Posted on 08/04/2013 9:47:03 AM PDT by ckilmer
I’m in tne bay area and here I see them every day. It’s surprising how many there are considering the price. Good looking car too.
Porsche also invented regenerative breaking at the turn of the century.
Braking
A friend of mine ordered a Tesla about six months ago with, at the time, an expected delivery date of July. I haven’t talked to him in a couple of months so I don’t know it he got it yet. I think he paid $107k for it.
No, he is not a liberal but a hard working, small businessman who is a Conservative Republican.
It's exactly the trim level (Sahara) I wanted, with navigation and satellite radio.
I see several a week here on the west coast and the frequency of seeing them has been increasing.
I saw one on i84 in Connecticut 2 weeks ago.
I don’t know Tesla’s politics, but I for one like the idea of electric cars because I think being grid independent is a good idea. Yes, I know that means you need a way to generate electricity, but that is easier to do than make your own fuel (even though there are survivalists who make their own biodiesel).
I am not against using oil for fuel. I don’t believe man-made global warming is real; and even if it was it would be foolish to enact policies that destroy the economy of the world so we can just keep the temparature from changing a degree. Life on our planet has survived a great deal of climate change and will continue to do so. Nor do I believe in peak oil because even if oil resources ever get depleted the law of supply and demand will result in oil continuing to flow.
An attractive and well-performing electric vehicle for under $30k is a great idea. I wish they also had a one ton or three-quarter ton pickup.
:-)
I am a lifelong entrepreneur with no college education and three successful businesses. In spite of my short comings (and I have many!) I can clearly see that our world is entirely solar powered. If you don’t believe it then imagine our world without the sun. Pretty simple and basic. So we have a clear choice, to create ways to not use any oil which is a finite supply or use the sun which will last as long as the planet has human beings on it. With a $30k solar charging system at my house I can forever charge my Tesla S and supply my home with all the power I will ever need. A total of $120k investment and the coolest car currently on the planet. Every comment here is a head in the sand mentality. Consider all the things we blow money on each year. Including the house you currently live in! Could you get by living in a house that is worth $100k less? And don’t ignore the lower cost of ownership that comes with the Tesla. Forgo a few things here and there and fund your freedom from the Middle East, complicated repairs on internal combustion vehicles, and your local dominating power company. Oh yeah, I am a 30 year car guy. Here is my challenge to you, watch 5 YouTube videos a day for one week about Tesla or Elon Musk and tell me you feel the same. The guy is worth over $5 billion and could just sit back and never put any of his fortune at risk, thankfully for all of us he doesn’t do that! Lastly, most all of these negative comments were eerily familiar to arguments against the modern car when the horse was the preferred method. It’s coming, like it or not.
Elon Musk is a devout Baraqqi.
But I agree with a number of your points in the post.
The reality is that Tesla makes their profit selling phony “electric car credits” to auto makers that don’t have an electric model themselves. This is required by California law.
No matter what Tesla calls luxury market, they don’t come close to being a player.
The Tesla really isn’t close in size to the A8, S-class, or 7-series.
Ya done good.
I oppose federal handouts to corporations and the "stimulus" bill was the same crap. TESLA motors got a truckload.
When someone have $120K to buy a car, I’m sure he/she could care less about price of gas. Cool? Maybe.. Range? 260 miles...
A Tesla HPWC draws 240V single-phase power at 80 amps through a 100-amp circuit breaker, enough juice to refill an empty 85kWh Model S battery and restore its 265 miles of maximum driving range in just over four hours. Put another way, a Model S charges at up to 62 mph through a HPWC, as in 62 miles of driving for every hour on the plug.
Our Coulomb Level 2 charge station draws 30 amps through a 40-amp circuit, plenty for all other EVs on the market. But it takes over a dozen hours to refill an empty Model S. Slow as this sounds, it would do until we got our HPWC installed. Many Edmunds staffers drive less than 50 miles overnight, which the Coulomb can deal with in less than 3 hours.
From Edmunds.com.
They will need to compete better and finally lower their prices to cause more people to buy the cars that use their products! Competition is good and we see over the years what has happened when the oil companies have had almost none...big big price gouging periods..because they can.
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Agree. Tesla is talking about bringing out a 30 k electric car in 2016. Great if they can do that as that would be world beater. but batteries will have to come down in price a lot while maintaining performance. so this is not a sure thing. (that said battery prices have been falling steadily as battery production volumes have increased—which you would expect.)but it is definitely doable.
but if 1 million electric cars are on the road displacing gas demand with electric demand....that will put a serious dent in the demand for oil ....
Six years ago your hypothetical 1 million electrics would be less than half of one percent. Serious dent? Heck that’s barely a ding around here.
“254.4 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States according to a 2007 DOT study”
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Ok yeah you’re right; it will take more than a million cars running on electricity to make a serious dent in the car market. More like 50 million cars. If the Tesla makes a 30k car in 2016, then they might hit 50 million cars in 2030. Just my wag.
The reason that the stock price is so high for Tesla is not because of confidence in the car or the company but because of confidence in Elon Musk who founded Paypal and SpaceX. People generally think that if the electric car can be successful—he’s the kind of guy who can make it happen. the business types love every move he makes and the technical types love the car designs. the tesla cars are currently status symbols in the way apple products were for years.
most all of these negative comments were eerily familiar to arguments against the modern car
I oppose federal handouts to corporations and the “stimulus” bill was the same crap. TESLA motors got a truckload.
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Tesla paid back their federal loan with interest this year.
I will be a buyer for sure! Far better technology and much lower maintenance costs. After all, no oil, spark plugs and the extreme heat generated in the ICE.
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