Spending Your Way Out Of The February Blues

Buy Your Inner Child An Electric Car!

As Dar Williams once put it in what is still the best song ever written about a hard month:

First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year,
Then we forgot that we’d planted at all,
Then we forgot what plants are altogether,
and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting and
The nights were long and cold and scary,
Can we live through February?

We all do our best to cope with the howling depths of winter, once the optimism of January has passed but the tiny flickering light at the end of the tunnel of March isn’t yet visible. Part of coping can be throwing money, and chocolate and flowers and heart-shaped carbohydrates and Beyonce tickets, at the problem. And now Tesla is making that somewhat easier for us, by allowing us to purchase for our inner child a brand new car!

That sentence works best if you hear it in a The Price Is Right announcer voice.

According to TechCrunch:

The $499 Model S for Kids is now available for pre-order and is scheduled to ship in May.

Like any good Tesla, the Model S for Kids is obviously powered by batteries. The standard model comes with a 140 Wh lithium-ion battery pack and if you want to splurge, you can also pay an extra $50 for a 190 Wh battery pack that promises “50 percent more playtime.”

Your lucky kid — or, let’s be honest, you, all smushed down into the driver’s seat — can vroom around at 3–6 mph. Though the Verge points out that that’s only half as fast as the top speed of Arrow’s newly available $599 “smart go-kart.”

I’m trying to think of what I could spend $500-$600 on that would give me as much life-affirming joy as your average child would get from a tiny Tesla or fancy go-kart, and I’m coming up blank. On the other hand, I’m trying to think of anytime I got a gift that expensive from my parents when I was a kid and I’m coming up blank too. What was the priciest present you got as a child? Did it indeed bring you the most abiding glee?

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