Despite it being 5 days after June 6, today is going to be D-day for us: It’s Tesla delivery day. We get our new Tesla at 2 pm.

A question almost every Tesla-buyer gets asked is, “What did you drive before you bought a Tesla?” I think the answer to that question is often a bit surprising. Here’s the list of cars my wife and I have owned over time:

1968 Renault 10 (first car — I bought it used in 1976)
1978 Renault 5 (Le Car)
1982 Honda Prelude
1988 Honda CRX
1992 Honda Accord
1997 Honda Odyssey
2001 Mercedes E320 4Matic
2003 Acura MDX

Clearly we have not been obsessive high-performance luxury car buyers prior to this.

The one obvious outlier here among all the Honda products (Acura is Honda’s luxury brand) is the Mercedes E320. That was the result of my desire to try out a very technology-centric car, given I was an analyst at a technology-centric analyst firm, Forrester Research. It included dynamic all-wheel drive GPS navigation, integrated mobile phone controls, over-the-air telematics, electronic stability control, and a host of other tech features. While many of those features are common today, they were quite rare in 2001, and I enjoyed having them as part of my daily transportation.

The downside of all this technology complexity, though, was reliability. The Mercedes is an extremely solid car, but its computer systems were still very much in their early days. The first time I saw one of the internal computers in the car crash while I was driving it rather upsetting; nearly every light on the dash came on, and I was alerted to at least 5 different failures of everything from the brakes to the air bags. I resisted panicking and pulled over to the side of the road.

Being a MIT computer science grad, I applied all my technical skills and knowledge to the problem: I turned the car off and back on again. Suddenly, all was right with the world. The car started without a complaint, all the error lights and warnings were gone, and I was able to drive off to work. So much for German engineering.

I have also been disappointed in the mechanical reliability of the Mercedes as well. On this one car, I’ve had several engine seals leak, replaced the main drive shaft twice, and dealt with power window failures more often than I would like. Compared to our Honda cars, the Mercedes has been a repair-shop queen, and a fairly expensive one at that. My rule of them has been that it goes to the dealer once a year for scheduled maintenance and repairs, and I expect that the repair bill will be multiple thousands of dollars each year. It’s just the cost of owning a Mercedes.

So what’s driving us to a Tesla instead of a Honda or Toyota? It’s three things:

1. Environmental impact. We put solar panels on our house a couple years ago, with the intent of them eventually powering our transportations needs. The Telsa is simply step 2 in that process.
2. New safety technology. As I’m getting older, I really would like to have modern features such as autopilot, collision avoidance, and lane departure detection. I’m a good driver (never had an accident), but these will make me better, especially as my reaction time slows.
3. Simplicity. Especially after our Mercedes experience, we want a car that pushes mosts of the complexity of the car into software, which can be updated, instead of hardware that breaks. The average internal combustion engine car has roughly 10,000 moving parts; the Tesla has less than 20 in its drivetrain. Less really is more.

All that said, the ultimate answer to what is driving us to a Tesla is “My Mercedes.” It’s what will transport us to the Tesla dealer and take us from yesterday’s technology to tomorrow’s when we trade it in this afternoon. It promises to be quite a ride.

I didn’t get to driving lightning overnight; I was originally an electric car skeptic.

I liked the idea of electric cars, but I thought they were impractical because of a old bugaboo, range anxiety. Range anxiety is that feeling in the pit of your stomach you are planning to drive 200 miles to New York City, and your car range is, say, 210 miles. Theoretically, you should be able to get there, but you know that:

• Your actual mileage may fall short of what your theoretical range is
• Charging mid-way will require finding and stopping at a charging station for the better part of an hour
• Even once you get there, you’ll have to charge up before you get home.

Internal combustion engine (ICE) drivers don’t worry about these things because of we have gas stations to refuel at. Electric car charging stations, on the other hand, are far fewer and farther between in the U.S. Assuming that most consumers wouldn’t want to deal with range anxiety, I had always thought that hybrid cars, which use electrical motors but have a gasoline-powered ICE to supplement them, were a better solution.

And then, on October 18, 2013, as part of some connected car research with colleague Ryan Martin, I went to our local Tesla store at the Natick Mall and saw the Tesla Model S85 chassis pictured at the top of this post. I was thunderstruck by what I saw.

Some may look at that photo and ask, “What’s the big deal? It’s a car chassis.” However, this photo is not just the chassis; it’s the entire battery pack, chassis, and drive train. There is no engine to put in front; the electric motor for this rear-wheel drive car is already mounted in the car. Here’s a closeup of the drivetrain:

The entire Tesla drive train has fewer than 20 moving parts. A normal ICE car has more than 10,000.

Now, despite having a fantastic test drive in the S85 (it was very responsive and very fast), I wasn’t sold on buying a Tesla yet. For one thing, our house has a steep driveway that really requires all-wheel drive to climb in winter. For another, the price of a Tesla is much much more than any amount I had ever paid for a car, and I was skeptical I could convince my wife that we should buy one.

At the end of our test drive though, I knew that our Tesla experience had fundamentally changed my mind. As I climbed into my car and was driving away from the Natick Mall in my Mercedes E320, I felt something I had not experienced in the decade since I had bought that iconic luxury car.

I felt a little disappointed to be driving it instead of a Tesla.

Now for something completely different.

As folks who follow my Twitter feed know, I’m finally buying a new car to replace my current 15-year-old one. While that would normally sound routine, I have added a twist that I think will make it worth reading about: we are giving up gasoline and going all-electric. More significantly, we’re going all-electric by getting a Tesla S90D.

My experience of going from an electric car skeptic four years ago (I thought hybrids were the better way to go) to actually buying a Tesla, one of the more radical plug-in electric cars, wasn’t a sudden decision; it was an evolutionary journey. And given how much I found myself weighing alternatives and constantly re-evaluating my plans, it occurred to me that others might be on the same path, and might enjoy reading about it. You may make different decisions, but sometimes it’s nice to know others have had the same questions and indecision along the way.

As of this weekend, I’m about to become a Tesla newbie owner. That means I’m going to have to learn a lot of new habits (e.g., “Hey sweetie, did you remember to charge the car last night?”) and I’m undoubtedly going to have some adventures that wouldn’t occur with a traditional car (“What do you mean we can’t drive through to grandma’s tonight?”). My plan is to document those experiences in hopes that others will learn from them.

Blogging about this is not my day job, so I’m going to try to keep these posts short and keep each topic focused on one thing. That means they should be brief enough for folks to read over a cup of coffee and then move on. I’ll present both facts and opinions (no ex-analyst can ever resist offering opinions), and I’ll try to identify each clearly. My goal isn’t to present iron-clad arguments or rationales about green energy. Instead, I just want to share our story of how a family converted over from internal combustion to all electric transportation over the next few years.

My first few posts will try to provide some backstory about how we got here, and what the Tesla buying process was like. However, because we are taking delivery of the car tomorrow (!), I’ll probably also have current event posts too. I’ll do my best to label each clearly so folks can keep the narrative straight.

With that, sit back, relax, and learn along with me what it’s like to give up our dinosaur juice addiction and start driving lightning.