How more specific does Tesla need to be than to tell me that I can recharge for free at their Superchargers for the life of the car? It was a selling point. I didn’t even know that until the salesperson told me.
Also on the Tesla page:
Sure, they’re outside of town, and yes, they do keep describing them as the kind of thing you’d use on a long trip, but if somebody was selling Toyotas and saying “by the way, you’ll always be able to get a free tank of gas at our approved gas stations,” that’s going to be something people remember.
Are you not understanding that most prospective EV owners are expecting to park at home and plug the car into the wall? If you have a 240V/50A outlet at home (like a stove plugs into), a Tesla would take a full charge in 7~10 hours, depending on battery size (there is a 90KWh battery option that is expected to offer around 300 miles range, except in Wisconsin in February). If you commute to work, where you can plug into a standard outlet, you would get back 30 miles or so over your 8 hour shift.
No one is expecting that Tesla owners would be using the superchargers the way you are accustomed to using a gas station. In fact, not using a supercharging station if at all possible is preferable, because the fast charging shortens battery life, and replacing the batteries are the biggest expense an EV owner faces over time.
It’s about the context. “You don’t have to worry about charging on road trips. Superchargers are on all the major routes and free for life” is different than “You’ll never have to pay one cent for electricity. You can use Superchargers for all your needs.”
It’s possible that some salespeople have miscommunicated the intent. I dunno. But it’s simply a fact that Superchargers are not intended to be used for local charging. Heavy local users have not yet been such a problem that they break the usage model. I expect the Model 3 to be different, and that Tesla will add language to the contract to prevent this type of use.
And in my town, there’s one on the east side, maybe five miles from my home. Not in the heart of the city, but still within the city limits.
Oh, and I read that the “Supercharger option” is about 2 grand, which one owner figured out was approx. 60,000 miles of driving. So he figures he has at least that much coming, and it shouldn’t matter if he’s doing it in increments of 200 miles or 10 miles.
It is simply a fact that the offer is made, in writing, on the Tesla site, without restriction. Tesla may now be spinning it into something less, perhaps not anticipating the demand at some of their stations.
I agree that the Model 3 buyers may not get the same offer.
I think you’ll find that my posts already had caveats to this effect. I am speaking of intent, not legal liability.
The post I responded to initially asked if Tesla had changed their practice of placing chargers outside of town. And the answer is no, because that would be inconsistent with the purpose of the Supercharger stations. Making local charging easier by placing Superchargers more centrally would be opposite to their goals.
Tesla strikes me as an organization that holds itself in high regard. It makes them seem overly sensitive and a bit petty. Scary for a car manufacturer.
When the customer calls out Elon for the claw back, Elon responds basically “I didn’t specifically order it, so we’re good right?” :rolleyes:
The famous NY Times review that caused a controversy.
Tesla’s sassy and partly incorrect rebuttal.
Elon’s only regret about the controversy is that he didn’t continue the petty fight further? Really dude, you said that into a microphone? A newspaper has more public restraint than Tesla?
I’m not interested in possibly being a victim of a megalomaniac and paying $35K for the privilege.
I’ll throw 2 cents in re: range anxiety, which I still think is a big issue for a lot of people. When the iPhone first came out, I scoffed at the notion of a phone that you had to charge every day, and couldn’t even swap the battery. My trusty flip phone lasted a week! And on the off change that I was in a low service area for a few days and wanted peace of mind, I could always throw a spare battery in my bag. The iPhone might be able to do cool things, I said, but if it couldn’t last a week on a single charge, it wasn’t much of a phone. I did eventually get a smartphone and grumbled about having to charge it every day, but I held on for far too long to phones that had replaceable batteries.
Well now I have a Galaxy S6 that lasts maybe 14 hours on a charge and doesn’t have a replaceable battery, and you know what? It’s fine. I’ve adjusted my habits – I have chargers everywhere (bedroom, desk, living room, all cars, etc) and I have an external battery pack I can throw in my bag if I’m worried about it, thing’s got 4 full charges in it. And life has been fine.
Sure, there are people, field researchers or rural doctors or whatever, who could probably still benefit from a flip phone with a 7 day battery life, but the point is that a lot of people like me who insisted that this feature was totally necessary were simply wrong, and we would argue with the smartphone converts until we became them.
I think that’s going on here, too – there are people who have lived with electric cars who say, “You know, it ends up it’s not that bad having to charge it every day.” And sure, there are people who just couldn’t pull it off, due to profession or location. But there’s probably a lot more people who COULD pull it off but will swear up and down that they couldn’t.
I live 6 hours from the nearest Tesla store, and 4.5 from the nearest Supercharger station. I plan on dropping my $1k deposit down anyway.
- It’ll be our second car and primarily used for daily commutes to work.
- It’s a great excuse to wire my garage for 220V.
- I am a huge fan of not having to work on my stuff if I don’t have to, and EVs tend to be pretty mechanically sound, especially compared to ICE.
- It’s a nice looking car!
I haven’t seen anything but “artist conceptions” of what it might look like. No pics from Tesla yet AFAIK.
Rolling back an update is pretty small potatoes compared to Volkswagen suing researchers in order to prevent them from disclosing known security flaws. Tesla isn’t perfect but they’ve been significantly more “hacker friendly” than most.
There’s a huge difference between needlessly punishing a curious customer and trying to keep a research team from publishing a paper that would compromise the security of cars made by multiple manufacturers.
Yup. Bullying into silence a group of academics who dared disclose dangerous design defects in a car is many orders of magnitude worse than punishing some random guy. I wonder which other researchers Volkswagen would have liked to suppress had they the opportunity.
(I should note that like all responsible security researchers, the university team gave amble advance notice to the manufacturers before public disclosure. And like so many other cases, the manufacturer chose lawsuits over fixing their shit.)
One week until the Model 3.
It’s still needlessly petty and I can’t figure out why you’re defending it.
You mean, “one week until they start accepting deposits”, don’t they?
I think he means one week until they reveal it.
It might be worth noting that the 20 minutes at the supercharging kiosk only gets you about 125 miles or so. To get the full 200~300 miles, you will be having a nice hour-long lunch.
It was petty and I’m not defending it.
Whiskey Dickens said he’s not interested in a Model 3 because Musk is a megalomaniac, and cited that event as evidence. Maybe Musk is a megalomaniac; I dunno. But if you’re going to pick out Tesla in particular, you should have something that’s unique to them and not basically par for the course.
We’re talking about an industry that needed a special law to prevent them from voiding your warranty if you installed an aftermarket air filter.
There are many good reasons to not want a Tesla vehicle. There are even some good reasons, depending on what you deem important, to not want to support them as a company. One event of picking on a guy is not one of them, especially since Tesla is pretty hacker-friendly in other areas, such as offering a bug bounty program.
Yep. According to rumors, though, they are showing a driveable model, and giving test drives to the attendees. So hopefully it’s representative of the real thing.
I don’t quite yet this. There’s nothing easy or convenient about the time spent at gas stations. They’re smelly and disgusting to start with. There’s a lot of fiddly nonsense with the nozzle and payment system. And I have to stand there the whole time, making sure it doesn’t overflow or shut off.
And while I’m usually pretty certain about my gas station experience, it’s by no means absolutely certain. There are lines. Sometimes the card readers don’t work, or they charge extra for credit cards. Sometimes the pumps are out of order or (even worse) they go reeeeeeeeallllly sloooooowwwwly. There are all kinds of annoying issues here.
With a charging station, I can plug in and walk away with no risk. Or get inside the warm car instead of outside in the cold. My phone tells me if anything is going wrong with the charging. And of course 95% of the time, I just charge at home in my garage, and never have to visit a station of any kind.
It’s a fair point–20 min was probably a tad optimistic, but then eschereal made the point that 5 mins for gas was also optimistic. A 40 min charge and 10 min refuel is probably more realistic but doesn’t change the overall picture.
The Model 3 will probably have a smaller battery than the S (being a smaller car), and hopefully they’ll have made improvements, so it may be that it charges more quickly. The highest power Superchargers put out 135 kW, and it’s possible the Model 3 will hit 250 W-h/mi, which means they could charge at up to 540 miles/h (or 180 mi in 20 min).
Probably more than that, really. But that doesn’t mean it’s a loss in practice, if the Superchargers are located in convenient locations.
Personally, the only routes I drive where I’d need a Supercharger are down I-5 to LA and up Hwy 50 and I-80 into the mountains. In all cases, there are Superchargers located in exactly the spots I’d want for a ~200 mi range car. No deviation required at all.
Again, not for everyone. I’m only saying that people should look at things beyond their initial gut reaction. I also think steronz made a great point in the comparison with smartphones in that a feature that lots of people said they couldn’t live without turned out to be not a big deal, and the loss was vastly outweighed by the other benefits.