Take that Tesla! SNL spoofs electric cars in funny new sketch

Tesla is hard at work developing new battery technology for its electric cars, but the solution may have been right under our noses all along. A new sketch from Saturday Night Live imagines a hilarious new Mercedes that’s powered by thousands of AA batteries.

The fake commercial, which was helmed by guest host Julia Louis-Dreyfus, did a pretty good job of selling the fictional Mercedes-Benz AA Class. After all, you never need to wait to recharge or refuel. Instead, you can just pop in a fresh set of batteries, though the car needs an insane 9,648 AAs to run. Even then, it’s only capable of hitting a top speed of 52 miles per hour.

Of course, this ridiculous car comes with plenty of problems. The batteries start to die almost instantly, as shown by the dashboard display. Emptying out all those batteries also takes a while too, even when you use the special “ribbon release auto-dump” feature.

Thankfully, modern electric cars have a much better solution in place with rechargeable batteries. Still, the option to swap in a fresh battery when the old one dies it is a pretty appealing idea. At least in theory.