The Tesla Model III is a cool car and that’s unrelated to the fact it’s electric

It hit me while watching the Model 3 keynote: Tesla’s new car is the first affordable cool electric car.

See, there was a big problem until the Model 3 with EVs (and green cars in general): you either had to be rich enough to afford cool things like a Tesla Model S or a Porsche 918 or you had to drive horrible automobiles like the Nissan Leaf or the Toyota Prius and instantly look like a giant moron.

I know Priuses, Leafs and even the Volt (or Bolt — whatever GM’s electric car is called, since sales figures stick around the absolute zero, it’s hard to remember its name) have been deemed “cool”. But they were cool because they were electric. Other than that, they were ridiculously expensive cars that didn’t even offered basic benefits like a decent boot or going from 0 to 60 in less a billion years (do they even go up to 60mph?).

Incidentally, people driving them were sending a clear message to the world: “Look at me, I drive this car because I care about the planet. Unlike you, I don’t kill dolphins when I go to my gluten-free veggie restaurant”. And this, ladies and gentlemen, was preventing all the normal people, those who didn’t want to teach the entire Earth population a lesson, from saving the planet.

On the contrary, the Tesla Model 3 is cool despite the fact it’s electric. First, it’s a beautiful piece of design. I love how it features so much glass without looking like a Fiat Multipla. It should also convince the people of Chrysler that you don’t need make windows look like arrow slits to get a great shape (like in the 300C, you know?). And I’m not even talking of the absence of a front grille, a subtle yet distinctive feature that helps setting the 3 apart.

Then, there’s the dashboard. It’s so simple and straightforward that it makes me reckon why nobody at any car company thought about it before. By concentrating all the information on a giant 15" screen in the middle, it frees up a lot of space on the dashboard and helps the driver focus on the road or the passengers (depending on your social skills).

And finally, there’s the engineering. For $35,000 you have an impressive list of features: a 215 miles minimum range, autopilot, room for 5 adults, bootspace… All sorts of things that are available from the competition but only if you choose just one or give your left arm to Mercedes and buy an S-Class.

Overall, the Tesla Model 3 is a brilliant car. It’s beautiful and well made, all of this at a reasonable price. In that way, it looks very much like the Citroën DS (perhaps the most innovative car from the 20th century): an incredible design for very advanced features still accessible to the masses. Oh and it’s fast too, unlike the DS.