Tesla Motors is expanding to New York City — not with a flashy showroom in Manhattan, but with a brick-and-mortar sales and service center in Brooklyn.
The new Tesla location opening Friday in Red Hook is not the kind of place where you can leave with the keys to your new Model S in hand, but it’s a big move for Tesla and makes its electric cars more accessible to the biggest city in the country.
If you’re interested in learning more about Tesla cars, the Red Hook store is the perfect place to start. The glass double doors on 160 Van Brunt St. open right into a showroom with two Model S cars and an undercarriage on display — not something that’s featured in most car stores.
But it’s a necessary component of a Tesla sales center, where people can come if they’re curious about what exactly makes a Tesla car a Tesla car. You can take a look at the battery that makes up the entire base of the car and see the two motors that power the all-wheel-drive models.
Not only that, but you can test drive a Model S right out of the store. Nothing tells you more about a car than taking it for a spin, and experiencing thatautopilot feature for yourself is more informative than reading about it online.
Build your own Tesla
While you can’t purchase and drive off in a Tesla at the new Brooklyn store, you can fully customize and order your own. Potential customers can select paint jobs, interiors and more on touchscreen displays and see how much it will cost. From there, you can send your order off to California and expect a Tesla to show up at your doorstep in six to eight weeks. Alternatively, you can email the build to yourself to think about it a little longer.
Why Tesla picked Brooklyn
New York City is a strong market for Tesla — especially Brooklyn — and Brooklyn is the easiest place to find 25,000 square feet of space.
Brooklyn is also a more family-oriented borough. With Tesla’s safety ratings being among the highest of any car ever made, the cars are a very attractive option for young families looking for safe transportation. The Red Hook location in particular has seen a lot of construction and revamping recently, which points to that area becoming a more popular destination for young families in the near future.
By being right next to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, it also isn’t too inconvenient for people who live in Manhattan to make the trip down.
And let’s not ignore the comparable absence of traffic in Red Hook, which will allow you to test out a Model S without getting caught trying to merge through three lanes of midday congestion.
