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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

The iPerformance 3 series can do 25 miles on battery which while isn't a lot is well below the average daily commute distance in the UK.

Don't get me wrong it would be great if it had a proper battery but and it's a big but it's still a £34,000 car which is 1/2 of the starting price for a new Tesla model S in the UK and in all honesty after having the pleasure of driving both on more than one occasion the BMW is a much nicer car to drive, the car feels premium, the interior design is far superior and if I'll ever decide to actually buy a car to own rather than rent or use zip car on the weekends I would go for the iPerformance vs a Tesla in it's current state in a heartbeat.

I had a few short drives in an i3 and it's also a pretty good car, but I don't have enough time behind the wheel to form a good opinion and to me it's just too damn ugly. I really wish they would've dresses the i3 like a series 3 or 2 car.

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I like to drive to Goodwood Motor Circuit once a month or so, which is about 80 miles each way and 160 miles round trip.

The drive takes me on some of the best roads in West Sussex, with some truly amazing cars (think Lamborghinis from the 70s and 80s, Porsche Carrera GTs and old 911s) and as such you can imagine we're too busy having fun to worry about economy.

I can do the trip there and back in 3/4 of a tank (11l/100km, or 25MPG). However, I genuinely worry that if I bought a Model S I would not be able to make the same trip on a single charge. There is a video on YouTube of someone driving their 85D on the Nurburgring and in 10 minutes the car has gone from 90% to 60% charge. Given that these roads allow for a lot of throttle use I expect I'd run out after 100 miles at best.

Sure, you could argue that we should drive slower, more economically, with less throttle. However, if electric cars are going to be fun and appealing to enthusiasts I think electric cars need to start matching ICE cars when it comes to range under high load, and I think the leading cause of such poor range when driving the car in a more demanding style is the extra weight electric cars have to carry over their ICE counterparts (a P100D is almost 40% heavier than its ICE equivalent, such as a BMW F80 M3).

Model S is equivalent to a 7 series, not a 3 series. P100D is 4960lbs, 750 xDrive is 4623. That’s not 40% heavier.

Model S is nothing like a 7 series or an S class. These are both executive cars and their class is decided on wheel base. In the EU a Model S is an S-segment car, whereas the 7 series and S class are F-segment cars. The two don't even compare.

You could compare a P100D to an F10 M5, which is 4,288lb - almost 600lb lighter than the Model S.

Ok, 15% heavier. Nobody compares a model S to a 3 series is my point.

I didn’t realize the 7 had grown so much (126” wheelbase is nuts)

IIRC wheelbase of the 330e is 2.85m the Model S is 2.95m the 530e is 2.975m.

I really don’t see that many problems with comparing the Model S to either tbh.

The Model S is heavy because of the battery.

Finish, comfort handling and in many other ways it’s much lower than the high end series 3/5 yet alone 7.

BMW just like Benz has a big overlap between its series.

The model S is an amazing car but it’s handling is subpar mostly due to its weight and it’s furnishing is a joke compared to even entry level luxury sedans.

Agree furnishing isn’t up to the others, was comparing similar sizes. Comparing to 3 series is the silly part. 5 series is more accurate comparo, tho its not exactly apples to apples due to interior size differences w electric. Doesn’t really matter why a car is heavier.

Series the 530e is what £45k? The weight of the car doesn’t matter here if anything the Tesla performs rather poorly because it’s breaks and suspension aren’t that great for its weight class.

Personally, I prefer that high-powered cars don't have great brakes; people who use the brakes that much are bad drivers.

I saw a talk from the data guy at Progressive car insurance, he said that the only signal from their "black box" monitoring of drivers (opt-in) which predicted accidents was extreme braking. Not strong acceleration, not anything else.

...and that shows why high quality brakes don't usually change driving behavior. Go ahead and test the quality of the brakes in your car. Nobody brakes remotely like that outside of a racetrack. It feels (at least to me) like something is happening that shouldn't be happening, so you don't get the crazy idea to rely on it in your driving. The braking power of modern cars is in the range of 600 hp when braking from 100 km/h to zero.

That said, my driving instructor said "if you use your brakes on the autobahn in normal driving, you are doing it wrong". That is because you can see far and air resistance slows you down quickly enough.

Eh? Under what circumstances could worse brakes be better?

High performance sedans, such as the Model S and F10 M5 don’t just need big brakes because of their speed, but also their weight.

2 piston calipers up front on either of those cars would be dangerous. What happens if the driver has to make a sudden stop? For this reason sedans and SUVs tend to have at least 4 piston calipers up front, 6 for performance models.

Never have I thought for a second, on road or on track, “Gosh.. I wish I had crappier brakes”.

I think we can agree that not every enthusiast will prefer one type of car under every single corner case. You might consider the case in which electric cars are already more fun: drag racing. I know that's more of an American thing, but still.

> 25 miles (...) well below the average daily commute distance in the UK.

Don't you mean above?

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