Robots eat cars

The obvious problem with steer-by-wire is that in the traditional design, it's not uncommon to lose power assist but not the mechanical connection to the wheels, so you can still steer the car. To completely lose steering control you'd need significant mechanical damage.

If the whole thing goes through the computer then there are lots of new ways to fail. Steering wheel position sensor goes bad on the highway? Computer gets bad data. Control wires get disconnected or damaged? No data. Completely unrelated wires get shorted and fry the computer? No steering. Anything pops the wrong fuse? No power, no computer or steering motors.

Some of those can be mitigated with redundancy but you're still vulnerable to common causes. You have three position sensors and someone dumps their beverage down the steering column, are there any left and do you have any good way to determine which one(s)? The vehicle took some minor damage allowing water to get somewhere it's not intended to, any way to guarantee you're not about to lose both sides of a redundant electrical system the next time it goes through a puddle infused with conductive road salt?

> Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?

I guess me, though I’d probably opt for the Y instead. I have a friend who drives a Taycan, one of the sportier variants with 4 wheel steering and blistering acceleration, and it’s nice, but it’s clear that they’re still crap at computers and interfaces, and I just really don’t want to go back to traditional car industry software interfaces and feature sets after our Tesla. I doubly don’t want to deal with a dealership ever again. Also, love their mobile service which comes to our garage and fixed a flat on two different occasions while I was working at home, super convenient. Roadside assistance was great when we got a flat in the middle of nowhere with no shops open anywhere nearby, they coordinated getting a tow truck out to us to tow it to a Costco like 40 miles away, gratis. Also, it’s just been a great car for us, extremely practical, great for long road trips, fun to drive, the autopilot works well and makes long drives much more pleasant, especially traffic. I don’t know why people confidently declare them to be bad cars - our experience hasn’t been flawless, but as a total package, it’s been the best car ownership experience I’ve had, including Acura, Toyota, Subaru, BMW, Nissans. I guess some combination of not liking Elon, and the issues from the scale-up period when they were making model 3s in tents, though those are long gone.

Actually i think it was the RAV 4 and BYD sold more EVs than Tesla.

How does it being motorized prevent injury?

> Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.

In practice they essentially got replaced with the Model 3 and Y, which didn't exist when the models being discontinued first came out.

It's because of the decline in battery prices. When the Model S came out, an electric car with that range had to be that price. Now it's overpriced for what it is so they'd either need to design one which is significantly more premium while still selling into an inherently lower volume market segment, or lower the price to reflect the current battery costs and then have it be too close to the Model 3.

What they really need to do is continue to move down, i.e. release a subcompact with less range than the Model 3 but on the cheap.

Or build a truck people actually want.