[Hermel]

>It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

The BMW electric cars (i3 and i8) are quite successful, beating Tesla sales-wise in Germany and selling half as many world-wide.

The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers). The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.

[martin_bech]

The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible, and the range is only so so, specially in cold weater. The i8 is really a plug in hybrid, looks really amazing, but is slower, holds fewer people, and has less space than my Tesla Model S85D. The autobahn is very valid point, driving at 200km/h+ for sustained amounts of time will drain the battery(the amount if sheer wind resistance, makes power used pr km. skyrocket), but driving at 130-150km/h, and stopping and charging when you are low (10% chargeish) is quite effective, as you charge quite fast, when the battery is warm, and low. Thankfully the autobahn always has sections of roadwork, and here the Model S powertrain is very effective at cruising :) .

[Reason077]

The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible

The battery on the i3 is warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles, with a drop below 70% of the original capacity considered to be a battery failure.

Tesla also have an 8-year battery warranty, with unlimited miles, but (afaik) they do not explicitly specify what level of capacity loss would be a warranty failure.

Considering most people are unlikely to exceed 100,000 miles in 8 years in a "city car" like the i3, is this really a horrible warranty?

[martin_bech]

I was sure the warranty was worse, when I was looking at buying one, but 70% of realworld range would be something like 44miles on a full charge to empty. That would be horrible. My Tesla has lost very very little range in ist first year, 1 or 2%.

[Reason077]

I see your point. A 30% drop in capacity in an 80-mile range car is worse than a 30% drop in one that started with 280 miles.

But these are worst-case scenarios. Hopefully the batteries will last much longer than what they're warrantied for.

And with any luck, affordable aftermarket battery replacements will be common enough by the time the battery needs replacing (and may give a lot more range, too).

[Reason077]

The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers).

OK, if you're averaging 200 km/h on the Autobahn then you will run out of energy pretty quickly. But this is just as true with ICE vehicles. If you're getting twice the energy consumption in an EV then you'll also be getting twice the fuel consumption in an ICE, and you'll have to stop and refuel pretty quickly.

So, with an EV, as long as there is a fast enough charger at the other end, who cares? You travelled 200km in that hour, you probably got where you wanted to go. Even if you spend 25 minutes recharging at a supercharger, you still got there quicker than if you drove at 100km/h!

Audi are already talking about 800V, ~300kW fast chargers that can recharge that 200km of range in 10 minutes. At these kind of speeds, the difference between recharging an EV and refuelling an ICE car becomes pretty negligable.

The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.

Simply not true. There's plenty of Tesla videos on YouTube showing sustained, comfortable driving at 200km/h+ autobahn speeds.

[pluma]

> averaging 200 km/h on the Autobahn

The recommended average speed on the Autobahn is 130 km/h. In reality due to congestion, noise reduction, construction work and maintenance there are probably more stretches with limits below that than not (typically 80 km/h or 60 km/h around roadworks, though there are also plenty of 100 km/h and 120 km/h stretches for no obvious reasons). Typical comfortable driving speed tends to be no more than 180 km/h, though if you don't want to have to break and accelerate all the time you probably don't want to go too far beyond 160 km/h.

I won't deny that depending on the time of day and the particular route you may be able to drive 200+ km/h on the Autobahn but talking about the implications of 200 km/h average speed as if it was an even remotely realistic representation is frankly absurd.

[lucaspiller]

> where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers)

Won't this be the case for any car though, especially sports cars which usually have a lower range? If you are driving at an average speed of 160km/h+ then you are going to need to stop fairly often. With the current EV technology any car will feel limited compared to an oil powered car which you can 'recharge' in under 5 minutes.

[usrusr]

Sure, that holds for any EV. Aerodynamic drag is such a drag, to put it in a really terrible pun.

That's why in a market with a high speed road network, the whole gambit of marketing EV as sexy fast car fails. It's trivial to make an EV max out traction for acceleration (aka "american fast") but battery density makes it impossible to give them any semblance of high speed endurance ("german fast").

It's therefore absolutely no surprise that the german car industry is doomed to focus on boring "reasonable city car" for their EV efforts and does not build their own entries for the Tesla class of cars. They have to skip the training wheels phase of building expensive luxury acceleration monsters and jump right into the much more difficult task of selling boring, reasonable cars that won't take a deadly hit when the manual says that you can't go fast if you want to see anything close to the advertised range. The autobahn has been a successful marketing stunt for many decades ("might be designed by engineers who push 200 km/h every day on their way to work" was an implicit ingredient of brand identities), but for electric, it is suddenly backfiring.

[JugMarker]

I would love a Tesla for my daily commute in Frankfurt, but there are no charging stations. I actually live in walking distance of a Tesla store, but you can charge your car only during business hours.

[jvm]

Surely you have never tried to operate an i3 at 80 MPH, I can assure you it has at most 50 miles range at that speed.