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Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

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Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#111

Post by greglindahl »

haberman wrote: post #55
btilly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to survey their customers. Speaking personally, my wife and I are new customers. This is the first time that we've spent over $30k on a car. Between rebates, the cost of gas, and reductions in maintenance costs, we think that we save somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 on the lifetime cost of ownership over the life of this car versus an ICE car. It is still a luxury, but between features like the driving assist,…

> But we have set it to never charge over 80% of capacity to maximize that limit. New Tesla owner here, hadn't heard that! Will you not charge above 80% even on trips?

You might consider reading the manual! It does discuss the issue.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#112

Post by FireBeyond »

sumeno wrote: post #97
King-Aaron wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60k is not a lot of money to spend on a car in this day and age.

This is an absurdly out of touch comment. The vast majority of cars sold in the US aren't even close to $60k. The average new car is only $37k and only about 30% of car purchases are new cars.

Agreed. $60K is well into Mercedes E class, BMW 5 class, Audi S class territory. "Not that much" for the average US carbuyer, not so much.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#113

Post by btilly »

pretendscholar wrote: post #89
webkike wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but electric cars have far fewer moving parts. Components are simply less likely to break.

Fewer moving parts does not mean that the components are less likely to break. A car with only one gear would have fewer parts but would break down more often.

That's a bad example. Early Teslas had 2 gears, but then got rid of that and now only have one. That got rid of the transmission and gearbox, and the car breaks less as a result.

ICE cars can't do that because their engines work best in a fairly narrow range of RPMs. But electric has no such limit.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#114

Post by Latteland »

twblalock wrote: post #72
Latteland wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla got money from California (effectively) for selling no emissions credits to other car companies. Other companies could have made evs too, they were just against it, except Nissan which also benfitted for this with the leaf. The 7500 tax credits for buying large battery sized evs helped Tesla too, but people got credits for butingbmw i3, Nissan leaf, gm volt gm bolt. It served a purpose which was to help know ki…

Tesla got almost $500 million from the Department of Energy. Yes, they paid it back, but that is not my point. My point is that Tesla would not have survived if it had not received that government money. Maybe its more meritorious to accept and repay a government loan than to be bailed out, but from the point of view of the taxpayer (and the free market) Tesla and GM both owe their survival to taxpayer money.

I believe it was a development loan, not a bailout. I don't understand why you point it out as underhanded. How would you compare Tesla to Chrysler and gm which really went bankrupt and had actual bailouts, not loans to develop new products in unexplored technical areas. GM got a more than $20b investment from the us government. I am glad we did save our auto industry in the us - but Tesla wasn't a bailout as I see it.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#115

Post by Someone1234 »

samfisher83 wrote: post #45

Sedans in general have cratered. Everyone is back to buying SUVs and Trucks. Its like we are going back to 1999.

An SUV sold today has as good or better MpG than a sedan sold in 1999.

For example the 1999 Subaru Legacy is 22 city / 29 highway.

A 2019 Subaru Outback has 25 city / 32 highway, 2019 Forester 26 city / 33 highway. Their brand new and huge three row Subaru Ascent is 21 city / 27 highway, just 1 MpG less.

Granted not all SUVs are this fuel efficient, but they're definitely better than they were in the 1990s. Most of the vehicles with legitimately bad fuel efficiency like the Nissan Xterra (16 city / 22 highway) got discontinued.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#116

Post by joenathanone »

jvehent wrote: post #21
smaili wrote: post #13

> Tesla’s competitors are feeling it. Sales of the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, the best-selling luxury sedan in the U.S., plunged 24 percent last month and are down 28 percent for the year through September. > And it’s doing so at a higher price than other mass-market cars. The most expensive versions of the Model 3 are currently the most popular, with an average selling price approaching $60,000. It would be very interes…

There is only a finite number of people willing/able to spend $60k on a recreational vehicle.

There is only a finite number of people.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#117

Post by FireBeyond »

CarVac wrote: post #107
FireBeyond wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No other cars on the road have drag coefficients as low as the Model 3 (or the Model S, for that matter). The Model S is the fourth lowest at 0.24, tied with the Mercedes S class, behind the Model 3 at 0.23. But leading the pack are the Mercedes CLA (0.22) and the Volkswagen XL1 (0.19).

I say that the XL1 doesn't count. I didn't count the EV1 either, which had the same drag coefficient. But TIL about the CLA. Note: the CLA was tested at 0.30 drag coefficient by Car and Driver, though.

Why wouldn't the XL1 count? It's got a production run, albeit limited.

Car and Driver's numbers for Cd are higher for everyone, it seems (though certainly the CLA was notably higher).

Then again the new A class is quoted at 0.22.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#118

Post by muraiki »

myko wrote: post #102
xltk wrote: post #90

I personally wouldn't purchase a Model 3. I rented the long range version for a round-trip trip from San Francisco to Sacramento (about 90 miles/2 hours each way). The main things that stood out: - Changing volume and airflow through the central touchscreen were much more challenging than the physical knobs and buttons most cars have. I'd even argue they were distracting and dangerous to use while driving. I don't be…

> the car slowed at a stop sign down to 20mph before blowing through it Not sure if you know or not, but want to make this clear - the current Autopilot feature does NOT know how to stop at signs or lights. It really is just really good lane adherence, and even that can be sketchy (hopping lanes into oncoming traffic, sudden hard braking for no reason).

Wow, if there was ever a perfect example of someone misunderstanding what "Autopilot" does in a manner that could have killed somebody, this is it!

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#119

Post by revscat »

Apocryphon wrote: post #50
alexandros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to go on the record as saying that the big car companies of today, short of a miracle, are on track to meet the big mobile phone companies of the pre-iPhone era. Remember when Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Sony seemed unassailable?

I would dispute that, in that big car companies have much deeper pockets, and thus have been readily spending on new tech, e.g. the big automaker acquisition of Cruise, Maven, Chariot. They seem more responsive to the changing nature of the industry.

I don’t think the big automakers — especially the Americans and Japanese — can switch gears, as it were. The reasons for this are discussed elsewhere in this thread, but thus far the EV models produced by the legacy manufacturers have been underadvertised, token vehicles. They are not shifting resources away from their current exclusive focus on ICEs, and there is no sign they ever will. Sure, they’ll do a press release. Or something like the Bolt that is lived by owners but forgotten by GM itself, who happily continues on basically the same as yesterday. They can’t change.

Maybe VW. Maybe. But GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda... I don’t see it. Toyota is still trying to make hydrogen a thing, ferchrissake. Meanwhile Tesla is eating the luxury segment alive.

If — and it’s a big if — Tesla can achieve profitability with the Model 3 and get their crossover SUV into production, they’ll own the world.

Re: Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans

#120

Post by FireBeyond »

CarVac wrote: post #107
FireBeyond wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No other cars on the road have drag coefficients as low as the Model 3 (or the Model S, for that matter). The Model S is the fourth lowest at 0.24, tied with the Mercedes S class, behind the Model 3 at 0.23. But leading the pack are the Mercedes CLA (0.22) and the Volkswagen XL1 (0.19).

I say that the XL1 doesn't count. I didn't count the EV1 either, which had the same drag coefficient. But TIL about the CLA. Note: the CLA was tested at 0.30 drag coefficient by Car and Driver, though.

Interestingly, there were some questions about C-and-D's comparison between the CLA and the S:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/mercedes-benz-cla-drag-co...

> The only Mercedes-Benz CLA model that actually is the aerodynamic benchmark for current production cars is the CLA 180 BlueEfficiency Edition, a variant of the small “four-door coupe” that will never be available in the US.

> With an official drag coefficient of 0.22, it bests the Tesla Model S by two whole points. On the other hand, a European-spec Mercedes-Benz CLA 250 sports a Cd of 0.28, which is still two points more optimistic than what Car and Driver's aero test concluded.

> Even so, what Don Sherman doesn't properly explain is that the US variant of the CLA 250 – the car they actually tested in the wind tunnel – doesn't sport the same aerodynamic mods as its European counterpart, such as active engine grille shutters, which make a tremendous difference in the car's drag coefficient at high speeds. In other words, the US-spec CLA 250 may very well sport a Cd of 0.30, could it not?

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