I drove the Model 3 last week. It’s a properly good car in it’s own right - It reminded me of the MOdel 3 from BMS in how it handles, of course the performance curve is totally different. The rethinking of the dashboard is perfect for the cell phone age. It’s Apple Good (back when Apple was good).
The performance curve - the instant power at any point is addicting. The seats were comfortable, and the trunk space was ample.
The build quality, at least on the unit I saw is _better_ then the S or the X right now. This is primarily due to the simplification of the assembly compared to the S and the X. Honestly, having driven both, I would buy a 3 before buying a S. The only killer feature I see missing is the air suspension, and we know that is coming for the 3.
They are going to sell a million of the 3s.
For the record, I’m not a EV or a green evangelist. I don’t have a snarky license plate, or solar on my roof. But I will be picking one of these up. It’s perfect for my use cases. People will compare it with the Bolt, but people forget that SUperchargers are Tesla only right now. Want to get from LA to NY? Easy in Tesla. With a Bolt, there are places that you just can’t go.
It looks like (judging by VIN allocations, which is not a great method, but also by drone videos) that Tesla hit 1k a week the last week or two of December. Assuming no huge bottlenecks remaining, that takes them solidly half way up their ramp, with one more huge jump - to 3-5k a week - remaining.
I believe Bolt is capped at 50kW fast charging, whereas superchargers provide 120kW, so not so fast for Bolt ;) (probably at least an hour to fully charge it's 60kWh battery)
People had the same questions about the Model X, the Model S before that, and even the Roadster before that. In every case, Tesla eventually was able to get production up and deliver. Tesla has no problem producing enough S and Xes.
To be fair, Roadster production was never really "up". I'm not sure demand was at any point satisfied before the model was discontinued. Less than 2,500 were produced.
I think people are underestimating the runway Tesla has, here. Tesla didn't even die in 2008. Now, they have a huge customer base, two other high-end car lines that are themselves doing well, and an enormous amount of goodwill plus a big moat (for charging in particular, at least in the US). Not only that, but SpaceX is doing fantastically well unlike in 2008.
I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued (above my pay grade, and I'm not invested anyway), but it's hard to make the case that Tesla is worse off now than in 2008.
>>I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued
The misconception I think a lot of Tesla fans have is that great product = great business. How much do you think Tesla's business is worth? A billion dollars? A trillion? Probably not the latter, and if they depended on that valuation to continue to do business (by virtue of access to continued investment), it wouldn't matter how great their cars are.
Their actual market cap is 50 billion dollars, more than Ford, and they will need to raise more money to continue operations. Ford makes 500 times more cars than them (based on some quick Googling, .3% market share of cars vs 15% for Ford). So if you're thinking Tesla is not overvalued, you have to think that Tesla will acquire a truly massive chunk of the car market, at the expense of well funded incumbents who have a head start in many aspects of car manufacturing and branding.
My point is that whether or not Tesla is overvalued is as important as whether or not their cars are great. I think their cars are great, but I'm a Tesla bear because I think expecting them to justify even a tenth of their valuation is unlikely.
People also forget that a Tesla has a magnitude fewer moving parts than a ICE(internal combustion engine) car.
The big issue in scaling up is making enough battery packs. Which is a question of ‘when’.
Once they have a monopoly on cheapest battery packs and enough superchargers, a Tesla model 3 is cheaper to maintain, cheaper to run and similar price to an ICE auto, probably better performance.
Unless they fuck it up, BE battery electric is the way to go. Energy to motion, Tesla does more than 100MPG.
The Nissan Leaf is already the model T. It's been out 6 years, is affordable, and has DC fast charging. Besides my own, I see them every day here in Kansas City, along with the Model S.
Actually, because Nissan screwed up introducing the new model year of Leaf, in November there were twice as many Model 3s delivered in the US than Leafs.
It's unusual for Nissan to screw up like that, but there you go.
> With a Volt, there are places that you just can’t go.
To be fair, you can charge any EV fairly quickly at any campground with 220V RV hookups. With adequate planning, I think you could drive a Bolt anywhere.
I wouldn’t describe the ~30MPH you get from a 240V RV plug as “fairly quickly.” It’s fine for an overnight charge, but you’ll basically be limited to driving the car’s single-charge range each day. It’s possible but I wouldn’t want to try it.
You can go from east to west coast in the US in 10 days while limiting yourself to ~210 miles per day. For a retired person with little need to hurry that's reasonable even with only nightly charging.
Personally, I have little interest in driving 600+ miles per day making fast charging minimally useful.
The big long range use cases in California is San Jose-Tahoe (with its mountain climb reducing range), LA-SF, LA-NV & SF-SD. So you would want a supercharger for those trips.
Also for car commuting in big metros, 40-60 mile one ways are common enough, which is 120mi round trip. The previous generation of affordable EVs had 80 mi ranges, which didn't work for those metros.
~8 hours charging at work is a plenty to top off after a 60 mile trip. However, 80 mile EV's are not designed for people with long commutes. I live 4 miles from work and their are charging stations in the office parking lot. So, based on my habits an 80 mile EV would cover 99% of my driving just fine.
However, I still think ~300 miles as the practical minimum because I do take longer trips and know I would occasionally forget to charge sometimes.
A lot of people don't have charging at work, so they have to charge at home. Or they might want to visit a friend that is 40 miles away who also doesn't have a charger.
What coastal cities are 2100 miles away? Maybe for few that are retired, but 210 isn't the best for trips that far, and that's assuming the chargers are exactly at where you need them to be
There are non-Tesla DC superchargers in the US, but yes, the network of those chargers is much less reliable and less well planned in the US. (Versus Europe which maps show a much more thorough ChaDeMo network than the US, which is arguably accountable solely to relative population densities of the continents and Tesla's US-first market focus.)
ChaDeMo could still catch up with the right gumption (the rest of the auto manufacturers teaming up, for instance), and there's still a lot of talk about how the two "standards" are easily interoperable with simple adapters (and Tesla has a Tesla-to-ChaDeMo adapter, but so far as I'm aware no one has yet to negotiate for a ChaDeMo-to-Tesla adapter to be sold; Tesla is in a position of strength for now so hard to blame Tesla on hedging that position a bit in the US).
At least it looks like the different "winners" in the US versus Europe might keep the game competitive in the current term.
That's not entirely true. There are no CCS DC fast chargers (the type the bolt uses) in much of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North/South Dakota. You might be able to drive from Seattle to NYC but you'd have to drive pretty far out of your way to do it.
Super chargers are available in all of those states, making any cross country driving in that area significantly faster and easier.
"Can't go" is probably the wrong term, but rather it's not very practical without a Tesla. "fast-charging" just isn't that fast in the US for non-tesla setups. 50kW max (which you don't normally get, usually it's something less) requires you to stop for at least an hour every 2-3 hours in a Bolt.
Add in winter conditions and driving at the usual ~75MPH and it gets worse than that. I wouldn't attempt any trip longer than ~200 miles in anything but a Tesla because even the superchargers at 130kW make it just ~bearable once the supercharger novelty wears off.
The performance curve - the instant power at any point is addicting. The seats were comfortable, and the trunk space was ample.
The build quality, at least on the unit I saw is _better_ then the S or the X right now. This is primarily due to the simplification of the assembly compared to the S and the X. Honestly, having driven both, I would buy a 3 before buying a S. The only killer feature I see missing is the air suspension, and we know that is coming for the 3.
They are going to sell a million of the 3s.
For the record, I’m not a EV or a green evangelist. I don’t have a snarky license plate, or solar on my roof. But I will be picking one of these up. It’s perfect for my use cases. People will compare it with the Bolt, but people forget that SUperchargers are Tesla only right now. Want to get from LA to NY? Easy in Tesla. With a Bolt, there are places that you just can’t go.
It looks like (judging by VIN allocations, which is not a great method, but also by drone videos) that Tesla hit 1k a week the last week or two of December. Assuming no huge bottlenecks remaining, that takes them solidly half way up their ramp, with one more huge jump - to 3-5k a week - remaining.