10 June

What applies to fashion also applies to cars. The distinction between status and functionality. The idea that you can either have a practical car or a stylish car is rubbish. The Ferrari here is clearly the higher status vehicle. But to me the Tesla is the ‘tailored’ car, the car built by designers to meet a whole range of very specific needs of drivers. Like a tailor does with clothes. That intense focus on design creates the much more ‘stylish’ vehicle, in my view. If you decouple style from status. Ferraris (and many Italian cars) are mostly a pain in the arse to own, because they’re all about status and often pretty dysfunctional. Tesla’s design brief is to give people a car that provides comfort, power, handling, safety, efficiency, little to no maintenance, a vast number of practical functions, and it’s this focus that creates a car where the style emerges from the functionality. It ends up looking like a ‘sports car’, but from the other direction, where that comes from aerodynamic efficiency rather than status. At a tiny fraction of the cost of the Ferrari, always an indicator that status games are in play. A Tesla is a Noel Coward tailored suit, a Ferrari is a Designer Gucci. A car bought more to be seen in, as opposed to a car designed to be functional in every possible way.