3 April 2016: I love driving my Renault ZOE, even after two and a half years and forty thousand miles. However I am interested and excited by the electric car developments coming from other manufacturers – particularly Tesla.
The Tesla stand in the Touchwood shopping centre, Solihull (Image: T. Larkum)
I’ve been following the travails of Tesla, and stocking up on their shares, since early 2012. I knew that the Roadster and Model S/X were not suitable for our family, not just in terms of excessive price, but also size. However the long promised Model 3 seemed like it could fit the bill.
When I learned a few months back that there would be a reservation list for the Model 3 and that it would open on 31st March, I marked the date in my calendar. Come the day before, last Wednesday, I rang the nearest Tesla showroom, in Solihull. I asked about reservations and understood that I just needed to call the next day from 8am.
However multiple calls first thing the next day only got as far as an answerphone. Later in the morning I got a call back from a Tesla representative to say that reservations were only being taken in store ahead of the official time of the launch (the next day in the UK).
Registering for my Tesla Model 3 (Image: T. Larkum)
To cut the story short, I was soon in the car and heading out from the Fuel Included office in Milton Keynes towards Solihull. I met up with a friend at Northampton and by mid-afternoon we were hunting for the Tesla showroom. Unlike the large out-of-town Tesla building I had previously visited in Weybridge, it turned out to be a small gallery shop in the local Touchwood shopping centre. In fact, the shop itself is still being refitted so the outlet is currently just a stand in the middle of one of the centre ‘boulevards’.
Tesla Model 3 (Image: Green Car Reports)
The reservation process itself was simple – I entered my contact details, then payment details, into a web browser, clicked a button, and an acknowledgement came up a moment later to say I had a reservation for a Model 3. That was it; a few minutes later we were heading home, having become two of the couple of hundred thousand new Tesla customers.
US Update: Report from the Tesla Model 3 trenches: lines, camaraderie, deposits