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by jtaillon
2633 days ago
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Disclosure: I'm a Tesla owner; I don't understand the point of this argument. Yes, in a ICE vehicle you can reach your destination marginally faster (we're talking about an hour on an 11-hour trip up the I-95 corridor, in my experience), but is that actually an important factor? For 99.9% of trips that are within a couple hundred miles of home, travel time is the same. If time is such an important factor on a long road trip, you should probably just be flying instead. I would venture that the number of people that want to drive > 5 hours, and have a requirement to do so "as fast as humanly possible" is pretty small. In that regard, the Model 3 is a BEV that requires practically zero compromises for both day-to-day and long road trip travelling, which is primarily due to the money and effort Tesla has spent on building the SC network. For that reason, I would not consider another EV besides Tesla until other manufacturers (or whoever) puts their money where their mouths are and builds out a fast-charging infrastructure that enables such long-distance travel. |
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> If time is such an important factor on a long road trip, you should probably just be flying instead.
This is rather tone deaf. Not surprised. A car designed and priced for rich people, attracts rich people. What a luxury it must be for you to afford to fly. Plenty of people make road trips. Growing up all we did was drive, often times 15 hours, for vacation. Can't imagine stopping every 3 hours for a half hour to charge. That's 2 and a half hours lost out of our vacation. Then you have to make sure there is a place to charge at your actual destination...
Tesla certainly has the best build out, they're the disruptors - of course they're ahead. But the value isn't there yet, for me to switch from ICE. It's really expensive. Servicing is an absolute nightmare. Charging at home isn't always quick enough. The supercharger network is on interstates mainly - that gets you a lot of places, not all places.
You can continually nip at the edges and say "who really drives like that" or "who's really going to those places." That's beside the point - they're excuses. ICE is simply a better product right now. it has none of the downsides, except eco-friendliness. I mean, hell, you can get a solid Corolla for a fourth of the price of a Model 3. It's great on gas, and gas is cheap anyway.
If Tesla figures out its scaling issues and the market adds some competition and the product is there, I'll buy in. Just not ready to yet.