It’s that time of the year again. Year-end lists of «the best X of 2014» are rolling out, soon to be followed by all kinds of predictions for 2015. But rather than just come out with its «2014 car of the year», The Telegraph in the UK decided to think a little bigger and named its «most important car of the past 20 years». The winner? Tesla’s Model S.

Why the honor? Because, in the Telegraph’s words, it’s a car that «moves the game on in a way few cars have ever managed».

Car of the future

In the video above, they break down what makes the Model S special into 7 categories. There are of course the driving range, which is best of class and eliminates range anxiety, how the car handles and performs, the convenient, roomy, and luxurious interior, the network of free-to-use Superchargers, etc. All things that we’ve heard before, but that doesn’t make them any less important.

If the goal is to replace gasoline and diesel vehicles, we need something so compelling that even people who don’t care about fuel costs and don’t care about the environment will want to get one, and that’s exactly what the Model S does.

And it certainly validates Tesla’s strategy of starting at the top of the market and going down over time with progressively cheaper and more ‘mass-market’ EVs over time, as they can ramp up production, gain economies of scale, develop better batteries, etc. Most others tried to begin at the bottom of the market, and while that hasn’t been bad or anything, it hasn’t been quite as game-changing (in fact, a startup like Tesla, without the resources of a big carmaker, probably couldn’t even have gotten off the ground with a strategy like that).

Via Telegraph