It baffles me that they were ever considered “luxury” cars except as to price.
Not surprisingly, companies that have been making cars forever are pretty good at making cars. Cars have always been a very competitive market, so you didn't have the kind of absolute stagnation you see in some other industries. Tesla just gave them a kick in the butt to make electric cars.
That's true, and they are insanely fast. But I will never forget when the Model S was released and was competing against flagships like the 7 series and S class. When I tried one out, my overwhelming first impression was: this is it? And that was 2012. And it's still basically the same car!
AIUI, it turns out that the ability to select drive vs reverse is considered safety critical, so it has to work even if the infotainment system is not operational. This involves something along the lines of a dual-port touch sensor so that an independent, higher-reliability system can detect the gesture to change direction, and the hardware for that is not free. And the “gear shift” stalk was simple and cheap.
I haven’t tried it in an appropriate model Tesla, but I suspect you can trigger an infotainment reboot using whatever the current button press combination is, and then, before it finishes rebooting, select drive or reverse by swiping the left edge of the screen, and it will work.
Score one for car regulations doing the right thing? Maybe, but this all misses the mark, because how many people will know to do the ridiculous swipe on an invisible target when the need to get out of the way of an emergency vehicle and their infotainment system isn’t working.
(I don’t know about newer Teslas, but infotainment glitches on older models are common.)
The frame and body and interior was garbage. That drive train though.
That was Tesla's sales pitch. Model S was no competitor for Mercedes-Benz S-Class. It competed against the E-Class.
Success is self limiting. It makes people start to engage in magical thinking about their own abilities and vision.
Funnily this happens only in my model 3, not my X (I bought them before Elon went crazy). Both have automatic wipers on.
Nothing spells out "luxury" better than misadjusted panel gaps..
Tesla is upper middle class (model S) or lower, just with potentially more horsepower in some models. It has great straight line performance and thats about it, but then ie dragsters should be in ultra-luxury class by that logic.