Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee has recently set up a separate car-focused channel called Auto Focus and has been producing some quite unique videos, mostly featuring (usually electric) cars that he’s spent some time with. He most recently drove the original Tesla Roadster and actually had some very interesting and new points to make about it, especially when it comes to the driving experience.
For him, the you can really feel the Lotus Elise connection when driving the car. It is small and light, you feel everything through the steering wheel and the seat, and it’s also a really petit vehicle that is very agile and quick to change direction. He actually makes it sound like these Lotus-like qualities dominate the driving experience more than the fact that the vehicle is electric.
This is especially true given that modern EVs are far quicker than the Tesla Roadster, yet there aren’t really any other EVs that feel as nimble as a Roadster. It manages to achieve something that many newer and much more powerful EVs often miss the mark on - being fun-to-drive, a real driver’s car.
Marques also takes his time pushing all the buttons in the interior and focuses on the screen located to the left of the steering wheel, which displays lots of detailed information through its six different screens. It is quite advanced for its age, certainly no EV from 2008 had anything this advanced.
The fact that it’s still compelling even more than a decade after its debut makes the Tesla Roadster a very intriguing car, even today. It’s not hard to see why it was actually popular in its day and it’s also a valuable piece of history because it showed that Tesla meant business and it did to a degree foreshadow the EV revolution that this company started, bringing electric vehicles into the mainstream today.
