Why customers love Tesla despite its many mistakes

What's not to like about Tesla? Charismatic CEO, moon-shot of an idea, the product (car) looks fantastic, moves like a bat out of hell (when the battery is fully charged), has a luxurious interior, and has has just the right Techie Chic mixed with "I'm doing this for the planet" aura -- as well as being a car that shows off your wealth because you could have bought a BMW for the same price.

In 2005 I got a nokia 770, and my favorite app was maemo mapper. Nice maps, could scrape data from multiple sources, and some limited nav.

In 2018 many cars still remind me of maemo mapper. Slow clunky touch screens. Laggy, no multitouch, horrible UI, and tiny screen. Overall generally numerous generations worse than my phone.

Most car manufacturers still to really skimp in the weirdest places. Things like headlights... pay a few $k for nice lights or get crap. So much so that the IIHS started lowering the safety ratings on cars.

Should $50k cars really charge $$$ for decent headlights and LED brake lights?

The Tesla was a breath of fresh air. Nice user interface, nice design, nice big touch screen, great nav, good seats, good voice recognition, etc. Especially as most of the auto world is moving to tiny, high rpm, "wonder" 2 liter turbos. They do well on MPG... during testing, much less so in real world conditions. They also seem to have significantly less longevity than the engines they replace. Saw quite a few of the CPO warranties decreased, which I found particularly troublesome.

I don't feel nickle and dimed, there's no huge matrix of incompatible upgrades engineered to up sell you. It's a safe car, fast car, fun to drive, and likely to last longer than an ICE car.

It's also more american made than any other car.

People need to look at the larger picture. Decades ago it became clear it was urgent for the human race to move off of fossil fuels, and this included automobiles. The problem was the technology was not at all ready, especially the batteries.

So Musk went to work developing li-ion battery cars that would be up to the job, and cheap enough to buy. Over the years Tesla has made great progress, and so did many other companies, and in addition many governments have been pushing ev's. As a consequence the ev industry is taking off, and that will do an enormous amount to help save the climate.

Why do so many people ignore all this and focus on criticizing Tesla? Some of them are climate change deniers, or people invested in the fossil fuel industry. Some are shorters who just want to make money. And some are haters who are not happy unless they are busy hating something, and happened to have picked Tesla and Musk.

So yes, there are things Tesla does wrong. But everyone needs to be focusing on the larger picture, and the role that Tesla is playing in it.