311–320 of 367 posts
Model S well equipped lease is <$1000, why the hell anyone without f-u money would shell out $100k upfront I'll never know.
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> > trying to be a fast car but only really good for 0-60 in a straight line > LOL. I sense hurt feelings. A Model S weighs something like 4700lbs, depending on battery? I suppose it depends on one's definition of "fast car", but I personally consider more than straight line performance, and lighter cars have a distinct advantage. I agree with Lotus's Colin Chapman: "performance through low weight". > > no OBD-2 port…
Porsche's 911 and Boxster have lower Personal Injury Claim frequencies My first thought at this statistic was to wonder if these drivers are less likely to survive to file...
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Between the touch screen control screaming "Look! Cool! Future! Oh yeah we had to sacrifice tactile feedback and usability when driving while ignoring fifty years of safety research but Cool!", trying to be a fast car but only really good for 0-60 in a straight line (and literally incapable of doing five laps at Laguna Seca without overheating and going into limp home mode), no OBD-2 port as another poster pointed ou…
> Oh yeah we had to sacrifice tactile feedback Nonsense. You need tactile feedback while driving. You will not be using the center console while driving. You will not even be looking at it. All of the stuff you need while driving is tactile. > trying to be a fast car but only really good for 0-60 in a straight line LOL. I sense hurt feelings. > no OBD-2 port as another poster pointed out Why would it need an OBD-2 po…
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> People kill 40K/people a year in the US simply driving, and injure/maim hundreds of thousands. Not true. People kill 40K people by crashing their cars into them, not by "simply driving". Make crashing your car into people illegal and punish that. No reason to ban driving.
> Make crashing your car into people illegal and punish that. No reason to ban driving. Except that people don't crash their cars deliberately, it's unintentional and unavoidable. There's no point making it illegal to do something that only happens accidentally. People will still do it accidentally. The only thing you can do is mandate changes to the system which remove the possibility that those mistakes will be mad…
And people can still speed unintentionally by forgetting to check the speedometer every so often, but speeding is still illegal.
Not stopping at a stop sign or red light for a right turn is illegal, but people often times make "California Stops" unintentionally.
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> A Model S weighs something like 4700lbs, depending on battery? I suppose it depends on one's definition of "fast car" What? Fast means fast. The Model S goes fast. It has better performance than cars it competes with, like BMW 5/7 series, etc. Is it the fastest car? No. And why would it need to be? It's a luxury sedan, not a race car. > Because OBD-2 is a standard with an entire ecosystem built around it. It's an a…
> Every car should have an open API that is easily accessible using any computer, rather than specialized equipment. This is the excellent statement but coupled with the threat of being kicked off the warranty (which means no repairs whatsoever since no independent shops) and being assaulted by lawyers with charges of industrial espionage if you veer a little to the left or to the right does not exactly make it a mod…
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I think you have no idea what you're talking about. There's an independent repair shop just down the street from me that has as much business as they can handle (they smartly located themselves right outside a major employer's campus, so it's a convenient location for all the people who work there). Everyone knows dealerships are expensive. With the average age of new cars being over 11 years now (according to the ar…
And how many of those people would take their car there after they switch jobs? I'm betting very few. Also things like tires and oil changes are different than major repairs.
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Your computer power supply has a ~400 volt rail in it. Are you unwilling to ever open a desktop computer? The Tesla battery has contactors inside of it, so you'll only have 400V live when the car is on. Additionally, assuming the HV is floating relative to the chassis, you need to touch two spots at different potentials to actually get shocked. That said, it looks like this is an attempt to prevent service of a lot o…
"Your computer power supply has a ~400 volt rail in it. Are you unwilling to ever open a desktop computer?" Not at 1000 amps, it doesn't ...
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> > trying to be a fast car but only really good for 0-60 in a straight line > LOL. I sense hurt feelings. A Model S weighs something like 4700lbs, depending on battery? I suppose it depends on one's definition of "fast car", but I personally consider more than straight line performance, and lighter cars have a distinct advantage. I agree with Lotus's Colin Chapman: "performance through low weight". > > no OBD-2 port…
> A Model S weighs something like 4700lbs, depending on battery? I suppose it depends on one's definition of "fast car" What? Fast means fast. The Model S goes fast. It has better performance than cars it competes with, like BMW 5/7 series, etc. Is it the fastest car? No. And why would it need to be? It's a luxury sedan, not a race car. > Because OBD-2 is a standard with an entire ecosystem built around it. It's an a…
It goes fast in a straight line, perhaps better than it's competitors. It's also portly compared to some of it's competitors, and not as nimble. Fast in a straight line is boring.
> It's an absolutely horrible standard and that entire ecosystem should die. Every car should have an open API that is easily accessible using any computer, rather than specialized equipment.
OBD-2 certainly has its warts, but it's an interoperable industry standard. I have a hard time believing that an OBD-3 or a legacy-free de novo interoperable standard would be any less wart-free. Some warts come from interoperability compromises, some from the industrial constraints, some from the bureaucracy. I'll take an interoperable standard over any proprietary API, no matter how nice that API might be.
> Has anyone actually ever died in a Tesla? I believe one person did.
Amazingly, this is not a unique feat! There's actually a growing list of cars that are without recorded deaths: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/50/1/1
> Yes. Because Elon Musk is pulling a Henry Ford. They're more vertically integrated than any other car company. I'm not sure that's a good thing ... but it does support my point.
I don't see any basis for your claim that Tesla is more vertically integrated than any other car company, and I don't buy it. A DDG search pulled up this short list of Tesla subsystem vendors, and there are plenty that are obviously not 'Murican: http://moneymorning.com/2014/05/08/tesla-suppliers-list-thes...
In fact, Monroney stickers I see online put the domestic parts content of a Tesla Model S at 50%, here's one: http://www.midway-group.com/inventory/2015-tesla-model-s-p85...
> Well, yeah. Someone has to pay for it to get built and to maintain it. It's free in the sense that I don't have to explicitly pay for it. It's just included and I can use it as much as I want.
A DDG search showed that some earlier Model S had a $2000 option to gain access to the Supercharger network, so that would seem to be a good estimate for the cost. The Monroney above shows it as "included", which I would say counts as explicit even though the price isn't transparent.
> The Model S and Model X are excellent cars. Not perfect, but excellent. There's a reason they're eating up the entire luxury market.
They certainly have a dedicated fanbase that should be the envy of any car company, and I understand why they are popular as peppy urban people movers. I personally find them soulless, but Tesla drivers would probably find the cars I enjoy to be vulgar and uncomfortable :)
As to the "eating up the entire market" article, my criticism there is that the other luxury marques have a more diverse product line with considerable overlap. Saying that the Model S is the single best selling car model in that grouping isn't informative if the cohort who would consider a Model S are buying a mixture of BMW models.
People used to repair televisions but at some point it became cheaper to just buy a new one due to the tech/manufacturing being sufficiently evolved and commoditized/cheap, as well as the issues involved with repairing more complex circuitry. Electric cars have the same potential, I think, because of their inherent simplicity. That potential already seems clear given that battery costs will keep falling.
One of the things that makes a car valuable is having a healthy aftermarket. It looks like, from this article anyway, Tesla is doing anything they can to make sure there is no aftermarket for their vehicles. To me, a car that you can't service yourself is worthless. A car that needs the manufacturer's permission to activate is not your car--it's owned by the manufacturer. And, when the manufacturer places a threateni…