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I know this is subjective and shouldn't matter, but I think the Bolt is ugly.

In fact out of all the non-Tesla EVs the only one I don't find ugly is the Fiat 500e which is only sold in CA (and now Oregon) as a compliance car and its own CEO hates it. It is a nice little EV though.

All of this also ignores the coming autonomous cars which I think are going to be here sooner than people realize (maybe this is the big part 2 of the model 3 reveal). When that happens I'm not confident the existing car companies will be able to compete - they're desperately trying to acquire the necessary tech now, but it's a little late.

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I have to completely disagree with you. I think it's actually a great looking little car. I find it interesting how such an item can bring out great differences in tastes, like ours.

Additionally, I'm sure that aesthetics will actually make a big difference to any potential buyer and so do matter a lot, so I think you are right to voice a subjective opinion on how it looks.

Little cars can get away with a lot. Sloppy lines, blocky stance, squat haunches, fat lights, goofy plastics ... that kind of stuff always looks horrible on larger cars. But small cars get away with it, sometimes even with style, for some reason.

I have to completely disagree with you. I think it's actually a great looking little car.

Me too. I rather like the Fiat 500e better than the Tesla for styling. I'm going to put down the deposit for a Tesla Model 3, though.

do you include hybrid EVs like the Volt and Prius in your "ugly" list?

Personally, I love my Volt. I only use gasoline on rare occasions -- a couple of out-of-state trips per year -- but don't have to make long stops (30 minutes is long for me) at charging stations along the way. And I think it's a pretty cool looking car. But then, I'm over 30, so what do I know about cool?

The Volt isn't too bad. Not great. The Prius is definitely ugly.

The Tesla Model 3 looks better than either, from what I've seen, but doesn't stand out from anything else from similar priced cars from BMW, Audi, Lexus, or Mercedes. It's all very subjective however.

The Prius is ugly, the new Prius, doubly so.

I like the 1st gen volt though. It's sort of chunky-yet-handsome from certain angles, esp rear 3/4.

While we are talking hybrids, I love my ford fusion hybrid. Looks exactly like the gas fusions and has all the same options (well besides wheels and engines). Some owners even take off the hybrid badges on theirs.

There is a little bit of nuance you might have missed here, we are mostly discussing Plugins, and Prius has a plugin. Ford Fusion Energi is the worst thing that can happen to Plugins and Fusion Hybrid is a good car but does not belong in the discussion here.

I've never liked them either. In Forza I had a volt, but only so I could cover it in vulgar graphics.

I think what bothers me is that they don't look like normal cars. Their shape is closer to a toaster than a sports car, they have small little plastic looking wheels, and smiling face headlight and bumper styling.

I absolutely think cars should move away from what they are now toward something more like an appliance, but I won't enjoy it.

But who am I to talk anyway, my current car is terrible.

Yep to both. The Opel Ampera (Euro version of the Volt) looks a bit better imo. I'd rather have a Toyota Auris.

A typical time constant for a supercharger stop is 15 minutes.

You might have one that short from time to time, but typical is 20-30 minutes in my experience.

Interesting, on a trip from the Bay Area to Tahoe, it's about 15 minutes each. I stand corrected :-)

according to https://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger a 30-minute charge will give the vehicle (specifically the model S; they don't have stats up for the 3 yet) 170 miles of range. A 15-minute charge would be a little more than half of that, but not much. Stopping for 15 minutes every ~80 miles would be a moderate inconvenience.

I have this rule for timing out how long trips take. Unless it's just me, for every pee and gas stop add 20-30 minutes. If it is just me then it's about 5-10 minutes. I have no idea why the disparity. But it's consistent. Stops for food are at least 1 hour. If you can stop for food and charge the car at the same time a 200 mile range wouldn't be an issue for most people.

All this leads up to; when you see significant numbers of electric cars on the road you'll see roadside businesses start to cater to them. That model isn't bad, customer parks, plugs in the car and goes in for snax and coffee. 20 minutes later the smart phone dings saying the car is good go. That's different than having stand around a gas station for 20 minutes.

I see so much of this in France... The "aire" stops are super awesome and many have restaurants... If they had super chargers in addition to the gas stations it'd be a lot like what you're describing.

my road trips involve about a 10-12 minute stop every 250-300 miles, and a longer meal stop of about 35-40 minutes if we go over 700 miles for the day. That's with my wife and our six-year-old son.

I've traveled with lots of friends who are the same way, and a few people who make much longer stops like the ones you describe.

Who is more representative of "most people"? I have no idea. But I wouldn't want to stop for 15 minutes every 80 miles, or 30 minutes every 170 miles.

I'm impressed that you can go four hours between stops with a wife and kid in the car.

I think most people will find the stops to be more than they're used to, but not onerous. You'll probably hit 4-5 chargers in a day of driving. If you can time it right, two of those will coincide with meal breaks, so you're looking at 2-3 where you hit the bathroom, grab a snack, and maybe have to wait a bit on the car.

If you make big trips once or twice a year then it can easily be a net win over a gas car. The gas car wins on long trips, but requires ~15 minutes/month at gas stations even when you're just local. In my year of Tesla ownership, I'd say I've lost about two hours total waiting for a charge, and gained about that much not going to gas stations.

> "it can easily be a net win over a gas car"

oh, I agree. I just don't see it as a win over a plug-in hybrid with a gas generator, yet. In ~6 months of ownership of a Volt, I've been to the gas station about 4 times (all on a trip to/from another state) at 5-10 minutes per stop, and have never lost time waiting for a charge.

The supercharger network is a nice step, and combined with electric vehicles with a 200+ mile range, we're a step closer to electric vehicles becoming the norm. But there are still obstacles to be overcome -- still some inconveniences that are better solved by other technologies.

That does sound like a pretty good compromise. I wanted a plug-in hybrid for a long time, but never found one that was good enough for what I wanted, and finally ended up with the Tesla instead. I don't think it's inherent to the technology (although the gas engine takes up some space), but everything on the market was just too small, especially in terms of cargo. Apparently the Volt has a whole 10ft^3 of trunk space? I think it's just because everybody besides Tesla is still aiming for the compact, economical, Prius-like market.

The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV seems like it's finally filling the niche of a bigger plug-in hybrid car. I know a friend with one and he's happy with it.

That's the one I had my eye on for years. It was supposed to be available in the US in 2013, then 2014, then 2015.... Now they're saying August of this year, but we'll see if it's real.

Edit: I just looked up the specs. The PHEV version (at least the UK one) apparently drops the third row seats. I can't figure out the available cargo space. Everything I find says it's 436L, which is about 15ft^3, but there's no way it could possibly be that small. In any case, all I can say is: no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame.

I'm impressed that you can go four hours between stops with a wife and kid in the car.

I think it depends very much what you grew up with. My wife and I both grew up in families when 8-9 hour drives with only a quick stop for lunch as a vacation was the norm from basically when we where born, and neither one of us thought anything about it.

Our daughter on the other hand spent the first several years of her life basically never going anywhere by car (as we didn't have one) and she absolutely hates spending more than an hour at a time in cars.

I was thinking more along the lines of biological needs.

Agree, the Bolt is ugly, its obviously on the cheap end of the market. The Tesla on the other hand seems much more design focussed and premium.

(IMO of course).

The demo'd model 3 screams civic to me. Not that there is anything wrong with the civic, but it doesn't scream 3-series/A4/c-class to me. Also, the interior is completely bland. That all said, I will wait until there is a final product to pass judgment in regards to styling.

What they should've done with the model 3 to make it look good and much more usable/practical is a shooting brake style. But that would kill their aero, and thus kill the range. Which is a shame, as otherwise they wouldn't have a trunk opening too small to fit a guinea pig cage [1] in order to accomodate passengers taller than five feet in the back.

It's kind of shocking how tied up to a specific roofline profile Tesla is, in order to meet range/price expectations. They'll likely never be able to put out an estate car without sacrifising range or making it obscenely expensive.

Also, wtf is up with everyone comparing the model 3 to A4/c-class/3-series? Current best estimates I can find put the model 3 at 5-10 inches shorter than either of those, and with a smaller interior (obvious just from looking at pictures, the model 3 interior roof profile is a lot less "square" than ze Germans, again for aero reasons). I think Mazda 3, but with a smaller trunk, is a better comparison. (Yes, I know the model 3 has a "frunk" to compensate.) I also think Tesla are being deliberately secretive with the external dimensions, to keep people thinking it's bigger than it actually is.

[1] http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--uaROKJL5...

The Bolt has its own aesthetic, less suave, glamorous, beautiful (whatever those means in non subjective settings) than the Model 3 for instance. Yet I cannot help looking at the Model 3 as a shrinked lo-fi luxury Model S which makes me cringe more than the 'ugly' bolt. The aesthetics fit the market better somehow.

To me it looks essentially like a Mazda 3 with shades of the BMW i3. Fairly generic.

Exactly this. Saw a new Mazda 3 4-door in the parking lot on Friday and did a double-take to see if someone had gotten their hands on a Model 3 test car. To me the design is... OK.

The Bolt looks like a $15k econobox deathtrap. The Model 3 looks like a 60k Italian sedan made in CA. But you cringe at that... yeah

The model 3 looks like something which started trying to look like a 60k Italian sedan but was redesigned everytime someone said "you know .. that corner offends me" or "I don't like that edge" until you got something where almost no one can say "I don't like that part", but lack anything special or interesting. All is round, round and .. round.

Why would autonomous cars be here sooner than Google thinks? Their talk is a fairly slow roll out of selective autonomic-like features in specific contexts. They've said probably 15 years before there's full autonomy in cities. And outside of cities it'll still be a desert.

Full autonomy is very challenging. More standardization among the manufacturers is needed, like the recent braking standard they've announced, but also that includes local governments to stop doing crazy things like different sign shapes, colors, fonts, messages, even vertical vs horizontal traffic lights. There's a lot of work to be done by more than just the car manufacturers.

Do you have a source for the 15 years number? I keep seeing people on HN saying 15-30 years, probably based on that widely misrepresented SXSW talk, and that just doesn't match up to the state of the technology or progress on the legal/regulatory front. Robotaxis will be in some California cities around 5 years from now unless some major setback happens. Here's a report that summarizes some of the sentiment I see in the industry [1].

Remember: there are already 100% fully autonomous vehicles roaming real roads in Silicon Valley. 5 years is a very long time to shrink and improve sensors, learn from real-world driving experiences, and beef up the software.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-drivin...

The tech isn't the only problem to solve, or even (weirdly enough) the major problem. We still have to deal with regulatory frameworking, legal frameworking, consistent road signs, improving infrastructure (most California roads are in third-world shape, especially in SoCal), and so forth. The cars could be ready tomorrow, and we'd still need a good 15+ years to make the roads ready for them at scale. It's depressing.

Heck I worry just about the maps! The amount of times Google Maps has told me to drive onto an old road that doesn't exist anymore, or veer 90 degrees to the right over a highway, these autonomous cars are going to get lost a lot.

I'm seeing someone DDoSing autonomous taxis by booking a ton of them to an address with known bad routing...

Autonomous cars with drivers ready to take control because that's their job. Figure 50 years for robo-taxis.

Autonomous cars have to be all or nothing, a human cannot take over a car at speed. Humans taking control is a process that takes seconds. Accidents happen in much less time. IOW, robo-taxis and autonomous cars will happen at the same time. 50 years? Maybe not quite that long, but it's not going to be soon.

Oh, I agree. I was saying that today's "autonomous" vehicles have professional testers ready to take over. That certainly doesn't work in the general case. You can only automate so far until you have to turn over control entirely and that's a long way out. (Google has effectively recognized this with it's steering wheel-less vehicles.)

Again, do you have a source for that, or at least some detailed reasoning? In a notorious story, a police officer pulled over a Google Car with no driver in it [1]. That was last year, on a real street. Completely driverless cars are already here, they just need to be refined over the next few years to be ready for wider adoption.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pul...

Read the literature, e.g. http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/publications

There's a huge difference between mostly working (especially on a highway) and truly autonomous door-to-door.

Sorry, which literature in particular? That page has a variety of posted papers, most of which cover things unrelated to practical autonomous road vehicles.

You also don't seem to have addressed my point that there are cars on the road right now with no driver behind the wheel. We are long past the point of mostly working and very close to the point of autonomous door-to-door in favorable cities.

In one city, with really good road paint, street signs, and incredibly detailed maps compared to everywhere else, almost no rains, and never any snow. And those cars are rare. Try making 10% of the cars on the road made up of them, all of which go to the extra safe fallback mode at a particular intersection; 1 out of 10 cars doing that will annoy the hell out of 8 of the other human driven cars. Now try 30% of the cars made up of cars in fallback.

I think autonomy will be partial, conditional, and thus not door to door autonomous for at least a decade.

I sooner expect Alphabet to sell this tech to a big 10 auto manufacturer, or to Apple, for the same reasons as Boston Dynamics: where's the cashflow? If it's not up for sale in 5 years, I'll expect it's the real deal and we'll see door to door in another 10 years.

Yes, but the point is it doesn't need to be ready for 100% of locations immediately. Los Angeles alone has close to 19 million people. Add in other favorable cities like San Jose/SV, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix and you're looking at a fair portion of the total US population. You can have robotaxis serving those cities initially while the technology matures, and location-restrict autonomous driving for consumer-owned cars to the same places. People seem to think that the moment autonomous cars hit the road, they need to be able to handle a blizzard on a dirt road in upstate New York, but that just doesn't make any sense.

Is Google a good benchmark? They get all the attention, but it's weird to believe an advertising company about the timeline for autonomous cars.

For a luxury car, looks matter a lot for the success of the vehicle, but for family/utility cars, I don't think they matter that much. Minivans are horrendous looking but popular for their utility.

500e looks super ugly from the front.

This looks ugly too. I'm undecided on the model 3.

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