Harrying works, it seems. Our constant enquiring, bleeting, and ‘please, please, please’s have finally worn out the guys at Dubai’s Green Car Rental. Having sworn scouts honour that we’ll behave ourselves, the keys to the new Tesla Roadster are dangled before our noses, and it’s not long before we’re hurrying across the car park, two-days of green motoring ahead.

We squeeze our ungainly frames into the Tesla’s miniscule seat and twist the ignition key. There are a few beeps and flashing lights on the dashboard but otherwise no indication that this thing is ready to burn rubber. Selecting drive, we edge silently onto the highways of Dubai and already we’ve come to the conclusion that there’s nothing quite like this.

With an available range of 250km at our disposal, we have Green Car Rental’s words ringing in our ears – the faster you drive it, the lower the range. Screw that! We need to see if this thing can cut it with the pollutant-spewing supercars around here.

Within minutes there’s a huge GMC truck filling the rearview mirror and we decide to give it a good rinsing. Foot flat on the (not so) loud pedal, the Tesla fires for the horizon in a surreal whoosh and the speed with which the gas-guzzler disappears from view is truly incredible.

Time and time again we slow down just to experience the brutal acceleration of this thing. There’s a significant amount of wind noise thanks to the rudimentary canvas roof and the tyres make a racket, too. But other than that, the only thing we can hear is a distant turbine-like whirr that increases in pitch the faster we go. It’s like piloting a miniature space ship. And yes, we absolutely love it.

The quality of finish inside the Roadster is vastly superior to any Lotus we’ve so far experienced. But there’s no disguising its origins, and we don’t have a problem with that. But unlike the Lotus driving experience, there’s no disguising the weight of that battery pack behind the seats either.

Hit a corner at speed and there’s an abundance of nasty understeer while the rear struggles to make up its mind what it wants to do. We don’t fiddle with the traction control, as this is the only Tesla in the UAE right now and we want to keep on Green Car Rental’s good side. But perhaps there are some lairy oversteer antics waiting to be discovered for anyone with a wide enough road. We’d like to think so.

Over the two days with the Tesla, despite an arduous and time-consuming recharging experience (our fault because we didn’t have the right set-up), the novelty of silent, emission-free performance shows no sign of waning. Seriously, the only cars we’ve experienced with this kind of acceleration have had either 12 or 16 cylinders.It’s positively slingshot, made all the more weird because the sounds we normally associate with this kind of speed are conspicuous only by their complete absence.

We’re hooked, converted and we don’t care who knows it. And while warbling V8s, screaming V12s and turbochargers will always excite us, we’re overjoyed that there’s an alternative out there that doesn’t cost the earth. >>>