Tesla still somehow benefits from its innovators / clean company reputation, but at this pace it won't be long before agencies start to act on what's become much more than just 'optimistic marketing'.
It's now pretty common in my circle to hear people say they'll pay a premium to not own a Tesla. Primarily because of lots of bad experiences with build quality/repairs, but also because there are now lots of high quality alternatives. Namely Rivian and Lucid, but also the legacy automakers (two friends bought mach-es recently and there's a smattering of F-150 lightnings.)
The fact that Musk has adopted the public persona of a crazy uncle who doesn't get Thanksgiving invites -- and is heavily associated with the Tesla brand -- doesn't help either.
Anyway. We are looking for reliability and imagine my surprise when Kia, of all brands, came out king of generally affordable reliability. Plus their EV reviews reasonably well.
A lot has changed in 10 years for vehicles I guess…
And it's all fine if you drive your vehicle for <150,000km (100,000miles) and then sell or move on, but my experience with them is that after that they start to have mechanical parts issues. Which makes sense because they've effectively optimized for the most common consumer vehicle ownership pattern. But.
IDK about Kia, except that they're doing pretty well on the EV front compared to other legacies. But in general, 10 years is at least one product cycle, so I guess it's not that surprising that reputations-vs-reality mismatches appear on that time frame. It is weird though.
If you think about the CEOs of major corporations, the only ones who are personally memorable for the public are founders. How many exceptions can you think of, memorable personalities that were hired as CEOs or rose to become CEO of established companies? Lee Iacocca is one, barely. Carly Fiorina manages to be forgettable even though she ran for president. I'm sure there are more exceptions, but not enough to invalidate the rule.
So why can flamboyant or quirky people like Musk or Zuckerberg not get hired as CEOs of huge corporations? At least part of the reason is that being bland and forgettable is part of the job requirements. It makes it that much harder for the public to remember the sleazy things they learn about a company. A crime committed by a faceless company is like a natural disaster. A crime committed by Tesla is easier to see as human evil, because we can see how Musk revels in his unaccountability. There's a story: evil person did evil thing. And an obvious corollary: evil person must be prevented from doing more evil! If Tesla had replaced Musk with a faceless professional CEO, there would be no story, just "bad thing happened for inscrutable reasons."
Lucid are expensive, but their entire product line is basically a Model X competitor and prices are comparable.
Are they also in the market for an electric car? I said I would pay a premium not to own a Tesla, largely because of Musk. And then it came time to buy an EV: and there just isn't a vehicle under $100,000 that performs better under 100mph. And range? The Kia EV6 GT, which costs $5k more than the Model 3 Performance (or $12,500 because it doesn't qualify for the tax credit), is slower 0-60, has only 200 mile range. The Model 3 could have 26% lower range than advertised and still have 10% more range. So .5 second faster 0-60, 10% longer range, for $12,500 less.
I only know three people who own Teslas, but all three have little positive to say about them, and one of them will tell you at length about how he regrets buying his if you let him.
It's for that reason, not my dislike of Musk, that if I were in the market for an EV I wouldn't even consider a Tesla.
I'm a lot more excited about Hyundai/Kia and Ford.
> Don't get me started on their "environmentalist adventure vehicle" marketing that's putting 7000-pound cars on mountain trails.
Car adventuring as an ends unto itself is something I just don't get, and since I can't really say anything constructive or nice about the entire activity/scene the EV component of it is a bit of a red herring.
AFAICT, R1T is a decent e-F150 alternative if you need to tow. Buy, yeah, driving through wilderness for no particular reason is kind of idiotic.
Uber is still a publicly traded company, despite explicitly starting up by just ignoring and bypassing existing regulation.
The US is so anti-consumer it will never relevantly punish a business making money.
For example, if you get 10 tesla cars of the same model, do the ranges differ?
If you get 1 car and 10 different drivers, do some drivers get the advertised range while others don't?
If you disassemble the battery packs, do you find some bad/degraded cells in cars with reduced range, or is this a design fault?
Do drivers that have trouble have inefficient mods, like roof racks, big wheels, etc?
There is very little you will diagnose on a modern car that the onboard computer isn't already aware of.
Therefore... the idea of a team of remote diagnosis people to fix most issues without a service appointment makes perfect sense.
As does the idea of having the analysis done automatically beforehand so the human doesn't have to wait.