He pulled a 1,300-pound, 400-volt battery out of a Tesla that had been underwater.

And then, with no real clue of what he was doing, he opened it and tried to fix it.

"It was terrifying," Benoit says now.

It was also the beginning of what has become one of the more interesting narratives in these early days of the modern era of the electric car, one that asks and answers a lot of questions and has turned the 36-year-old Benoit — a father of three who works in IT in Boston — into one of its early superstars.

The Tesla that started it all, a Model S that Benoit refers to as Delores, was purchased from a salvage yard after it had been caught in a flood in New Jersey. Benoit had a friend who owned a Model S, and the moment he pulled it into Benoit's driveway to take him for a ride, Benoit was obsessed. The way it was whisper quiet. The impossible acceleration from zero to I-feel-like-I'm-on-a-roller-coaster-and-about-to-throw-up in an instant. The way he could feel all of the work that went into creating the vehicle, a history of progress that combined to create this feeling of the future.