why Tesla owners love their car

$14 billion in less than a week.

That’s the backlog of pre-orders that Tesla Motors tallied up in the days after announcing its latest car, the Tesla Model 3.

The vehicle is the electric car maker’s third major model and its most affordable to date. With a base price of $35,000 it is comparable if not less than what many mid-sized sedans sell for today.

None, of course, boast the unique conveniences or distinct powertrain that the Tesla does, which is why the car is expected to have a transformative impact on the industry. If early results are any indication, Tesla is likely to exceed the predictions of many car experts.

In the first seven days after the Model 3 was unveiled in April 2016, Tesla received orders for an astounding 325,000 cars. (That’s more cars than Ferrari has sold in its 77-year history.) Half of the orders for the new Model 3 poured in in the first 24 hours after the car was announced.

The $14 billion backlog that the orders produced? That’s bigger than the annual revenues of Marriott, Visa or Facebook.

While some car companies obsess over the time it takes for their vehicles to zoom from 0 to 60, Tesla’s Model 3 went from 0 to Fortune 250 in less than a week. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the Model 3’s performance, rest assured its equally fast: It zooms from 0-60 in less than 6 seconds.

“[The Tesla Model 3] hits the target of Style, Performance, Price and ‘Feel good about myself,’” says The Tech Caucus, an influential Silicon Valley Newsletter produced by book author Ben Parr. “There is not another car that has three of these, let alone all four!”

All that is indeed true. Unquestionably, the Tesla is the best electric car on the planet. But would you be surprised if I told you that wasn’t what makes the car special? To its owners and inventors, the Tesla is remarkable not because it is electric, but because it is digital.

While that may not sound like a big distinction, it’s literally the difference between 20th-century ingenuity and 21st-century innovation. Here’s why.

Virtually everything in the car that can be measured has an active sensor on it connected to the car’s digital network. What does that mean? Your Tesla can park itself neatly into your garage. It also means that you remotely check the cabin temperature on a hot day and tell the vehicle to power up the AC so it will be at a desired temperature when you hop in for a ride.

The car has dozens of other cool features that leverage digital innovation. But there’s one feature that sets it apart from virtually any other vehicle on the road. Aside from a handful of parts that need routine replacement—think tires and wiper blades—the bulk of the vehicle’s components and functions were designed to be upgraded, not by mechanics wielding wrenches, but by software engineers working in Tesla’s Silicon Valley research and development labs.

In other words, the Tesla is more like your iPhone than it is like your other car.

Like an iPhone, the Tesla S gets better every time the company releases a new software update over the Internet. These updates make the car safer, more reliable, and even more pleasurable.

Take driving in San Francisco, which is something my friend Robert Bigler, an engineer and entrepreneur who invented the SmartMotor and Hoverboard, does quite frequently. Like a lot of successful people who work in Silicon Valley, Robert was drawn to the Tesla Model S the moment that it was introduced. He bought one not long after it became available.

The more he drove the car, the more Robert became a fan. But one thing bugged him about the vehicle, especially when he drove it around the streets of San Francisco, where street grades can exceed 30 percent. When he drove his car over the famed hills of the city, he noticed it would roll back unnervingly when he stopped uphill at intersections for stop signs and street lights.

“It reminded me of driving an old manual transmission VW Beetle. Without a mechanical clutch, the Tesla wants to roll back on steep hills,” Robert told me. Concerned about his safety, not to mention that of fellow Tesla drivers, he turned to Tesla for more information and discovered that other Tesla drivers had already alerted Tesla of the problem.

A few days later, a message appeared on the touchscreen console when he started his car. A fix, the message informed him, was automatically downloaded to Robert’s car (and every other Tesla) overnight while it charged in his garage.

Sure enough, when he next found himself stopped on an upward slope in San Francisco, the problem was gone. Tesla engineers had written some code that programmed the car to automatically engage the safety brake whenever it was stopped on a hill. When the vehicle begins to move forward now, the brake stays engaged for a few seconds until the motor can put sufficient torque on the wheels to give it the forward momentum it needs to prevent the vehicle from rolling backwards.

In addition to convenience, software upgrades have also improved safety. When one battery caught fire after being pierced by a piece of road debris, Tesla engineers made several changes. One reset the default height setting on the vehicle and raised it by a few inches with a simple software patch delivered wirelessly. No recall was required, and no fires have been reported since.

A recent software upgrade gave owners Blind Spot Warning and Automatic Emergency Braking. It also provided guidance for locating charging stations on road trips and improved the range monitoring while providing owners more options for safeguarding their cars, including speed restrictions when handing them over to parking valets.

With its front-mounted camera, rear-mounted radar, and a phalanx of ultrasonic sensors, the car can start, stop, steer, drive, navigate, park, and avoid obstacles. With the AutoPilot software downloaded to the car recently, the Tesla can also operate like one of Google’s much ballyhooed semi-autonomous driverless cars, leading Steven Colbert, host of The Late Show, to exclaim, “Tesla owners woke up to find that their cars could drive themselves.” If and when the law allows for driverless cars, Tesla will be ready, much to the delight of its owners, who realize that the car they purchased is unlike any other.

“With my Tesla, I feel like I get a new car every time there’s an upgrade. There are new features and new capabilities, and as a result the car just gets better and better,” says Bigler.

A car that improves with age? That hasn’t happened since mechanical cars were invented more than 100 years ago. But in the new world of digital transportation, this will become commonplace.

And this is happening not just in transportation but virtually every industry, as I write in my latest book “The Digital Revolution: How Connected Digital Innovations Are Transforming Your Industry, Company and Career.”

-- Inder Sidhu