If designers insist on a screen, it should be like the Model 3’s: huge, high resolution, easy to read in sunlight, and smoothly responsive to touch, supporting gestures like pinch to zoom on the map. But some modern cars have so many buttons across the dash and the steering wheel they look like a Yamaha synthesizer threw up, often with information split across several little screens. I’m typically a fan of physical buttons, which are easy to find with minimal eyes-off-the-road time, and was apprehensive about Tesla’s extremist approach.

Every function in the Model 3 is controlled via, or displayed on, a centrally mounted 15-inch touchscreen. Tesla chucked out all the buttons, along with the instrument panel, traditional home of things like the speedometer. If your friends are anything like mine, they’ll be most interested in the Model 3’s interior, whose minimal design would make Patrick Bateman’s New York apartment look cluttered. That’s what I wanted to find out, using the Model 3 to tool around LA, to hit freeways and winding roads, to traverse the desert and climb snow-covered mountains. The real question is whether it lives up to the hype, to Elon Musk’s promise that this is the car for everyone. And it turns out that driving one of the most anticipated vehicles, ever, is enough to shake these seen-it-all Angelenos to attention.

Surely, some of them are among the 450,000 people who have already put down a $1,000 deposit for the right to buy this car. Other Tesla owners come up to me to chat while charging.

Yet, as I’m driving around town in a (bright red) Model 3, I feel unusually conspicuous, attracting the eyes of passers-by, some of them walking into traffic for a closer look. In LA, it takes a special vehicle to stand out. Not the sort of thing that impresses Angelenos, so blasé about celebrities and rich kids valeting their supercars at restaurants. The Model 3 is supposed to be Tesla’s humdrum car, the everyday, cut-price offering to the masses.

Tesla model 3 review