Tesla’s Model 3: A car that’s a star before it has been driven

Tesla Motors new Model 3. AFP

Tesla’s newly announced Model 3, the Silicon Valley carmaker’s first “affordable” vehicle at a base price of US$35,000 (Dh128,560), has one particular trait in common with the ill-­fated, long-suffering Chevrolet Volt: it has been talked about several orders of magnitude more than it has been driven. To date, almost no one in the motoring press has been given the chance to drive the car, which is interesting when you consider I saw two of them on the road last weekend close to where I live in California.

Except, maybe I didn’t – a Tesla spokeswoman emailed me back immediately when I attempted to fact check what I’d seen, saying: “No, Model 3 was not in Marin over the weekend.”

Let’s chalk it up to the power of suggestion – the Model 3 is generating a lot of buzz, with about 300,000 pre-orders in fewer than three days since ­Tesla unveiled it to a salivating audience, even though it won’t be available until late next year. By comparison, Chevy took five years to sell its 100,000th Volt.

I've been trying to cozy up to Tesla's PR people for years, even arranging a test drive of the Roadster for The National in 2011, which Tesla later cancelled. Then, I set up an interview in 2012 with the company's head of power-train, but after agreeing, he backed out saying that he wasn't authorised to speak on behalf of the company. That's strange, when you consider that pretty much any engineer or design chief at GM, Ford, Porsche or whoever will frequently talk to the press, albeit with a communications minder on their hip. That's how this game works. But then, Tesla's not a car company per se; it's a tech company, which means it's steeped in the outsized paranoia that permeates much of Silicon Valley.

Also, there’s really not much jeopardy in cancelling on me, I’m not particularly important. That said, they’re the only company-­that-happens-to-make-cars that has ever cancelled an interview or a test drive on me since I started writing about cars almost a decade ago.

So, officially, I still haven’t seen the Model 3. Except, I feel like I have. It was a gorgeous sunny day in the Marin headlands, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and at first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. In light of the aforementioned email, I’m still not. The Model 3, both on the internet and in my, ahem, imagination, looks a bit like the Model S, but it seems taller yet with a shorter wheelbase – like a Model S that’s been squeezed at the bumpers.

The Model 3 appears to be a hit, well before anyone has driven one, which makes my job appear almost obsolete. That said, the Model S has had serious reliability issues, which only raises questions about this extremely popular new model, that basically no one has driven. Like so many Silicon Valley successes, Tesla is selling an idea as much as a product. For $1,000, you too can subscribe to that idea; just make sure you’ve got the remaining $34,000 handy in more than a year from now.

Meanwhile, the Volt has languished for years, and may not get the market-share boost GM is hoping for with its recent makeover. What the Model 3 and the Volt also have in common is the incredibly long run-up to their reveals, and the bonanza of hand-wringing, baseless pronouncements and general hysteria that accompanies what is potentially the next great automotive game-changer. The Volt turned out to be anything but. As for the Model 3, it’s perhaps best to wait until people have driven and lived with it for a while before getting too excited.