Hacker News Reader

Comment by el_cuadrado | Hacker News Reader

Yes, if you do not travel, it is a perfect car.

I would not take Tesla on my camping trip, or my ski trip, or my ~700 miles road trip. And I honestly do not want a car I cannot use outside of my commute.

View on HN

There is an entire, large, class of people for whom 300 miles range is more than adequate to cover a regional trip, if there is a place to charge the car overnight (e.g. at the hotel parking). Anything further is a plane ride + car rental anyway, so it's not a big deal. Your use case differs. To think this matters to a statistically significant group of people is merely logical fallacy.

But that makes you the outlier in most American households. Lots of American families have a car for a specific purpose: minivan for the kids or a pickup for going to Tahoe.

There is no reason that the Tesla has to make a value proposition which assumes it wont be paired with a more utilitarian vehicle by buyers. And with the superchargers, you really can drive the SF-LA corridor, which in CA at least, is very very good.

For most people today, an all-electric car is a pricey second car that you can't use on longer trips. Nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of families have a couple vehicles, one of which is an SUV/minivan and the other a car. It's not even exactly unheard of for one person to own a couple of vehicles (I do). The main issue today is price which does indeed tend to put Teslas in the same category as owning a BMW as a second vehicle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com