Price £50,000

MPG 152 (equivalent)

Top speed 140mph

The future doesn’t arrive gently: it comes at a leap – a great galumphing jump that leaves you laughing with disbelief. I drove the Tesla S last week and it offers such revolutionary solutions to so many of the oily problems that bog most manufacturers down that you wonder what on earth they’ve all been doing. While they’ve been dozing, Elon Musk, the polymath gigabillionaire who invented PayPal, has set about changing the cars we drive – and the way we drive them.

From the outside, the Tesla S is fairly unremarkable. It looks like a posh Jag or maybe a nice Lexus. In a corporate car park a Tesla is just another anonymous fatcat motor. It’s under that boring skin that the fun begins. First up, ask your kids where they think the engine is. They’ll point at that long bonnet. Pop it open by squeezing the fob in your pocket (the key is shaped like a tiny Tesla). The kids will peer into the empty cavity and see only decent storage. Ha, they know your game. It’s round the back. You pop the lid on the boot… Nope, just more storage. “Holy shit!” They cry, “There’s no engine!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The world at your fingertip: the 17in touchscreen interface dominates the inside of the car

In fact there is: it’s the size of a handbag and is hidden behind the back seat, but they don’t need to know that. A giant battery pack powers this handbag and it takes up the entire floor of the car. Some have said a Tesla is not so much a car as a battery on wheels. It’s this smart battery that blasts you to a top speed of 140mph and gives you a range of 240 miles.

The car doesn’t have a fuel tank, exhaust pipes, petrol cap or any of the other gubbins associated with an internal combustion engine. Being purely electric it only has one gear. Hit the throttle and the car accelerates in a soaring, totally silent, endless swoosh – it essentially does 0-140mph in first. It also doesn’t have an ignition. There is no on or off. The car wakes up when you approach it (it detects that tiny Tesla in your pocket). You get in, select D, press the throttle and off you slip. When you stop, you just get out and walk away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plugged in: the fully charged Tesla S has a range of about 240 miles. Using a supercharger it takes four hours to top up the battery

To drive it does take some getting used to: the regenerative braking means it lurches to a stop as soon as you stop accelerating. It doesn’t free wheel at all. But after a while you’ll find you hardly use the brakes. Under acceleration its ability to pick up speed is astonishing and it handles corners just as you would expect a premium performance car to do.

Inside, the car is lavish, but it’s quite normal. The only giveaway to its futuristic credentials is the driver interface – a gigantic multimedia screen. You control everything using this. It’s also a TV, a computer and a music system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Open road: the all-electric car has superb handling

You can stay in touch with your Tesla using an app on your phone. Sitting at my desk, now, I can see the car is parked outside my home seven miles away. Its interior temperature is 21C. I could open the sunroof or flash the lights with a tap on my phone screen. Actually, I just honked the horn. That’ll make the dog bark – wife annoyed, tick! You can sync the car to your online diary, too, so if you have a 2.30pm meeting in Reading, the car will contact you and tell you when it’s time to leave.

The only real issue is charging. When you buy a Tesla they install a supercharger in your garage. It then takes four hours to fully charge. Using a domestic plug, it only recharges at six miles per hour. There is an ever-expanding network of superchargers spreading across Europe and these are free for Tesla owners. If you want to drive to the south of France, the car will plot a route via the charge points you’ll need to visit. But what if the battery is flat, your kid has an accident and you have to suddenly drive to hospital? Tough, you can’t. But I’m sure Elon’s working on that…

Correction: this article was amended on 6 July 2015

The price of the Tesla S is £55,000 not £50,000. Also I wish to clarify that a home charger and a Supercharger are different things. A home 7kwh charger charges at 22 miles an hour so if plugged in overnight the car is fully charged each morning when at home. Tesla does not install the charger. It is a generic EV charger installed by POD point, Chargemaster, British Gas or similar with the help of a government grant. Superchargers are installed by Tesla at various locations across the country and are free to Tesla drivers to use. The Supercharger fully charges a car in an hour or will do a 50% charge in 20 minutes. For more information, go to teslamotors.com/en_GB/charging





Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166