> I totally missed that the segment of rich people with enough disposable income to buy an average electric car as a statement was big enough to be viable. So, well played Tesla I guess.

This is pretty dismissive. I'm not sure how many Tesla owners are trying to make a statement, nor are all Tesla owners over the moon with the product. You can see a prior comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173756

There is probably much wider variation in Tesla quality than other car manufacturers, as the Model Y stories (detaching roof, hardware store wood trim hack jobs to hold assemblies) suggest. Their lack of respect for "legacy" practices throws the baby out with the bathwater. There's lots of valid criticism for Tesla.

All that being said, if you get a unit without the worst of those issues, you quickly learn to see the bigger picture and realize no competitors have yet built a comparably-capable EV. That is what drives the sales. They are here today.

EVs are not for everybody. But if they fit your automotive use case, when you need a car for transportation duties rather than the kind of pleasure that comes from driving a high-performance combustion-driven vehicle, they are so clearly the future. It's like using an LCD flat-panel monitor with a VGA connection in the early 2000s. Even before they got to the high standards they have now, those early units presaged that LCD monitors were obviously going to make CRTs obsolete. Tesla cars are the automotive equivalent of those LCDs. And it will be great for the consumer when Tesla no longer has the enormous lead that it still enjoys (years away).