The funnest car I ever drove was the original Tesla Roadster.

It was 2011, back when Elon Musk's EV company was courting press instead of denigrating us, and they offered me a test drive. I took the car up I-280 — a beautiful, mostly deserted highway with perfectly banked curves that seem to have been designed for Silicon Valley types to test out their speedmobiles — and was blown away by its responsive acceleration and the ease with which it handled at 120 miles per hour. Er, did I say 120? I meant 70. Yeah.

I rode fast in a few other sports cars-an '80s Nissan Z and Fiat Spider, and a '90s Porsche 911-but the Roadster's essential electricness-no gears!-made for a driving experience that was at once familiar yet entirely unique: a very overpowered and aerodynamic golf cart. Don't care much for the iPad-like controller on the dash or the door handles or any of the other bells and whistles. Just loved the way it drove.

Not being an auto reporter like Kirsten, I don't get to drive new cars too often. So it's been brief experience behind the wheel of a Roadster, another couple of Teslas owned by friends, and other than that, nothing further in the EV department; my ride has always been a gas guzzler.

So I was over the moon with excitement when GM offered to let me spend a full week living with an EV, the new Chevy Equinox, ahead of my onstage interview with CEO Mary Barra at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 29.

They dropped it at my house in San Francisco on Monday. It's quite beautiful, as you can see in the photo above.

The first thing I thought was: How do you even plug it in? I kinda think that's been one of the biggest mental barriers that would have stopped me ever going electric, and I am still unsure what the answer is. I believe you need some sort of home adapter, and then you need to upgrade the voltage to 220V so it can charge a bit more overnight. That sounds like an expensive call to an electrician for my money.

I could get enough charge at one of the Shell charging stations outside the mall to get to the gym every morning, since I was driving the Equinox for only a week.

It had about 300 miles of range when it was delivered, so there was no need to worry about that right away.

My son was out of school on Monday so I took him down the block for a burrito. Like most modern cars, the Equinox unlocks automatically when you approach it with the key. Unlike most other cars I've driven, though, it actually starts without your having to press any buttons or do anything — you just sit in the seat and it's on.

In doing so, GM embraced the notion of a new-age automobile-an automobile as a "computer on wheels"-placing nearly all controls on a vast touchscreen mounted to the dashboard.

It was kind of funny hooking my phone up to Bluetooth until I noticed the "on" button on the upper edge of the touch screenthe screen lights up for some basic controls, but you have to touch that button to get full functionality. The car automatically turns on when you get in, but not the touchscreen? Weird design choice.

By and large, it was a pretty painless and entertaining control system to operate. I loved built-in Google Maps, considerably more useful and intuitive than the mapping system that's built into my Toyota. I couldn't connect Apple's CarPlay system wirelessly to use, say, Apple Maps. That's apparently by design. It's Google or the highway, friends.

Other oddities: There is no headlight button, so I had to go through the screen to shut the headlights when I parked the car. (The default headlight setting is "auto," so they would have flipped off eventually, but I'm old-school and have been mentally trained to turn the lights off so I don't run the battery down.) And, when you shut the car off, you have to press another control on the screen. It's easy enough to get used to-once, that is-but if you tap the brake with your foot by accident as you get out of the car, it turns back on and you have to shut it down from the screen again.
On the plus side, there's this exceedingly cool anti-crash system that vibrates the driver's seat on the side that corresponds with where nearby objects are. The vibrations get louder as you close in. Sounds like a pain, but I found it intuitive and almost like a natural ability; almost in the way that sometimes a hardwired part of your human brain senses people crossing your path while walking in a city. Less obnoxious than the triple beeps on my Toyota every time I am about to knock into something.

As far as the driving is concerned, this thing's got great power. That hill just outside my house steep enough to require a "Sport" mode on a gas-powered car to lose the burn of a long stoplight can be rocketed up easily. Acceleration on the freeway was instantaneous and reminded me, once again, of that Tesla: there's just something about how an EV revs without ever changing gears that feels responsive and smooth. The suspension was a bit tighter than I like, the steering a bit looser, but that's really just personal taste. (And no, I did not drive this car anywhere close to 120 mph, but it felt like I could have!)

Then came Tuesday morning. Charging time.

And then it wasn't as easy as I thought, as the port is on upper left corner of the front fender above the wheel and it works through scanning a QR code that I can download Shell app, connect it to my Apple Pay account, plus plugging it into that socket. Then, I was waiting for the confirmation-it would chirp sweet little when it started charging, and the blue light on dash turns green.

Nothing like an easy gas station where you drive in, fill 'er up, and pay. The value was much better, though-it cost $0, all week. I estimate that if those rates held, I'd save about $1,500 per year on gasoline. (We don't go around much, living in a compact city with generally good public transit.)

The schedule worked well until Friday morning. All the charging stations closer to the gym were occupied, so I moved down a bit into the parking lot of the mall, pulled up to an empty one, scanned the QR code, and …. NOTHING. Instead of Shell being able to find my charger, it simply kept directing me to the other stations, listed them as "unoccupied" even though the stalls were full, and refused to let me charge at the nearest stall to my car.

I dialed up support-a call no one wants to make at 5:30 AM in a mall parking lot-and they couldn't even figure out how to do it themselves. However, I was instructed that if I set up the account, they might be able to charge it for me from here. (No thanks. I needed to go to the gym, get in and get started with my day. )I finally found a charging station that was both empty and also actually listed on the app for 7 minutes of walking outside the entrance of the gym.

This isn't a criticism of GM. However, for such a key function — particularly with something as scary as charging new to an owner — to be reliant on partners is a dicey move and seems to underscore the reason Tesla had to build its own Supercharger network: a pricey necessity. Maybe it's lucky that the Equinox does offer an adapter so that you can use Tesla's network.

Tesla has always been an EV company, never had a fallback plan to fall back on. It needed to make the EV experience better than any gas car in order to stay alive. GM embraces the future with EVs, and self-driving systems, and revolutionary software. Still it builds millions of gas cars each year, and must play both sides of the market.

One final side note, which will sound weird to auto enthusiasts or people who review cars for a living but which I think may be more typical of the average car buyer's experience: I don't really want to spend much time learning how to use a car.

The point of a car is to get where you need to go quickly and efficiently, preferably with some fun on the way. I think they have gone a bit too far in making cars complicated as the industry aggressively embraces what others pioneered as the "computer on wheels" concept epitomized by Tesla. Do we really need new ways to shift from park to drive? And new control schemes for every brand of car we drive? Well, maybe I'm showing some "old man yells at cloud" mentality, but sometimes I just want to drive down the coast with the wind blowing through my hair, feeling the freedom of the road.

The Equinox did make me feel that GM is a credible player in the market and worth considering should I choose to take the plunge. But it did work to convince me I'm still not ready for an EV.