WHY, OH Y

The world never got to see Wardenclyffe Tower, but here's the Tesla Model Y

- By Kartik Ware Photographs Kaizad Adil Darukhanawala

Now, with the Tesla Model Y arriving in India from the ‘land of the free’, as suddenly as a post on X, I might add, I certainly wasn't expecting my time with it to be limited to a couple of hours.

Such brief periods, in my experience, work best with big V8s; you know, those lovely machines that try to kill you every time you so much as look at the right pedal. Or even the left one. That leaves this account to be nothing more than a meandering first impression. Then again, in this electrified age of automobiles transmogrifying into transportation devices — and they do indeed feel like driving laptops from different brands — I couldn’t help but plonk myself into a Tesla. After all, Tesla is the one who made EVs cooler than the North Pole, right? And to no great surprise, as it goes with EVs, I came away a bit nonplussed.

That, you may think, is a surprising thing to say about (somehow) the world’s largest-selling car for the past two years. Those with their heads full of fossil fuel may be seething at the fact, too, but the Model Y doesn’t care — it does its own thing, and rather differently, too. Perhaps a bit too differently. To begin with, like a lot of pretentious Indian cars, it claims to be an SUV — and it is decidedly not one. If anyone begs to differ, I'll happily take their Model Y rock crawling and see if we can reach a mutual understanding. It doesn’t look like a sedan or a hatchback or an SUV, but has elements of all three, and to me that makes it the automotive equivalent of the monotreme (egg-laying mammal) we call the platypus.

And that’s not an insult because I do like the way the Model Y looks. Like I said, this Tesla does its own thing.