Alef Arendsen

Last Saturday my Tesla Roadster was delivered! In the pouring rain, the delivery man parked his truck about 500 meters from my house, since he couldn’t get closer to my place. After having signed off on the delivery, I drove the car through town to my house and parked in my garage. No touching (or at least driving) it for the rest of the weekend, since it hadn’t been registered yet.

Last Monday I went to the registration agency to get my license for the car. This proved to be difficult. The forms they had didn’t support electric cars and the guys at the agency were perfectly fitting the image Dutch customer service has: they didn’t want to help me out at all. Yesterday after a few calls and some discussions, I tried again and this it worked. Then today I went by customs to get it cleared. This usually involves paying an additional 40% of taxes, but one of the incentives here in Holland is that you don’t have to pay that tax, so that’s cool.

Driving to and from the registration agency and customs is allowed after having obtained a one-day license number. Since the process took a whole three days, I drove around without the license yesterday and today. I haven’t been stopped by the police, so I guess that’s over now.

On to the experience of actually driving the Tesla. It’s a totally awesome car to drive! The acceleration is just too good to be true. Yes, in perfect conditions a Porsche 911 Turbo is faster (it does 0-60mph in just 3.4 seconds), but then again, this involves doing running through the shifts and all; and guess what: the Tesla doesn’t have gears, so no hassle with those. The car is most fun to drive through town or on the countryside. This is where the constant power that’s available all the way through 0 – 200 really begins to show. On the highway it’s certainly not too bad either; it’s fun to see a car in your rearview mirror closing in, just touching the pedal a little bit and already having equalled his speed.

All in all the first three days have been great. I can charge my car at the office and at home, which for now is good enough. Soon, we’ll be moving our office to Amsterdam and there I do not have a charging station closeby yet. This should hopefully be resolved quite quickly, with the Amsterdam municipality already having promised a charging station in front of our office on the Keizersgracht canal.

Yesterday, I also dropped by at our graphics designer. He’s going to prepare a bit of branding for the car. It’s almost too beautiful to put it on, but then again, we’ll have to promote the company a bit as well .

I’ll post some pictures later on.