The Tesla Diaries

A delightful and personal peek into the all-electric future of driving

A love story between a couple, a car (the all-electric Tesla Model S, which Consumer Reports once rated “the best car ever tested”), and the future, “The Tesla Diaries” traces how Pati Nagle’s dream became reality — the ownership of “Nikola,” a deep blue version of the luxury sedan that, with the addition of solar panels to the couple’s roof (“now our Tesla is powered by the mother-freaking sun!”) illustrate the game-changer that is the electric car.
Nagle’s delightful chapters trace a line from the past (inventor Nikola Tesla) to the couple’s investment in the future (Tesla is rolling its Model S profits into the new and much more affordable Model 3, which stands to revolutionize driving worldwide.) It’s a tale of discovery, from a new way to buy cars (over the Internet from the factory — no dealers) to the power and speed of “Launch Mode”; Nagle reports that her husband cried out “‘My eyes!’ because the launch had pressed them back into his skull.”
The couple tested and approved of the autopilot, the car’s ever-evolving suite of driver-assistance tools that enable the car to track the car ahead in traffic, among other features. The chapter on “Range Anxiety” brings the reader into the world of Tesla owners as they learn the car’s charging system and drive it cross-country, using Tesla’s expanding national network of superchargers. The couple lost “Nikola” to a road accident, and then gains its replacement, “Nikola II”, illustrating the writer’s deep attachment to this car, the company, and the vision of founder Elon Musk.
Cars with internal combustion engines — dinosaurs, by Nagle’s comparison — will soon be a thing of the past. “The Tesla Diaries” allows readers to share in the historic first stages of a clean energy-driving future.