Jay Leno explains why he bought Tesla for $1 trillion

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Jay Leno explains why he bought Tesla for $1 trillion

After Jay Leno started learning to diversify his skillset, this is Yahoo Finance, like a smart investor. Comedian, talk and game show host the all-new You Bet Your Life as well as car collector and host of his own car show, Jay Leno's Garage, fill out his resume.

His adventures in car collecting and wrenching on his own car creations are the envy of auto enthusiasts and fans around the world. His collection includes 180 vehicles and 160 motorcycles, all in a gargantuan car garage museum workshop in Burbank, California.

Onlookers have seen him riding around the streets of Los Angeles in his priceless Lamborghini Miura, a diminutive classic Saab, and even one of his steam-powered contraptions.

The classic-car loving Leno is a big fan of electric vehicles, and his daily driver is a Tesla TSLA Model S Plaid.

It's been great, Leno said in an interview with Yahoo Finance about owning a Tesla. I had a regular Model S P 90 before this -- I had that for seven years -- It never went to the dealer, really. It never broke. It was fine. The latest Tesla of Leno is the fastest and most expensive version of the Model S -- the Plaid. It is the fastest accelerating vehicle on the planet. He said that he bought it for the performance, and he's saving the planet, too, and that's why he said with a smile.

It is that performance that makes Tesla special in Leno's eyes, and the company's massive leaps in technology that make owning an EV realistic.

Tesla is probably 8 to 10 years ahead in battery technology. If new technology is to succeed, it has to be superior, and until just the last five years electric cars didn't quite have the range. Now they do, he said.

Rivian RIVN received a impressive 300 mile range from the Environmental Protection Agency for its hulking, roughly 6,000 lbs., and rivals like Lucid LCID are touting 500 miles of range for its Air sedan. The newest 4680 batteries from Tesla are nearing production, and it is upping the ante when it comes to efficiency and power density of its own batteries.

Even though he is a long time Model S owner, Leno is no Tesla stan. He knows the tech, capabilities and drawbacks of EVs, but he believes Elon Musk and Tesla have proven their engineering and software prowess. He wasn't so sure in the beginning.

Elon brought his roadster here in 2007. He said to me that we're building infrastructure, we're going to build charging stations all up and down the highway, and that's why it was only one or maybe two prototypes. And I was going, yeah, that'll happen, Leno recalls.

Leno says he was eventually proven wrong, as Musk did build out that infrastructure. Tesla has 30,000 Supercharger Fast-Charging stalls in the world, and it has superchargers in all 50 U.S. states. Leno sees this as a part of the value proposition for Tesla owners, but also as a way to justify a $1 trillion valuation.

They deserve that valuation because they are that much ahead, Leno says. Everybody doing it is kind of copying Tesla, because they used to be nice, but they were slow, and they were, quote, big golf carts, you know, that type of thing. It is hard to believe that was once the case. In fact, Leno broke a quarter mile world record in a Tesla Model S Plaid earlier this year, completing a pass of 9.247, just under the car's quarter-mile time of 9.23 seconds.

The car, which can hit 0 - 60 mph in less than 3 seconds, will dispel any notion of EVs being big golf carts.