“Course, we may wake up to find some company having bought Tesla on the cheap, and market them in a different way.”
The company may come on the cheap, but the product makes no financial sense. It appears to be over designed and expensive to manufacture. And, beyond that, the very concept just isn’t ready for prime time. It’s an idea being driven by politics instead of economics. In the end, economics will always win. (I think that it’s the economics of the country that put Trump in the White House. Liberalism, like electric cars, just doesn’t work well in the real world.)
European competition is already in the showrooms at Jaguar and AUDI... plus dozens of others in the next year+... and ALL of them will be newer better designs than any current Tesla.
——the very concept just isn’t ready for prime time——
Rather than scale down a BMW 7 series, success will come from scalng up a golf cart. I think that process is well under way at present
in Florida retirement communities
On financial sense, I totally agree. Once you get somewhere in the range of 30-percent of all cars being electrical...I think the demand on the grid (particularly in Europe) will reach a level where upgrades are required, and you wake up to a monthly electrical bill of 280 Euro (340 US dollars roughly) a month (currently around 85 Euro (105 US dollars), with the once or twice a week car charge taking a fair amount of the monthly increase. Note, because most heat with natural gas, and there is usually no AC usage...the bill is lower than an American might pay.
But for a practical guy, there’s two big negatives here. For a charge period, generally...you are talking about three hours. It means continually planning and executing the charge with a time schedule....something that most people have a problem with. Note, to get the cheaper electrical rate....you’d probably have to charge at late hours (figure midnight to 6 AM). The second negative is the battery strength, and how extreme summer heat or extreme winter cold...might affect your mileage in the end.
Locally, I live in an urban region of Germany...by the end of 2019, our city will have 55 city buses replaced with battery buses (not hybrid or such). You can take pretty much every single route and figure that they will get about five hours of use before a charge is required. So far, no one talks much about the summer heat/winter cold affect on the battery drain, and no one talks about full loads versus half-loads on the buses. The money is spent and one just senses that this is pretty doomed to fail.