT going to talk about space today," says PayPal co-founder, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk.

Pity: I really wanted to pick his brains about his deadly serious intent to end his life on Mars.

Today, though, we're here to sample his outrageous Tesla S P85D, a high-performance, all-wheel drive variant of the only electric car on the planet to let you make a 300 mile round trip uninterrupted by enforced, over-long enslavement to the National Grid. So we're talking Tesla. "We really wanted to break the mould, to show that electric cars aren't just glorified milk floats," says Musk. "This is the fastest accelerating four-door production car in the world.

That's one hell of a milk float." "This is a halo car for Tesla" he adds. "We didn't do it from the beginning because it adds complexity, and we already had enough fish to fry just making a car that worked. But it was always something we expected to do. We wanted to position it as the fastest in order to change the public mindset. It had to be something dramatic. And getting those few extra 10ths of a second was hard."

The seven-league-boot strides that Tesla is undeniably making in changing the public attitude towards electric cars will, however, constitute only a small step towards Musk's oft-avowed goal of an all-electric automotive world unless a similarly seismic shift in thinking overtakes the major car manufacturers. And his growing impatience at the continued lack of such a sea change is palpable.

"I thought the big car companies would be coming out with electric cars sooner" (Elon Musk)

"I had thought the big car companies would be coming out with electric cars sooner," he says. "Crazy thing is, it's now seven years since we unveiled the Roadster, and yet there's still not a single car for sale without a Tesla badge that has a 250 mile range. That's mind blowing."

In a move of extraordinary altruism, then, Musk earlier this year "open-sourced" the company patents, technically allowing all and sundry to readily access Tesla technology with the simple shuffle of a mouse (with caveats). A bizarre business decision, surely, to so ruthlessly eradicate your own competitive advantage? "That wasn't to advantage us" says Musk, "it actually disadvantages us. We're still very tiny in the car industry - this year we might do 32-33,000 cars out of over 9 million. We're a minnow from a volume perspective, but technologically we're on point. This allows other manufacturers to catch up technologically."

"And that's the whole idea" he continues; "it's the goal of Tesla to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport, and I'd rather the other manufacturers would go fully electric as soon as possible." "Open sourcing the patents does have the advantage of making Tesla a more attractive place for the world's best engineers to work" considers Musk. "And it builds goodwill, which I believe will be important..."

Speaking of goodwill; how, one wonders, will Tesla shareholders look upon Musk's decision to punt the combination to the company's technology vault into the public domain? "I only own 30% of the company, says Musk. "They can fire me if they want. I've got nothing against profit, I don't think it's an evil word. But if we have a choice between short-term profit and scaling the business, the latter makes much more sense.

There are larger issues at stake."

With Tesla already actively involved in trying to help both Mercedes, Toyota and BMW bring electric cars to the market, and "at least one major car company" already taking advantage of his decision to open source patents, Musk is still not satisfied with the rate of progress.

"So I've come to the conclusion we need to be a lot more active in building our own cars" he says. "Maybe if we start taking market share away from other companies that'll get them a lot more interested."

Hence the decision to follow the Tesla Model S with an SUV, the Model X, and a smaller vehicle, the Model 3, which aims to halve the S's $70,000 price tag. Musk wanted to christen the latter "Model E" in the interests of having an S...E...X Tesla model line-up, but Jaguar's previous claim to the "E" has, sadly, scotched that. "The P85D is a precursor to the Model X" explains Musk, "which will use the same chassis and drive train architecture. Demand for the P85D is off the charts. We're seeing a very high proportion of orders for all-wheel drive, either P85D or 85D (which has smaller, equal sized electric motors front and rear), so 70% plus of our cars will be dual motor. With deliveries of the X due to start next summer, the biggest problem we have at Tesla now is meeting production demands."

Indeed, and the arrival of Model 3 in 2017 will pose further problems for Tesla, not least that of producing an affordable all-electric car crammed with expensive lithium-ion batteries.

That's where the Gigafactory comes into the equation: a 15 million sq ft plant outside Reno in Nevada which, on completion in 2017, will boast the capacity to produce batteries for up to half a million electric vehicles per year. "We need the Gigafactory because there currently isn't enough battery cell capacity for a high-volume, pure electric car at any price," explains Musk. The Model 3 is 20% smaller than the Model S, so the battery pack can be just 80% of the size, but we're aiming for a 50% price reduction from the S, so we need the factory to make it affordable."

Musk isn't only slaying the dragon of battery production costs in his own, inimitable, head-on style, he's also tackling the ever-thorny issue of a viable electric vehicle recharging infrastructure in an equally straightforward manner.

Dismissing the chicken-and-egg bickering that has seen increased electric car production shackled by the lack of recharging facilities, and vice versa, Musk has simply created Tesla's own global Supercharging network. Half-charging a car in the time it takes to savour a cup of coffee, there are currently 237 Superchargers worldwide, with 83 in Europe, making it both the largest and fastest-growing fast-charging network in the world.

Musk says, "By the end of next year you'll be able to drive anywhere in Western Europe on the Supercharger network. And recharge for free."

So, while the major manufacturers continue to make the emperor Nero look like a man of action, Musk and Tesla just get on with it. It's extremely hard not to admire a man who so volubly and relentlessly puts his money where his mouth is. I will not be surprised to one day learn that Elon Musk has, indeed, arrived on Mars.

Read GQ's review of the Tesla P85D