as for Musk, let's hope he will not ruin his other projects, i still want to see some people on Mars
Basically the entire market of everyone who realistically might consider an electric vehicle in the next five years overwhelmingly wants nothing to do with him moving forward.
Sounds like it’s already starting to bite as well https://www.cnet.com/tech/tesla-buyers-are-bailing-because-o...
No one else is putting out EVs at the volume and quality (functional quality, not finishes / luxury) that Teslas have and it isn’t even close.
The Tesla battery is stupidly reliable. The car in general is the most reliable vehicle I’ve owned and it isn’t even close. I have ~200k miles on my 2019 Model 3, and I taken it to ungodly places off roads, through deserts, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, beach coasts, every terrain imaginable — some even jeeps would have issues with. I had to replace the bottom a least twice because I ripped up the covers, but not once did the vehicle ever stop running or being reliable.
When I set in other vehicles, it is like I’m in the past, or some invisible super powers have left me.
I don’t have high opinions of Musk and wish he didn’t get involved with Twitter at all. It would have been better for him to be focused on acquiring more funds for the mission towards sustainable energy and multi-planet species. Stop taking credit for the work of others and do everything possible to enable them instead of managing them; his companies do well because the people believe in the mission, not because of him. After this situation boils down, Tesla will still be producing the best EVs on the market, because the mission is a good one.
Long story short, I don’t want to do with Musk but in the foreseeable future I don’t see me getting any EV besides a Tesla. There are just too many variables to consider when managing a battery and battery life, and even if another company comes out with something that looks better, I’m willing to bet reliability won’t even be close & the battery pack will be significantly degraded after a year — not to mention the lack of a nation-scale charging network.
Taking the car on terrain is more a question of ride height than durability, anyway
Being able to roll over things is the minimum
The real car manufacturers are slow and lazy, but they only need to learn how to slap electric motors and batteries in there
As far as I'm concerned, musk did his part. He got EVs to be a part of the conversation
Want to start a new EV company? Could build a barebones, rugged EV that is cheap as hell, easy to hack, and has no unneeded electronics / no connectivity. I would switch over to that in a heartbeat.
I’d call that stupid reliable.
Doesn’t matter to me in any case; as long as Tesla can survive, all this hate just means there will be a shorter line when I grab my next one.
I’m not willing to do that to anyone, and since an alternative exists, I use it.
There appear to be many contenders, but then Europe's a bigger EV market than North America:
https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Y...
The best EV platform for price to capability (800v, V2L) at the moment is probably Hyundai's E-GMP platform used in the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Kia EV6, and the Genesis GV60.
The best value EV is the Chevy Bolt: https://electrek.co/2022/12/20/the-chevy-bolt-is-about-to-be...
The outright best platform is the Lucid Air for both range and performance:
My new 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV, on the other hand, it's amazing. And so inexpensive!
Lucid Air has an outrageous price for 4 doors slapped on electric motors so I wouldn’t even consider one.
Life expectancy [2]: declining everywhere at about the same rate
Infant mortality [3]: Europe ranges from 2.5 (Spain/Portugal) to 3.4 (Netherlands) to 3.6 (Switzerland, Greece) to 3.8 (UK); US is 5.2. By comparison, Canada is 4.8
Guns [4]: Europe is hardly some gunless utopia. Switzerland has 27 legally owned guns per 100 people, Portual 21, Germany 20. Granted, the US does have 120 guns / 100 people.
Brownshirt gangs: no idea what this is
Lax regulations: hard to quantify this, also "lax" compared to what? Europe is frequently accused of having overly restrictive regulations, especially by entrepreneurial types.
The US has problems, but it's hardly a third-world place by these measurements. Instead, it comes off as the sort of condescension that your parent was complaining about. And it's not like Europe doesn't have it's share of problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
[3] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
[4] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-owner...
That tracks.
There are many different cars and trucks and vans on the roads in Europe that don't seem to be available for sale here at all.
There are many choices available in the US that are better than Teslas, but there are even more in Europe.
I’ve looked at all of them and I am telling you, there isn’t another choice of an all EV that can go over 300 miles in a charge. The ones that claim have too many reports of rapid battery degradation after a year, and lack a meaningful fast charging network to go anywhere. Most have under 300 miles of range.
It is one thing to say “look at how many are manufacturing EVs”, and a whole other to say look at how many are manufacturing EVs ordinary people can get and use to drive across the US in an old fashioned road trip.
There are so many small details that have turned me into saying what I’m saying. Like being able to run climate all night in a Tesla and not freeze while in the middle of no where in winter, and sleep, while still having enough charge in the morning to make it to a charger. Or going into Death Valley and up a canyon, running nearly out of charge, hiking and enjoying the place, then almost completely recharging on the way down with regen braking. There are things I’ve done with this vehicle I wouldn’t dream of doing with others, years of trust built up in small capabilities most people wouldn’t think about or imagine are possible.
About the only vehicle I’d trade my Tesla for and take a chance on is a Rivian, but I want to see the longevity and support of Rivian play out before I’d get one.
For example, are you aware that the cheapest Tesla available to me with a range over 300 miles is $56,160 plus tax, title, and license[0]? That's $20k more than I paid for my car! The seven less-expensive Teslas available can't do 300 miles on a single charge either.
I've got an amazing 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV that I love, that I bought for much less than any Tesla available within 200 miles of me, even the ones with a 267 or 272-mile range. And that's before the $7500 tax credit I'll get, which I wouldn't with a Tesla, so more than $18k less overall.
But hey, my EUV is only rated with a 243-mile range. Which is more than my Fiat 500e, and plenty long enough for road trips, given the ABRF app, but fails your filter.
I'm glad you're happy with your car.
0. https://www.tesla.com/inventory/new/m3?arrangeby=plh&zip=750...
300 miles is my floor because of how heavy my usage is. In a year, that 300 miles degrades to ~260 miles in an EV with current battery tech. I put about 70-100k miles/year.
Often times I have to max charge to make it in and out of places. Some places even a max charge doesn’t do it, so I come up with tricky solutions to make it work. I went one way into Big Bend, for example, and talk someone that works there into letting me use a 120 service outlet for 3 days. I hiked for 3 days there; went up to Emory Peak and all the surroundings. Beautiful spot. Returned to a fully charged vehicle.
I’d like vehicles I purchase to last at least 5 years. I think this Tesla will go at least another 100k miles before the battery degrades to the point of not being usable for long distance travel.
If I had started with even a 260 mile battery pack, I would probably already be at the limit by now — and I don’t have any data on battery longevity for any other EV used at the rate and intensity mine has been used. I would be surprised to find this kind of durability to be the norm in vehicles, it just doesn’t make economic sense.
The US is neither the cheapest nor the highest quality for most things, although it provides a reasonable trade-off of the two for many things.
This is borderline comedy. I think you’re tremendously underestimating what a Jeep can do just with its ride height compared to a Model 3, that’s before considering the hardware that makes them significantly more capable. A stock Model 3 cannot cross a log or a high median.
There are many places higher clearance vehicles can go that I can’t, but there are many places I can go that they can’t — without puncturing an oil can, or rolling over, or any number of other reasons.
People here can say what they want, but I’ve been places on the US and seen things, with pictures to prove it, that most Americans won’t see in their lifetime.
I was driving through Montana to Spokane, WA and going through the mountain passes between Missoula and Spokane. There are two, Lookout Pass and Fourth of July Pass, both can get pretty bad during the winter.
I am driving towards Lookout pass and it is looking okay; middle of winter but the weather isn’t bad. Right when I get to the major ascension, a storm hits. Visibility completely plummets. I can’t see the road & it becomes difficult to even tell where the side is. I can’t pull over because there are cliffs & visibility was so bad it was not possible to make out the boundary, so I went forward.
Eventually, there was a clearing where you put on chains — for people who thought they could make it and fight to get up, but realize they can’t probably. Anyway, this area was visible because it was lit like sunlight with lighting. i start to veer towards it. Unbeknownst to me, I veer off the road and into the middle. I hit the center of the roadway with a ton of snow packed from shoveling and my car flips on its side….then, stops.
Understand I an on my left two wheels and my car is sideways at > then 45 degrees. I was just happy I wasn’t off a cliff rolling down to my death, and that I stabilized. If I was in just about any other car, I would either have completely flipped or be impossibly stuck and need a tow. In a Jeep, no question this is a flip btw, Jeeps can flip easily especially at that speed and angle.
So I am sitting there sideways, not flipping, and everything still works, so I just do standard “stuck in snow” procedures, starting with going forward and back to slowly build momentum. I do this for about a minute while holding a hard left and, to my surprises, I start moving sidewise. Like out of a cartoon, my car just plops back on all 4 and I keep driving like nothing happened.
It took a crisis that could have resulted in a flipped & buried vehicle, with no cell reception and a practical blizzard outside near a mountain peak, and made it into a funny happenstance.
I drove much slower and more cautious after that and finished the rest of the journey safely.
Not an offroad story but paints the picture of what low center of gravity + electric AWD can accomplish.
> Most would be hard for someone to relate to because of the extremes of where I go.
There is nowhere a Model 3 can go and come back as it left that any off-roader would consider extreme.
The possibilities are endless. Don’t narrow yourself. Being able to drive a car uniquely that has a vastly superior drivetrain is not something difficult to imagine.
I don’t think you have an accurate idea how significantly more capable a Jeep Rubicon is. Agree to disagree.
Happy holidays!
I don't know. It's certainly a massive gambit in that 4D chess game, and unclear it's going to pay off.
Nobody is going to be splashing out the kind of money needed to buy a Tesla as a car they up until this point they hated at a conceptual level to “own the libs”.
These are some of the most insecure men alive that we are talking about here. They don’t want to explain to their friends why they are suddenly driving an electric vehicle. They will look for a million other performative ways to own the libs before they ever consider that.
Musk craves constant attention. If he can get that by flirting with the right and pissing off some segment of "the libs" he'll take it. A person tweeting nonsense at 4am just wants attention, in whatever form it takes.
When they talk about "freedom" and "the people", it's ultimately about them.
First of all.
Second of all, the Internet - at least in the US - never had this newly-discovered freedom of speech problem. Even in the early days, when we hung out on compartmentalized HTML discussion boards, the admins would bring down the hammer on idiots and trolls with no mercy, and no one complained. The place was much more civilized.