Tesla Model S Outperforms Aston Martin
autocar.co.uk
autocar.co.uk
The Rapide is a $150k car that is outperformed by a $25k Ford Mustang. No one has ever gone into the draft room and thought to themselves "If only I could design a vehicle that cost less to produce than the Rapide AND was sportier!". Outperforming it is not an achievement.
I actually revel in wildcard comparisons that demonstrate just how remarkable the Model S is.
And let's not overlook the obvious: they are both upscale sedans with a penchant for spirited driving. This isn't a sedan vs coupe or sedan vs pickup truck comparison. It is actually conceivable that a Rapide buyer would cross-shop a Model S because of the unique cache of the Model S, and much less conceivable they would cross-shop a Mustang.
Now, when Tesla starts slogging it out in the 30 to 40k range write me, until then they are just skimming off the crowd that with excess money who expect the same in their cars.
Hats off to their accomplishment, but maintaining quality and luxury at that price range is baked into the price.
Good luck finding a home in the UK for the same price as a Tesla S.
Finding a house here in Sweden in that price range is easy, as long as you're willing to live where no one else wants to.
http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/houses/liverpool-city-centr...
If you buy second-hand you can also easily pick up an Aston for cheaper than a new Tesla S, so say the classifieds. I wouldn't recommend leaving it unattended outside your £40k Liverpool house though. Probably best not to drive it into the estate at all.
[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster [2] http://www.teslamotors.com/models [3] http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx [4] http://green.autoblog.com/2013/08/07/tesla-sold-5150-models-...
Homes in London? Not even close.
Operating costs of these cars are meaningless to people who can afford them, so until there's a Tesla in the $20,000--$30,000 range I don't see that as something that's going to factor into a purchase decision for most people.
I personally would never spend more than $10,000 on a car, and I'd have to be having a really weak moment to even spend that. I still find Tesla to be interesting to read about, they are quite clearly the best effort yet at an electric vehicle, but for me they will likely always be just a curiosity, sort of like a Cray supercomputer. Amazing, but really special-purpose.
I also wouldn't write off operating costs as a reason — certainly, those who can afford them can likely afford the operating costs of similarly priced ICE cars, but my experience is those with a greater amount of money tend to be more frugal than those with slightly above average income. There's also the difference between wealth and income — purchase power for something like a car may well be done on the basis of wealth, while maintaining it done on income.
Couldn't care less. Couldn't.
You are comparing cars that don't really compete, yet the Tesla matches or outperforms them. I personally like to know that it's faster than X or better equipped than Y or drives better than Z.
I wouldn't buy an AM because I need a 4 door sedan for my lifestyle. Yet, isn't it useful to know that it is as refined as a high-end sports car?
Fine. So you'd be interested to see the Tesla compared to a WRC car, and you would find it useful to hear that the Tesla can pull higher g's on an asphalt skidpad and has a nicer interior?
isn't it useful to know that it is as refined as a high-end sports car
You got that out of this video? They barely even mention fit-and-finish. The main focus between the two is the acceleration comparison, which says zilch about refinement.
Sure, I'd read that article. Throw the Tesla onto a dirt track too, I'd read that as well. Hell, I want to know if it can go upside-down in a sewer tunnel. I don't see the problem here.
Oh, the Tesla has a nicer interior than the stripped Subaru racing shell? Count me impressed! (said no one)
Unfortunately I would be very surprised if Top Gear touches a Tesla car again with a 10-foot pole (and I can't say I blame them).
I think they both had wildly different expectations of what was appropriate in that situation. Neither came out looking very good, IMHO.
(This is part of why Top Gear America is but a shadow of Top Gear UK)
Top Gear lied. Tesla wasn't expecting special treatment for sponsorship, they were expecting a modicum of honesty. You don't get to put this down to "culture clash" unless you're defining "ethical" and "unethical" as cultures.
Judges aren't arbiters of truth, they're arbiters of law. If your standard for truth is "a judge didn't say it was legally defamatory", I hope nobody ever trusts anything you say.
Oh no! They showed a dramatization of running out of power while driving it on their track! How dare they!
(while driving around the track, cornering) "This car then really was shaping up to something wonderful. But then..."
(cut to Jeremy in the Roadster, a musical cue cutting off the soundtrack, signalling a problem. Jeremy pumps his foot, looks down at his foot and back up with a perplexed look on his face, and says "Oh", with backround noise of the Tesla decelerating.
Jump to outside view of the Roadster rolling to a stop in the middle of the track, with Jeremy narrating "Although Tesla say it will do two hundred miles, we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles." During this the scene changes to men pushing the Roadster in a hanger.
More narration from Jeremy, "And if it does run out, it's not a quick job to charge it up again."
Make of that what you will, I don't think words do it justice, which is why I included the video[0]. The narration is accurate, but the portrayal clearly implies something more than the narration, making it very to misconstrue what the facts are. The facts are, by the way, that the Roadster never ran out of power, they ran it for a few hours, decided they didn't want to wait for it to run out, and staged that portion.
Now, Top Gear is clearly an entertainment and comedy program, but to act like that's the end of it is also clearly ignoring the reality of the situation. Top Gear is less like SNL than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Viewers expect it to not be too serious, but right or wrong, they also expect to be able to get some information from the show, knowing that they'll need to sort through the context to determine whether it was a joke or not.
Keeping all that in mind, to me Top Gear seems to have overstepped slightly here. Then Tesla overreacted with a lawsuit. That's why I said neither seems to have come off well.
[1]: http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/electric-shocker, start at 4:17 for the relevant scene.
Sometimes they fabricate things to make an awesome car look awful, sometimes they fabricate to make a mediocre car look awesome.
The common denominator is that they fabricate for the sake of entertainment. Anybody who actually watches the show would know and embrace that.
But engaging the press in a press release war creates the wrong image for the company. Who will hear about it? Viewers of Top Gear and the NY Times. And they won't be likely to guess their beloved news source is in the wrong. You can't win that kind of fight and he should have known better than to try. I can't believe it has been good for Tesla on balance.
Top Gear is the Daily Show of automobile journalism. Although it's entertainment, a surprising number of its viewers would cite it as their primary source of auto news.
Just as with the Daily Show audience, the Top Gear audience isn't thinking very critically about every subject presented. With that kind of audience, it's all about appearances. Merely having heard that there has been a kerfuffle over their prior coverage of Tesla is sufficient for viewers to think, "well, perhaps what I saw about Tesla on Top Gear wasn't quite accurate." In other words, since loud and silly is all that this audience can perceive, I think Musk did the right thing.
I was skeptical of Musk's reaction to the Times, but in net, I think Tesla came out of that looking seriously intolerant of journalistic hijinks. And many people respect that.
Jesus, is there some bad blood between HN and Top Gear? Or is this the bad blood, the Tesla thing?
On second thought, I could see that being it. HN pretty much idolizes Musk after all.
But, whether you and I see it as entertainment is somewhat moot when, like the Daily Show, much of its audience actually gleans the totality of their auto news intake from this entertainment show. Because, frankly, many are not interested in watching the serious news shows, automotive or otherwise.
I was also on the side of it being a slight misstep for Tesla to make as much of an issue of the NYT and Top Gear problems, but in hindsight I think it's paid off for them. There's been so much good press now that people thinking back on the events may have a different opinion than when they first heard about it, and Tesla was less well known.
It doesn't really matter if their beloved news source is right or wrong, it still paints Tesla as litigious. The only time such suits over reviews expressly supported by the manufacturer go over well is when the reviewer committed gross fabrications or other inaccuracies.
The omissions in their suit speak quite loudly to me. For example, I just went back and rewatched the Top Gear review. They mention the engine overheated in one Tesla, and in the other the brakes failed while it was charging. I notice Tesla only made a big deal about the race track range estimate, which if I recall they didn't even claim was wrong- just misleading. That leaves an especially bad taste in my mouth- it's almost like Tesla is trying to discredit the apparently real failures by nitpicking unrelated minor details.
It all looks even more shady when you consider how few of these sorts of scuffles come up with Top Gear & other car companies.
I think a suitable segment to parody would be the (rocket assisted) Mini Cooper Ski-Jump[1] from the Top Gear Winter Olympics Special[2].
For the low low price of a single Model S, a Merlin engine, and some quality time bodging one onto the other[3], he'd have a guaranteed viral hit in which to make his appeal to the public, as well as, almost certainly, the credibility of producing either a much better jump, or a much larger fireball.
As the saying (sorta) goes: "Never get into a rocket fight with a rocket scientist who owns his own rocket making company."
[1] http://www.bbcamerica.com/top-gear/videos/mini-ski-jump/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_Winter_Olympics
[3] plus somewhere with a ski-jump they don't really like that much, and whose authorities don't have a problem with a mostly-horizontal rocket flight-plan, which might be tricky.
The Rapide is no slouch, to be sure, but acceleration falls somewhere in the middle of a larger spectrum of goals for that car.
Maybe putting the Aston into 1st would be more fair, but that's not a realistic real-world test. You don't mill around town in 1st gear. It's a surprising result because having full-torque at all times still helps when you are milling around at local-town speeds. It's not just an electric-car pony trick.
I don't think it's fair to compare the Model S with the M3. The M3 (well, the M4) aims to be a compact executive. In terms of wheelbase, the Model S is much closer to the M5 and the Rapide.
What I really want is the Tesla S4/S5 or 335is-equivalent, though.
Sorry, I don't think the tech is there. Either the range would suffer (due to more compact frame allowing for fewer cells safely) or the power would be gimped (to allow for lower overall battery capacity).
Electric cars are competing with the entire petroleum-fuel supply chain, and as such, are fighting a david vs. goliath battle.
That Tesla does this, has won consistently, and wins with style is why their stock is up 500% over the past year.
Of course, they've picked their battles, and fighting the S4 or 3 series isn't one of those they're ready to fight (yet). Maybe, like Apple, they never will (Apple ceded the enthusiast/gaming desktop market years ago).
I'd also take a car which had the same general size and chassis as the Model S but with a larger, more-secure trunk at the cost of seating capacity. My dream car is a 2-seat coupe with a trunk the size of a compact pickup truck bed.
Of course here in the Seattle area there are tesla model S cars on every other street so the curb appeal story is a little different.
Don't get me wrong, I believe Tesla is an incredible company and doing something awesome. But there's more to a car than just performance specs.
That being said, the reviewer mentions that the interior and exterior is on the same level as the AM, yet the AM feels dated.
All that stuff is fine, I guess. There will always be luxury markets, and that's where the Rapide is aimed, and I'm sure the purchasers like them just fine.
But that's not where Tesla is aimed. I think there was a Matthew Yglesias post a few days back about exactly this: look at Tesla's stock price. They're looking to be another GM or Toyota or Daimler, not just another spit-and-polish luxury vendor (or Ford subsidiary in this case, I believe).
The real point here is that there's an existing market for performance sedans, performance is something that can be measured objectively, and Tesla's offering competes very well.
Here's an example of their level of effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH_JaKvqdh4
Is that good enough for you? Or do you still need clarification? Because I can cite 90+ years of history.
Better statements would be "Astons are higher quality than Teslas" (subjective), or "Astons are made by hand and Teslas are not" (objective).
That's the point of your parent's comment. Acknowledging that the two vehicles are designed with different things in mind, and thus are sort of like racing apples and oranges.
By all indications, what they come up with will be better quality and better featured than the equivalent offering from the traditional auto companies. If they can pull that off, I doubt any investors will end up suffering for it...
But Autocar also do comparisons that don't really mean much, like a track race between an SUV and a trackday special. The rolling start race with the Aston isn't meant to signify anything other than the real world result of the huge torque in an all electric. When the Model S ships in the UK their review will be a must read. This is just a little fun.
That's a huge but necessary undertaking to make it a viable alternative to traditional cars with their vast network of petrol stations.
These comparisons between expensive performance cars are fun but they're only done for entertainment value. Ultimately this car is changing the industry and the fundamentals to how automotive transport is designed and serviced.
If ever there was a collectors car, decades into the future this will be it.
Actually if car manufacturers take an existing, good looking car and swap the engine with a battery bank it would be something I would be interested in driving. But instead they somehow make their hybrids and EVs as ugly as possible.
If only Tesla manufactured auto-rickshaws which is popular in cities like Bangalore. We would have green, silent and "cool" mobility. We would be still stuck in traffic jams but hell, it would be a walk in the park compared to now.
Of course, take heed from the Insight and Prius of the late 90's vs. the Prius of the 2000's. You have to hit just the right mark of ordinary but not too ordinary- if it is too weird, people won't buy, but if it's too normal nobody will notice how progressive and smart and cool you are for buying it.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html
"Electricity is a significant source of energy in the United States and is used to power homes, business, and industry. The combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity is the largest single source of CO2 emissions in the nation, accounting for about 38% of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 32% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2011. The type of fossil fuel used to generate electricity will emit different amounts of CO2. To produce a given amount of electricity, burning coal will produce more CO2 than oil or natural gas."
A lot of people don't realize the amount of CO2 that electricity produces.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2013/08/21/with-the-...
"The Tesla’s state-of-the-art materials, particularly that $30,000 battery, take a massive amount of energy to build–and that energy comes from fossil fuels, particularly coal. In fact, some studies argue that the Tesla battery takes so much fossil fuel energy to make that the car over its lifetime emits more CO2 than a gasoline-powered car."
The second link is a propaganda piece on a guy's blog.
>"In fact, some studies argue that the Tesla battery takes so much fossil fuel energy to make that the car over its lifetime emits more CO2 than a gasoline-powered car."
That car being a Prius, not a comparable full-size sedan.
The study also assumes a vehicle lifespan of 100,000 miles, or about 8 years of driving. I would be quite surprised if an all-aluminum car with few moving parts dies 3 years before the average age of cars on the road today (11.4 years).
Link to the actual report: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/a-roadmap-to-climate-frie...
Edit: digging deeper, their whole argument ultimately rests on this report: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es103607c
GreenCarCongress reviewed it, saying
>They also found higher life cycle global warming emissions than have been previously reported.
And they are actually doing it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Renewable_ene...
The share of electricity produced from renewable energy in Germany has increased from 6.3 percent of the national total in 2000 to over 25 percent in the first half of 2012. Renewable energy share of gross electricity consumption rose from 10% in 2005 to 20% in 2011.
There are many factors that this statement fails to take into account. Perhaps most importantly, the efficiency at which that energy is turned into useful power to propel the vehicle. Further, this is speaking very broadly about these fuel sources, and so is not directly applicable to specific complex. A quick google search surfaced a DOE primer[1] on EVs that claims that they are both "Energy Efficient" since "Electric vehicles convert about 59–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels—conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels." and "Environmentally Friendly" because "EVs emit no tailpipe pollutants, although the power plant producing the electricity may emit them. Electricity from nuclear-, hydro-, solar-, or wind-powered plants causes no air pollutants." On the latter point, power plant technology is increasingly moving away from dirty coal generation processes in the developed world, so gas powered vehicles will be at an increasingly great disadvantage.
The EPA also uses a method for rating vehicle fuel efficiency of non-petrol burning vehicles called eMPG[2] (effective miles per gallon) that takes into account the energy potential of the ultimate fuel source/sources used by the vehicle and converts them to the MPG (miles per gallon of petrol) scale. Electric vehicles rule the top of the rated vehicles followed by a couple hybrids and deisel compacts. EVs tend to be ~2x more fuel efficient than similarly sized petrol vehicles when compared by this particular method.
Concerning the Model S in particular, the EPA rates it as the most fuel efficient large sedan at 95 eMPG. Speaking generally, the only car class (does not take into account trucks and SUVs) that is led in fuel efficiency according to the EPA is the Midsize Station Wagon class. It is led by the Prius Model V, and the class does not seem to have a pure EV option. Every other class is led in fuel efficiency by an EV.
Finally, according to the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Emissions calculator, the 2013 Tesla model S generates a US average of 250 grams per mile driven of Greenhouse gas emissions compared to the average new car at 500 gpm[3]. So half as bad as the average new vehicle in terms of GHG emissions.
P.S. Sorry for the somewhat poorly structured nature of this comment. It evolved organically along with the research used to produce it.
[1]http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml
[2]http://www.epa.gov/carlabel/electriclabelreadmore.htm#2
[3]http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?zipCode=78641&year=20...
[edit: I can never seem to remember that the editor eats up single newlines, fixed the footnotes section so that they don't all appear on the same line.]
One reason it would be cool to all switch to electric powered vehicles is that we'd centralize practically all consumer energy to one source (not counting the relative bit of natural gas used for home heating). This means that we'd only have to worry about energy reform of one source.
Yes, but 60% of the cost of petrol in the UK is taxes & VAT.
It's already happening in the US:
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212311986/states-targeting-hyb...
So, to the extent that "impact on public roads" becomes more divorced from "consumption of gasoline", gas taxes get worse at performing their primary purpose (they still serve the secondary purpose of internalizing social costs associated with burning gasoline, but that's not their main purpose.)
So for 1 year that's 1,514L. And 1L of super unleaded = £1.43, so you're spending £2,165.02 per year on petrol. You can make your own figures up for insurance and what have you - let's call it £5,000 per year, averaged out. Assuming the Tesla is £80,000, you don't break even until year 6, assuming the Tesla's running costs are £0/year.
If you do drive a lot you'd probably buy some kind of diesel car, so then you could expect more like 30mpg, perhaps, assuming you're going for the equivalent of this 20mpg thing. And the break-even part recedes further into the future, or you can just drive more.
(I've no real feel for what sort of car you'd get for £50,000 though. At a guess: BMW 530d, Jaguar XF, Range Rover TDV6...? Something like that. Are those really the Tesla Model S's natural competitors?)
Honestly, its Detroit that should be dead scared, the Volt is a piece of crap, and I don't see anything Hybrid that's interesting.
There was an incident in which a wrecked Volt caught fire three weeks after a crash test. But if you haven't left your car three weeks after a severe side impact, you probably have bigger problems.
VW's position is more interesting. According to them, Diesel is preferrable over electric for a wide range of use cases. And I guess they are right as long as battery technology does not significantly improve.
I was going to go pick up one in a few hours to see how it handles. Benefit being free HOV lane access.
They could murder it on the very top and low end of the market.
i've heard numerous people (i live in LA) and seen numerous comments on the internet say that now they "get it" - that is - they "get" why people would be "into" cars. like it was a huge mystery before, why someone would be passionate about automobiles.
it's mind blowing. how can you not "get" why people are into cars (even if you yourself aren't into cars?)... like, i understand perfectly well why people are "into" things that i'm not.
So the article seems more like a backhanded compliment.