[djao]

Tesla redefines luxury. Traditional luxury car snobs object mightily to this new definition. In a way, I can understand their view. If some new group of people comes in and redefines a word that you've been using for decades, then it's normal to be upset. For example, for me, crypto will always mean cryptography, but it seems that normal people think crypto means cryptocurrency now.

For now, let's get past this initial disagreement by using a different name. I've seen people use the phrase "techno-luxury" to describe what Tesla is doing and to distinguish it from the usual notion of luxury cars.

Luxury cars, as I understand it, are characterized by some or all of the following things: physical comfort, richness of sensory experiences, quality of materials and build, noise reduction, and at the very high end of the market, "quirks and features" such as automatically opening and closing car doors, refrigerators in the back seat, umbrellas inside the door jambs, and so on. There is a category of luxury such as Ferrari or Bugatti that emphasizes performance to a certain extent, but I really really doubt that many people will take their Bugatti out to the track for a day.

Techno-luxury, on the other hand, emphasizes entirely different quirks and features: app access, long-term climate control (4 hours+) for when you're sitting in the car a long time, in-car youtube, in-car netflix, in-car video games, autonomous driving capability, built-in dashcam viewable from the app, location tracking, valet mode and other security features, and so on. There is some overlap between luxury and techno-luxury, in that some traditional luxury cars have some of these features, but Tesla still does it better than anyone else if you are specifically looking for techno-luxury, which I am.

[snotrockets]

Luxury is build quality: not just a list of features, but the care and effort taken in assembling all the parts into a car: tolerances, alignments, finish quality.

Tesla fails all, with frequent misaligned panels, paint bubbling, ill-fitting parts, etc. It has software bells and whistels, but shitty build quality for the hardware.

20+ years ago, we did a trade-off in the datacenter, replacing single piece of expensive hardware with multiple copies of cheap hardware, with software to patch over the deficiencies. That doesn't work as well when the product is a single piece of hardware.

With some smart software, I can run 3 servers at 50% uptime each, and get 100% uptime. I can't get one nicely assembled car from two shitty ones.

[djao]

I've not heard of build quality described as luxury. I think for most people functionality and bodily integrity is a basic requirement of a car, not a luxury item.

You're not buying a new car every day. As long as you have one good car, it doesn't matter very much to you how badly the other ones of the same model are built.

My car is 5+ years old and still working fine.