I mean, multiple companies have higher quality electric vehicles, but that isn't what sells. The name is what's selling.
Tesla's are pretty ugly, they have horrible reliability. You don't buy a Tesla for style, you buy it to show off.
Tesla's are pretty ugly, they have horrible reliability. You don't buy a Tesla for style, you buy it to show off.
When I bought my Tesla in mid-2018 the alternatives were the Bolt and the Leaf. Both had significantly worse range--I was looking at a 180-mile roundtrip commute for the next year, so range was important. Both were uncomfortably small for me. Neither matched Tesla's driver assist features for my almost entirely highway commute. Neither had fast-charging options along my commute route; Tesla had two superchargers.
The situation has changed a bit in the last 1.5 years, but still nobody else matches Tesla's range or charging network.
I'm not sure what metric you're using for quality, but Tesla won me over on features, not name.
> Tesla's are pretty ugly
Subjective. The X is a bit strange, but the falcon doors are actually super convenient (as long as they don't break). The S and 3 exteriors are both very nice looking in my opinion, though I'm not such a fan of the spartan interior on the 3.
Oof. The last thing I'd want to add to an already horrible commute is a supercharger stop, or more.
> the falcon doors are actually super convenient (as long as they don't break)
Kinda a pain in the ass in a garage.
The Tesla had enough range that if I was able to charge regularly I didn't need the supercharger, but it was a nice backup if something prevented me from charging.
Also stopping halfway through the drive and grabbing a snack while at the supercharger wasn't really a bad thing.
>Kinda a pain in the ass in a garage
I have a standard 7ft garage door and they can fully open with about 2 inches of clearance at the top. Not really a pain at all.
It is a very polarizing car, some strangers will go up to you and tell you how Tesla will go bankrupt, you'll have no one to service the car, it will lose all its value and other things like that. "The name" is nearly a liability to me. It is just a car, it is useful.
Yes, same here. I also initially wanted a Leaf, in part because I don't really want my car to be so conspicuous--before the Tesla I drove a tan Corolla, about as inconspicuous as you can get. But the Leaf (and Bolt, which was the other EV option at the time) simply didn't make sense.
Any references about this? So far I've only found evidence they're functionally highly reliable.
Meanwhile it's fairly unambiguously true that electric drivetrains are a lot simpler and should require less maintenance in general.
Short seller FUD, on the other hand, is quite real.