Michael Thompson was Canberra's first Tesla battery electric vehicle owner

Because what appeared to be a conventional car with four doors and a boot certainly wasn't.

For starters, it had no engine cylinders and two motors, not one.

But boxes had to be ticked and as is the case with all branches of bureaucracy, forms completed.

So curiously, to mollify the authorities, his battery-electric Model S was registered as having just one cylinder.

And when he ordered his personalised ACT number plate Tesla, the person behind the counter asked: "What's that?"

Now it's a question never asked because the US brand is the hottest seller in ACT.

More than 1000 have been delivered to Canberra customers since the start of the year alone, and the Tesla delivery centre at Hume is the busiest in the territory.

The company only sells two models and so far this year they have alternated as the territory's top-sellers, accelerating quickly past the ACT's traditional "big two" - Toyota and Mazda - as the ACT has become, per capita, the country's largest electric vehicle market.

And given Tesla doesn't spend a cent on advertising nor invests in any dealerships and only employs a handful of people, there is much gnashing of teeth at this EV upstart emanating from Canberra's long-established "car sales precinct" on Melrose Drive, Phillip.

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In 2010 when Mr Thompson ordered his car online, sight unseen, he simply ticked the small website box marked "Max out my car" and chose an unusual colour: pearlescent white.

When the car arrived in Australia just over four years ago, it cost him $187,500.

At that time, Teslas were built in just one factory at Fremont, California. Ironically, that same factory had been sold by Toyota because the Japanese giant couldn't turn a profit from building Corollas there.

"Most of the people in Australia who had tracked the whole Tesla start-up in the US and ordered cars were in IT, as I was," Mr Thompson said.

"It was a leap of faith to spend that much money online, on a brand and an electric car which was so unknown to so many people at that time."

A successful high-level rally driver and car enthusiast, Mr Thompson admitted he had his choice of any number of high-performance alternatives at that price.

"But when it finally arrived, it was so far ahead of anything else on the road. It was amazing," he said.

The latest "intention to buy" data on vehicles issued by analyst Roy Morgan shows 548,000 Australians plan on buying an electric vehicle in the next four years - an increase of 1230 per cent compared with four years ago.

The same research revealed how much Tesla had been the major market driver. Five years ago, only 37,000 Australians intended to purchase a Tesla in the next four years, and this has now increased by almost 900 per cent to 369,000 today.

"It's extraordinary how many you see on the road around Canberra now. We drove from Canberra down to the South Coast at Easter time and counted 30 or 40 Teslas coming back," he said.

Mostly out of curiousity, he recently placed an online reservation for the next and arguably most radical of Tesla models, the weird, shovel-nosed Cybertruck.

"It's worth $150 just to see if it [the Cybertruck] even makes it to the Australian market," he said.