When I see the factory videos of the production of the BMW i3, or that interview with the Monroe guy whose company took apart and analysed the i3... It seems to me BMW is well ahead of Tesla in many ways.
Tesla does source its current batteries from Panasonic though.
a new company producing cars isn't doing much "from scratch", other than design, and the basic concepts there are also pretty well established. as far as i can tell tesla is producing the same basic product as everyone else except all the tech people are into it because of elon musk, where they probably hated or didn't pay attention to cars before.
I agree that Tesla's are an economic substitute for Toyotas but when you step into a Model S as a car guy you know it's different.
There's only two reasons I didn't buy it 1) I love road trips and there's one supercharger station in my province, and more importantly 2) I couldn't afford it. Tesla's are like BMWs you know they aren't that reliable, are really expensive, but there's nothing like driving one. Like BMW, it's a smiles per gallon car you buy it because when you step on it, it goes, not because it gets great gas milage.
in other words, same basic product as any high end fast car. this is coming from someone who has a high end fast car, is a car guy, has a 'brand', and has ridden in all the high end fast cars.
they're all basically the same.
musk is a car guy and lives in LA (bel air), car capital of the known universe. he's a genius for recognizing this market angle.
Right - the i3, which is the only electric car BMW makes, and is shaped like a prototypical, onion-parody of an electric car.[1]
Here's a prediction:
Another 5 years, on top of the prior 5 years, of car-show prototypes and concept cars, with cutesy sub-brand "i" and "e" monikers, and nothing to buy but hybrid cars with little chainsaw engines inside of them.
[1] ... although, I will say that the interior of the i3 is very progressive and well done. Very impressive.
I'm a big fan of industrial design/architecture/automotive design and try to study it extensively, albeit at the hobbyist level. My all time favorite cars are probably the 1973 Porsche 2.7RS and the 1960 Aston Martin DB4GT Jet by Bertone. I only say this as proof that I usually have what most would consider fairly good taste in cars and yet the i3 might be one of my favorite sub $100k cars released in the last few years.
I admit that it tends to photographic poorly and BMW has a habit of painting them some very unflattering colors, including some really weird two tone colorways. The first time I saw the i3 in person it was painted a "unique" burnt orange/copper color and I thought it was hideous. Then when I finally saw one in person painted dark grey with nicer wheels my opinion completely changed.
I also really like its size. I work right next door to Tesla's design studio here in Hawthorne and I can barely cross the street without seeing a model S. While I like the overall body shape there are a number of things that I strongly dislike such as the chrome accents around the windows and much of the front fascia, not to mention the large size. The i3 seems much more forward thinking to me from a design perspective. I’ve never actually sat in or driven one though.
I’m curious if you or others wouldn’t mind sharing what you dislike about the i3, hopefully I haven’t completely lost my sense of style.
I live in the SFBA and therefore see a lot of these in person.
It's not that, by itself, it's a bad design - it's that it follows in a long, almost comical line of "things that look like electric cars" - sort of like the Mercedes B class. As I say, if you were mocking up a typical electric car for the onion, you'd come up with basically that.
The model S has, in my opinion, a LOT of design shortcomings, but what is notable about it is that it's just a car. It's not a future car or a weird car or a thing that looks like an electric car - it's just a normal car-looking-thing.
I grew up in SF and still visit family a couple times a year and I'm always surprised that I don't see very many Tesla's in SF, at least in my area west of Twin Peaks. I've seen more i3's, I wonder if the smaller size is more attractive to SF residents. Meanwhile, whenever I spend time in Manhattan Beach I can barely cross the street without almost getting run over by a model S.
I live in Marin and it is tesla-city here. Everyone has a model S. There are intersections where multiples pull up at the same time.
I've also seen 8-10 model X cars in the last week or so.
Unrelated: the other "it" car in Marin seems to be a diesel powered BMW X5 or diesel porsche cayenne, which is just baffling to me. Why anyone would want to visually "see" a brand new modern car, but aurally "hear" a badly maintained lawnmower is beyond me.
You'd think these rich marin moms would be more discerning, but what do I know...
I didn't realize these modern diesels still sound terrible, are they really that bad?
You know the somewhat recent Jetta TDI (2.0 ? 1.8 ?) that's really, really loud ? They're not quite that bad. But they're loud, and the loud they make is an antique loud. A non-precision loud. Noises that nice new luxury cars shouldn't make.
I am in europe regularly for rsync.net and the diesel A6 and A8 (among others) are not any better.
It's really just a terrible aesthetic. I don't know why people put up with it.