Tesla Tries An Engineering Solution To An Emotional Problem

I have spent about 10 hours in a Tesla-S, including some track time and not found anything about it, wanting. But, then I'm a simple type, if a car goes _ stops _ and defrosts the windows, I'm good to go. I don't need all the fooferaw that some of the spoiled on this site think they need. Automatic adjusting mirrors and seats, heated and air conditioned seats, defrosting mirrors, jeezus, does it ever end with this inane material nonsense. And then the spoiled brats complain about the MSRP. Manufacturers just can't win. I'm grateful to the first adopters for paying the price Tesla needs to keep this car in production. We 'all' need for it to succeed. Its derivatives are going to be important to the future of viable personal transportation, as are BMW's 'I' cars. And that future, is probably coming hell bent at our heels.

@3Deuce27 +10 If Rockefeller hadn't needed to be rid of an undesired byproduct of his lamp oil (gasoline), we'd probably have EV's with a 500-mile range that could be recharged in 5 minutes. Now the descendants of Rockefeller's empire have some long overdue competition, and they don't like it - fossil fuels are now being advertised and promoted like never before, because they know that the writing is on the wall. Musk has powerful entrenched economic and political forces aligned against his dream; I can understand his defensive attitude. I just wish I could afford to join his quest - maybe he'll read this and give me a discount on the cheaper upcoming version... :-)

@shaker There's a lot of complaining about price with no acceptance of the fact that car manufacturing benefits from economies of scale and Tesla is an independent car company. They're not banking massively inflated profits. Musk has already done something near-impossible in this business and it's only going to get better over time. So many others have failed to get even near this far. At least they're doing the sensible thing and not pulling a Bugatti and losing $6 million dollars per car sold.

@Kaosaur The way economies of scale works is that when you sell more cars, your costs would go down and you would pass that on to your customers, Musk and Tesla have made no such indication this will ever happen and the Tesla salesman even went so far as to tell me Tesla will never lower the price of the Model S. The average Model S sold is about $95,000 nicely loaded and as far as I am concerned it is not a $95,000 car, it is barely a $75,000 car. At $95,000 or even $75,000, saving $2,000 or so on fuel costs is nominal, especially when you lose content, features and convenience. In reality you could buy a fully loaded Accord Hybrid, get great gas mileage, tons of features and save yourself almost $50,000 if saving money is really your thing.

@Kaosaur A fully loaded Accord Hybrid won't out-drag a Corvette.

@Kaosaur > The average Model S sold is about $95,000 nicely loaded and as far as I am concerned it is not a $95,000 car, it is barely a $75,000 car. Funny someone called "VenomV12" makes this sort of argument.

@Kaosaur >> The way economies of scale works is that when you sell more cars, your costs would go down and you would pass that on to your customers, Musk and Tesla have made no such indication this will ever happen ... The Model X (CUV) is due out this year. And a smaller, less expensive sedan -- no designation yet, but based on the Model S -- is in the pipeline. Speculated price would be around $40,000. There's a tongue-in-cheek article circulating the internet distinguishing Tesla buyers from Leaf buyers. All I can remember is that Leaf drivers are more likely to hug trees while Tesla drivers are more likely to go to strip clubs. Tesla is less about being green, saving money, or saving the whales. It's more about a luxury car that's different, distinctive, and happens to be clean.

Humans should always try to avoid hubris, for the reason that it my result in retaliation by "Instant Karma" (from a previous article).

@shaker > Humans should always try to avoid hubris, They should also try to avoid conflating hubris with showmanship. Or at least getting the basic facts right, eg: > The Maginot line will never be breached. It wasn't.