Tesla really does do things differently.

On March 31, 2016 my son Robert and I both went to the Natick Mall Tesla store to stand in line and get early reservations for Tesla Model 3s, the roughly $35,000 models that will start shipping in late 2017. I reserved one for my wife; Robert reserved one for himself.

As I admired the roughly 250 people standing in line to pay $1,000 for a car they’ve never even seen, I made up my mind that I should try to get a model S to beat the rush of new Tesla owners. That has turned out to be a prudent decision: roughly 400,000 people have put deposits down on model 3s, so it will be a while before all those orders are filled once it begins production. That won’t happen until at least 2017, but it suggests the production line is going to be very busy at the end of next year.

I had taken two test drives of a Model S previously at the Natick Tesla store, one on October 18, 2013, and another on August 29, 2015. That last appointment took roughly 6 weeks to set up; Tesla test drives are very popular here in Massachusetts. At the last test drive, I’d had both my wife and Robert drive the car, and they both thought it was both fun to drive and would be a good next car. So with family approvals in place, now all that I needed to do was put in an order.

While you probably could order a car in the store, the reality is that any Tesla order actually gets constructed on the web site. I created an account and configured a S70D to my liking. For those not familiar with Tesla nomenclature, the S means Model S (and not an insane or ludicrous mode performance P version), the 70 means a 70 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery, and the D means dual-motor/all-wheel drive. I figured I didn’t need the biggest battery because we have a lot of superchargers here in New England, so I went with the small one, which was advertised to give me about 230 miles of range.

The actual configuration above didn’t take long; I had custom built the same configuration about 50 times before. What changed this time was that I hit the big red capitalized “PLACE ORDER” button:

That action started my more than 2-month quest to becoming a Tesla owner. I’ll talk more about what happened along the way in my next post.