you sat down and closed the
door is still cutting-edge today.
The notion of replacing a
vehicle’s nearly every physical
control with a digital one then
updating the underlying soft-
ware with patches and imag-
inative new features—all while
you sleep and free of charge—
is still just being emulated now.
And still, the better part of
a decade later, there isn’t an
electric car that can travel as
far as a Model S, nor is there a
street-legal production car of
any motivation that can beat
a Ludicrous Model S to 60 mph.Meanwhile, Tesla remains
among the front-runners of
advanced driver assistance
technology; Autopilot and
Autosteer were both unveiled
on the Model S.
The Model S changed theway the world thinks not only
about electric cars but also
about cars in general. Divorce
the car from the controversies
and polarized opinions of the
company and its mercurial
CEO, and it remains clear there
isn’t another vehicle created
during our 70 years of existence
that has had a truly compa-
rable effect on automobiles,
the automotive industry, and
society at large.
Every car here was selected
because it’s the best repre-
sentative of the decade when
it won, and still the Model S
stands apart. In our 70 years of
identifying a Car of the Year,
none is more deserving than
the 2013 Tesla Model S.
Will Tesla Motors still exist
70 years from now? Perhaps.
But Musk’s true vision was
to electrify the world via
an incontrovertibly earth-
shattering product, not
to create an automaking
monolith. In seeing how Tesla’s
rivals are rushing to imitate its
technology—sincerely, not with
lip service—it is clear his vision is
close to being fulfilled. SEMoToRjanuary 2013 motortrend.com TReNd
Shocker!
2013 car of the yearsince 1949 never a
like this...winner
$4.99Billionaire rocketeer Elon Muskthe auto industry reboots
with car 2.0Tesla changed how we think about electric cars.
Seven years after the Model S’
win, no one has put a bigger
screen in a production car.
SEPTEMBER 2019 MOTORTREND.COM 45