The Toyota Land Cruiser has been a popular car in certain upper-class circles. At $87k it's fairly expensive, but it doesn't look expensive.
Not to mention a fully specced out Tesla Model 3 is $80k and Model Y is now.. $90k, and the tax credits are basically gone! I remember getting a pretty well configured Model 3 for $50k after tax incentives in their first year of production.
For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.
But comparing absolute numbers for a car you bought five years ago may be misleading because the majority of the increase is likely due to inflation.
Back of the envelope math: If you were in CA and got $7.5k federal and $2.5k state credits that means the Model 3 you bought in 2017 was ~$60k or ~$73k in today's dollars. If it's now $80k then that's a real price increase of ~$7k in today's dollars.
That's certainly an increase, but making an expensive car slightly more expensive doesn't seem particularly insane to me.
If you are in the market for a 3-row / 7 seater, you can spend $55k on a Toyota Highlander SUV or $40k on a Toyota Siena minivan.
It's genuinely pretty challenging to spend under $30k on a new car now outside fairly basic 2-4 door smaller sedan/hatchback vehicles in their base trim without options.
Nothing wrong with basic vehicles "in their base trim without options", we have two parked outside the house right now, and the vehicle we owned before them was similar.
I am only trying to illustrate that the line between luxury/excess in autos has shifted substantially in the last few years partially inflation driven and partially cheap credit / long loan terms driven.
The universe of under-$30k cars is now quite limited whereas 5 years ago, one could possibly describe $30k+ as being luxury.
My family also always only bought used cars (and I continued this practice), so I guess that further skewed my conception of car cost downward. I only just bought my first new car recently, and I still haven't really adjusted to the reality of both what current prices are like, and how much more expensive a new car is.
I try and remind myself that for the most part it's not that cars are that much more expensive but that dollars are worth so much less.
For a shit car with the interior fit and finish of a poverty-spec Skoda, and all the important controls replaced with a bloody great iPad that blinds you at night.
Oh, and it's from an obscenely "techbro" company.
Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?
I could excuse the drawbacks you cited and the cost if they were the Framework laptop of the automotive world. But at those price points, and a repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’ll buy a Tesla.
I have a couple of old Range Rovers. There are very few things you can't fix with a half-inch spanner and a hammer, and those you can fix with a 7/16th spanner and a bit of sticky tape.
They run on propane, so they get cheap tax and can be registered as Low Emission Vehicles, which is pretty hilarious for a 4-litre V8.
Combined they probably still have a smaller ecological footprint than making one Tesla Model S.
They've also got far comfier seats.
How does fueling work? Perhaps I just haven't noticed (because I have to reason to), but I have never seen a fueling station advertise propane, outside of tanks for grilling and similar.
Common enough and cheap enough that I still feel a bit prescient for buying a 2017 Ford Focus wagon with about 30k km on the clock that was factory modified for LPG, in August 2021, for about half what the original owner paid.
To fuel up you just go to a filling station with an LPG pump (getting harder to find here unfortunately) and instead of poking the nozzle down the filler neck and holding down a trigger on the filler gun, you plug in a hose with a fitting like a BNC plug the size of your wrist and hold down a button on the pump until you've put enough in. It clicks off when it's full.
No difference in performance (in theory you could adjust it to get more because it's the equivalent of 115RON fuel!) and a bit more fuel consumption, but roughly 2/3 the price of petrol.
But yeah, whenever I'm in a Tesla, the interior looks cheap, and the giant iPad (in the Model 3 at least) looks bolted-on rather than designed-in. Not to mention the real-time display of what's around the car is laughably bad, with cars and pedestrians flickering in and out, and sometimes not even showing up at all.
I'm glad people drive them, though; more EVs on the street is a good thing.
I am very impressed by their batteries and I like the look of the Model S but I'm utterly unimpressed by the build quality of the interior and the cheap materials used.
At that price I'd except to be entering a comfortable car using luxurious materials.
FWIW I tried the Porsche Taycan and the interior is leaps and bound ahead of the Teslas (but the batteries aren't up to par yet and the software ain't either I think).
Tesla exaggerates their range and few actually achieve the quoted EPA range, so you can deduct 10-15% for real world.
The Germans, especially Porsche undersell their range and real world you can get about 10-15% longer out of the BMWs & MBs and something insane like 35% more out of the Taycans.
InsideEVs has a nice real world 70mph highway range comparison, and the ranking would surprise you compared to the advertised ranges. https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
So an advertised 350mi Model S and a 225mi Taycan in fact meet somewhere in the middle, closer to 300mi +/- for both.
Also, Land Cruiser has apparently been discontinued.
Wait, what sort of longevity are we taking about? 15 years? 20?
I don't think we humans can reproduce quickly enough for that to span "many generations". :-)
I can totally see how a car could get passed down from father to son, but a single car and "many generations" doesn't really add up in this part of the world (could be totally different in other parts of the world, of course).
Fuel availability considerations notwithstanding, there's very little that would stop them going another 25 years.
I don’t think the so-called “safety features” developed in the next 20 years are as valuable as the others predict. We’re already very safe in cars, especially massive modern ones like the cruiser. If you’re driving fast/reckless enough to get killed in one today more safety features aren’t what you need.
People need to be more mindful of the fact they’re operating multi-ton death machines, not sit back behind increasing layers of technology and text their buddy while driving because they know their “safety features” will protect them.
This is partially why I disabled my airbags - pedestrians don’t have them, why should I? Gives me more skin in the game.
But then you do get articles like https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/brisbane-accou...
For those not from the US like myself, this is only the case in the US. I'm sure we'll still get plenty down under.