I firmly disagree with this.
When I want to have fun driving, I have just the car for that, A Ford Focus ST, turbo-charged, with a six-speed manual. It puts a smile on my face any time I sit in it. I don’t plan on selling this car probably ever.
But all too often driving is drudgery, in which case I’d rather not be in the Focus ST, and a car with autopilot sounds like a dream come true.
A lottery win. I suspect this will be a pricey car to own, no longer to buy.
I’m a car enthusiast. To me a car is not simply an appliance for getting from A to B. I have to enjoy the experience, even if it’s the mundane working week commute or running errands on the weekend.
Teslas look like an electronic appliance to me - an iPhone on wheels. All that drive assist, park assist, brake assist bullshit will just annoy the crap out of me if it can’t be defeated and I bet it can’t. But worse than that is the range anxiety and the fact that it’s all so highly dependent on the “right” driving habits. And by right, they mean that they expect owners to obey speed limit and drive under ideal traffic & weather conditions.
If you look on the Tesla web site for the Model S, you’ll see that simply going from 65mph to 70mph, reduces range by 10%. Interestingly, they do not permit you to exceed that speed on the web site, despite the fact that the car is rated up to 155mph. I don’t think that kind of dramatic range reduction is true of an ICE vehicle, but even if it is, I can fill the fuel tank of my sport sedan in under 10 minutes and then merrily be back to doing my usual 75-85mph (when road conditions permit). And I can re-fill and repeat all day long until I reach my destination. Something I simply cannot do in an electric car. Not in the foreseeable future.
So while I’m pretty certain electric cars are the future of transportation, it’s not in my future until the infrastructure exists to support it and the technology allows a full recharge in a sub 10 minute stop.
I’m with you. the vast majority of my driving is by “necessity,” e.g. driving to and from work. There’s nothing fun about sitting in heavy traffic.
Honesty, I wouldn’t mind it if we had something like what was shown in Demolition Man, but in reverse. In the film, the police officers used autopilot until they got into the city, at which point they’d switch to driver control. I’d like to see the reverse; let my car handle the city traffic (would require V2V communication) and let me take over when the road opens up.
That’s just bizarre to me. Autopilot concentrates the fun of driving. The situations where autopilot fails are the same ones where I want to drive anyway, and where it succeeds I’d rather not be driving. Hwy 1 vs. I-5.
Just about any activity consists of fun bits and drudgery bits and any tool that can separate the two and automate the drudgery is, IMHO, fantastic for enthusiasts. It’s like saying cooking enthusiasts shouldn’t own a food processor; they should always use a knife.
I think I can get used to it. In fact I’m already getting used to it. We’ve seen Tesla’s evolution here–the Roadster had a pretty conventional grille; the Model S had a smooth nosecone that kinda looked like a grille; the Model X has a thin strip that hints at where a grille would have been. Maybe the Model 3 would also look better with such a strip, but I dunno. Maybe it’s just time to rip off that design band-aid.
Hold on a second, you are seriously proposing a jury-rig hybrid? 
The year is young, but that’s the most ridiculous proposal I’ve so far this 2016.
The X has a 5000lb towing capacity. You could pull a diesel genset with a pretty big tank of fuel.
What does this even mean? There’s no vehicle on Earth that’s versatile enough to be a sole vehicle. Some requirements are contradictory, like having a vehicle small enough to navigate tight city streets easily but large enough to carry 7 people and a month’s worth of luggage.
Of course some people have particular needs that they weight highly. If all your driving is long road trips, then an EV is not right for you. But that doesn’t imply that EVs aren’t general-purpose vehicles any more than the existence of people that tow their boat every weekend proves that sedans can’t be general-purpose vehicles.
My (gas) sedan is perfectly adequate as a sole vehicle. And yet it doesn’t serve all of my needs–sometimes I need to move large objects or lots of people. I find alternatives in those cases.
I’d rather see some kind of advanced generator concept, such as a free-piston linear generator or microturbine. With such a large battery as a buffer, your generator can be small; perhaps 15-20 kW. It also has no need for high start/stop efficiency since it can have a cycle time of tens of minutes. Under these conditions, you could have much greater efficiency than a normal piston engine.
First off, I’d have to live in a place where I could actually plug it in (not my current 2nd floor apartment). Secondly, I’d have to live in an area where it makes sense environmentally.
Right now, in a lot of the country, an electric car is essentially a coal powered car, and it’s coal powered in a very inefficient manner due to the losses in the transmission lines.
Currently, hybrids may actually be better environmentally than pure electrics in a lot of the country.
For those that have put in a deposit - when did you get your email confirmation telling you your number?
I put my deposit down at 10:20 am yesterday still haven’t gotten email confirmation, but my credit card was charged almost immediately, and I can see my reservation at www.mytesla.com (I created an account with the same email address). I didn’t see that until today, so it was probably around 24 hrs.
The reservation numbers aren’t sequential, so there’s no way to tell where you are in the queue.
With the model X reservations, there was a reservation number and a queue number so you really could tell. I can’t quite figure how to link my account to the reservation but I figure it will sort itself out in a few days. I too haven’t gotten the email confirmation but my card was charged.
I finally got the email.
I don’t think there’s any explicit need to connect the account to the reservation. The email addresses just have to match. I created an account at mytesla.com beforehand and used the same address for the reservation. However, I didn’t sign in or anything while getting the reservation. The mytesla.com page initially showed Model S/X pages and after a while the Model 3 stuff popped up.
If the reservation numbers are encoded and not completely scrambled, maybe someone will reverse engineer the encoding scheme to figure out queue number, etc. They’ve said that different locations will have separate queues, and furthermore that previous owners will have priority, so I assume the reservation number somehow contains all of that information.
A V6/V8 with supercharger
And a true manual transmission, no sludgebox, CVT, DSG, or flappy paddle garbage…
I reserved at 10:25 PM Central last night and just now received my confirmation e-mail. I haven’t looked at My Tesla yet and probably won’t until I get the notice to place my order.
They’re up to 232k orders, so you weren’t far off.
Say what you want about Musk having a personality cult or whatever, but there’s something to be said about being able to marshal this level of enthusiasm into real money. Even Apple never generated this degree of interest in a product that was years away.
I wonder how well they’re going to be able to ramp up production to fill all of those orders. (Although I expect a good percentage of those who put down deposits will tire of the wait and cancel their orders eventually.)
umm nothing. They’ve gone out of their way to shake rattle and roll their way into this century. And their owners go out of their way to gut the exhaust so everybody else on the planet is aware of it too.