Yeah, the interior is not as nice as a top end BMW or Mercedes. I don't care, driving the car is amazing. I drove a $150k Audi RS7 the other day. The whole time i wanted to be back in my S.
The interior is not as nice as our 328 wagon. It's no where close to a high-end model. They are fascinating cars, but the fit and finish and range are still lacking (from my perspective, anyway). And sedans are boring.
Yes, the Tesla is super fun when you get to push the speeder, but the rest of the time it's just not. This was also a year before Tesla launched their "autopilot", and I picked an E-class with Mercedes' self-driving tech which had already been on the market for years at that point...
Hire some established car interior people from existing companies, and work with existing suppliers of luxury manufacturers. The interior is the one part of the car that doesn't need to try to be innovative, so they could have basically just copied their German rivals. Am I missing something about how hard this is?
Also, is it really that bad? I've never driven or ridden in a Tesla, but I've looked inside one in a showroom and thought it looked pretty nice inside.
And at the end of the day, quality costs, and the price of the Model S is high enough already.
My soon 3yo Mercedes E-class doesn't squeak, rattle, flap, wobble, dinkle, pop or waffle anywhere. Nothing.
Meanwhile, the Tesla I test-drove felt much cheaper. It's nice enough, but it really feels like the cheapest entry-level German luxury cars, while it's priced like their highest-end cars. I've also seen reports that build quality is hit-and-miss, they start to squeak and rattle after a while if you're unlucky.
Have you ever driven a manual? They, too, can give you acceleration exactly when you want it.
My biggest gripe about driving in the US. No manuals to rent -.-
What Tesla does do better is the constant torque. That must be fun.
This comparison is not even in the same time zone. The average American drives a car with gearing technology at least two or three entire generations beyond manuals. Electric cars feel like a couple generations beyond even the best automatic setups.
A car with a good CVT, for example, doesn't even switch "gears", it's one continuous acceleration from 0 to speed. My current car, a hybrid with a primary motivating electric motor, makes my wife's CVT feel like a steam-punk jalopy.
A good electric car, on the other hand, makes even the best automatic feel like the engine is dragging, or you're pulling a trailer or something.
Manuals, even great ones, feel like some stone-aged anachronism. After riding around in an electric, then getting in a manual, you can't believe that cars are still being made with such terrible gear shifting contraptions. It's like that car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with all the lever pulling and pedal pumping.
I don't see how they could know in advance that I'm going to accelerate unless I tell them. Hence the sluggishness can not possibly be removed.
Unless you count flappy pedal gearboxes as automatics as well. Then yes, far superior to traditional manuals.
Mind you, even Formula E has a flappy pedal 5-speed gearbox despite being all electric.
I haven't driven a fully electric car yet, and I'm sure their power output is impressive, but I have driven hybrids and they were crap in terms of fun-to-drive.
That's the thing... any trace of that sluggishness is gone in a Tesla (or other quality electric). From the moment your foot starts moving even the tiniest amount on the accelerator, you feel your back being pushed into the seat. There is zero delay.
A comparison I thought of... It's the difference between pressure-sensitive touch screens and capacitive.
> I haven't driven a fully electric car yet, and I'm sure their power output is impressive, but I have driven hybrids and they were crap in terms of fun-to-drive.
Yep, hybrids are nowhere close to a Tesla. Go take a test drive, you'll see in the first few seconds what I'm talking about.
However, my mom's (fully-electric) Leaf is worlds apart. No matter how hard you step on the accelerator, it always responds immediately, fully, with seamless, continuous thrust.
A Tesla? I've never driven nor ridden in one, but I can only imagine it being like a launch-type roller coaster: immense, terrifyingly sudden acceleration.
The only way a manual can hope to compare is if you rev the engine and drop the clutch, which probably isn't something you do everyday.
You can learn to drive an automatic, just like you can learn to drive a manual. In mine, I just blip the throttle down a bit to force the car to downshift if I'm anticipating an overtake soon - it's something you learn if you drive long enough. Besides, I drive a car with an AMG 7-speed Dual Clutch transmission, where the shift takes fractions of a second - I could not possibly change that fast in a manual. No chance.
Probably not. Modern autos like CVTs don't actually even shift, not in the way that a manual or very old fashioned automatic. They can feel a little mushy, but on modern generation vehicles power is pretty instantaneous and about as continuous as you can get in a non-electric vehicle. They aren't "fun" though and tend to be built to maximize efficiency over speed or power. But they're mathematically more responsive than any manual could be and they're effectively always in the "right" gear, up/down shifting doesn't really make sense.
Other than the occasional rental or when riding in my friend's cars, and between our household cars and the occasional electric I've been in, I haven't felt a gear shift in a couple years. It actually feels a little alarming these days when you do feel one. Manuals are worse, they don't feel fun anymore, they feel like there's something mechanically wrong with the car.
Because of these qualities, most racing leagues have banned CVTs, since a performance oriented CVT would outperform any other shifting strategy in most kinds of racing. It was tried out by Williams decades ago for F1 and is said to have been astonishingly faster since it kept the engine in peak torque. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3UpBKXMRto
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2007/05/03/banned-continuously-va...
http://www.rstreet.org/2014/07/15/the-twisting-tale-of-the-c...
But the industry is starting to move beyond CVTs now and direct drive is starting to hit cars. Teslas are like this, but even some consumer hybrids don't have any sort of gearing anymore. CVTs beat manuals for shift speed, but direct drive, because there's no such thing, beat CVTs. These are both the correct answer, manuals are some sort of weird vestigial technology that clings on because of all kinds of weird myths about performance and efficiency and notions about what's "fun".
I'll toss this out, a ludicrous launch in a Tesla is much more fun than any ICE engine transmission system.
Caveat: I am from Germany, have driven manuals all my life.
Every time I even drove a Citroen C-Zero shared car from Multicity for 10mins, getting back into a manual car -- even one of the nice CLA Mercedeses that car2go now offers --, feels like going back from the 21st to the 19th century.
"#Citroen c-zero vs #2CV which one is going to win?":
https://www.flickr.com/photos/65912627@N06/6892145177/
My money is on the 2CV.