I've always been a fan. They are so incredibly good. Elon Musk and people at Tesla are showing the entire industry how to make cars.

I'll have to buy a new car in a year or so, and I so wish I could easily get a Tesla here in EU.

I've seen a couple Model S vehicles in my area and I get really jealous There's also a Tesla dealership in DC that I've walked by and drooled over. I'd absolutely get one if I could afford it.

I hope the company really takes off in the coming years. They're on the right track in terms of reducing the price of the cars, so lets hope they're able to get it down to something a tad more reasonable for the average car buyer, even dropping the base price another $20K would be a gigantic improvement (it's currently around $62K for the base model).

Indeed. And, just few days ago, this: http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/r...car-ever-tested .

Other than the price, I can't think of any disadvantage of owning one of these cars. Oh, and of course, the complete lack of "gas/power" stations in EU.

As you say, I really hope Tesla takes off.

As I said before, I will have to buy a new car soon, and it is frustrating seeing Teslas and not being able to get one for one reason or the other.

OMG, I love everything of this car. This is possibly my dream car. Should we tell Elon Musk about the Empeg, so that maybe he makes sure the Tesla in-car player is just as good?

http://vimeo.com/61821553 .

Gets better:

http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-achieves-best-ever-crash-test-score

I test drove a Roadster a few years ago and had a blast, inspiring me to become a car blogger (link). I recently did a test drive of the Model S and wrote that up as well (link). I pose the purchase decision as a question: "if you were willing to buy an Audi A7, would you pay the extra cash to buy a Tesla?" My conclusion is that the purchase isn't financially rational. On the other hand, if you're already prepared to make irrationally expensive car purchases (e.g., a Maserati Quattroporte), then Tesla has the perfect car for you.

Give them a few years. If a three year old Model S goes for $50k rather than $80k, that will change things a lot. Likewise, if the forthcoming "Gen III" work out (allegedly priced and equipped to be in the same ballpark as a BMW 3-series), then that might start a real avalanche of Tesla sales.

That makes me think, Dan, I wonder what kind of problems we're going to see with the used car market for electric vehicles. I'm going to be wary of an impending battery replacement if I buy a used Tesla...


I'd definitely like to start seeing those charging stations (especially the ones with THIS), but the lack of stations doesn't really bother me, since I'd be using it entirely as a commuter car.

Admittedly, Rome (where I live) has some charging stations around the city, mostly for electric Smart cars (existing as a result of Tesla-Mercedes agreement) and few other electric cars and scooters. And I even see two or three Smarts and two or three scooters in the last two years, which is possibly more than I expected but way less than I hoped.
So, if I wanted to buy a Model S or a Model X for a city commute, well, that would definitely be possible today, which is truly wonderful. Obvious to say, if all cars and motorbikes in Rome were electric, Rome would be an entirely different city to live in. And that possibly goes for every city.

But, would I buy a Model X next year for a 22Km daily city commute, in the heavy traffic? No. I'd buy something smaller and cheaper (Smart, Nissan Leaf, Renault small funny cool electric car). For a model S or X to make sense, I need to be able to go anywhere in EU, or in Italy at least. Or at least to reach major cities in Italy, assuming I like Elon Musk's company and paradigm so much. And I think I do.
But today, sadly, I'd hardly be able to get anywhere far from Rome, here. And, there are other electric options that make more sense for a city-only vehicle.

Why oh why. I love the Teslas!

A bit of Google searching and it seems the replacement cost of the 85 kWh battery is $12,000 (link). In the next 5-10 years, you can expect that price to go down as batteries improve. If you're trying to make a rational model of the used price of the car, you can pretend that you're buying two parts: the shell of the car and a $12,000 battery. Both depreciate at different rates. The battery pack's value drops linearly to zero as you put however many miles on it. The shell's value depreciates more like a car (a big loss, off the lot, a bunch in the first few years, and then probably slows down).

So far, Teslas seems to be mostly targeted at the sort of drivers who have dedicated garage space at home as well as a second car, for inter-city driving. Using a Tesla as your sole car, even once they finish rolling out their American "Supercharger" network, or keeping one with an apartment that doesn't give you the charging infrastructure, is just not where they're at right now.

Oh, definitely. It just doesn't make sense for MOST people right now. But infrastructure is what helps that. Cost reduction only helps so much, but at a certain point the logistics only make sense for people with garages (where the chargers can be installed).


You know, I wish I were as optimistic as you are. Battery tech is easily the #1 tech area that could use improvement. I just don't see that part improving enough - even in a decade - without a major leap. I hope that happens, though!


I'm very curious to see how this might change in the era of electric cars. Of course you're right about how cars depreciate, but it seems to me that electric car shells might have relatively less depreciation, considering there's less stuff in them to break down (isn't there). I remember one of the very minor parts of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" was a brief section where they talked about how easy it was to work on the car (for repair guys). There was no oil, for example. I don't know much about the internals of the Tesla, but is there less "stuff" in these cars that could break down? I'd imagine that would make the cars hold their value better, probably enough to offset the battery issue a little...

*edit*
ps- sorry for - as usual - talking out my rear end. I don't know what I'm talking about here, but I love electric cars and I'm dying to own one ASAP.

I was on the electric car race team at school, so my experience is fairly old and might not be relevant. However, in my experience, when something in the drive train broke, it wasn't bad to replace it, but it was borderline catastrophic.

In one weekend, we had two controllers go. The first time it resulted a small electric fire. Lucky it was in the garage and we were able to put it out before anything happened.

The second, was when we were walking the car from the pit to the garage after some testing and the result was instant full acceleration. It went from coasting to spinning the tires looking for traction to just GO. The driver was quick with pulling the emergency disconnect, otherwise you can imagine how bad that would have been, there were people everywhere.

Hopefully, things have gotten better, but when they did go wrong, they went really wrong.

I have to imagine that Tesla isn't making cars with those kinds of issues...

I would hope not, but just because something is easy to fix doesn't mean it getting broken isn't catastrophic.

I did actually apply to Tesla to manage the infotainment system team (back when I was still at apple) but they never replied to my resume....

As such, the infotainment system sucks rather when it comes to music management - you get slacker & tunein out of the box, but playing music from USB drives sucks rather badly.

My time at apple (= share options) means I now have a rather nice Model S. Nowhere for the empeg to fit, though...

I'm not sure whether the long-term future of in-car audio is for manufacturers to roll their own or to just delegate to your phone. Certainly, Apple's "iOS in the Car" effort has signed on a bunch of manufacturers, which is a promising sign. (I opined on this further in a blog piece.)

I'm sure you could saw a perfectly rectangular hole in the center of that big touch screen. Plenty of room.

Yes, I would have assumed so, actually, as now I have come to the conclusion that there is just NO awareness of how a proper in-car player could/should work, in the automotive industry.
BUT, Tesla seems so different than anything else in the automotive industry, so, they are promising in the area of infotainment too. Fingers crossed for the future.

BTW, I contacted Tesla for a Model S test drive. They were nice and responsive. Also, they don't know I can't afford it. Can't wait.

They've promised app support at some point; maybe that's the time to write a StrongARM emulator and run the empeg within a VM on the tesla...

That would be a dream come true.

You'd probably want to rethink things a bit, given that the empeg UI was built around four buttons and a spinner, while the Tesla has a mammoth touchscreen. That said, the first people to write apps for the Tesla will inevitably be the various big music services (Pandora, etc.). Given how many Teslas are floating around Google, I wouldn't be surprised to see ports of the many different Google apps with automotive relevance (Music, Maps/Navigation, and inevitably Google+, if for no other reason than the head of G+ owns a Tesla).

The big question for me is whether Tesla goes the Android route (well supported by ARM) or the web app route (growing in popularity, and making it pretty damn easy to port existing apps). I'll bet they go for web apps, if they do 3rd-party apps at all. I expect, with security concerns and whatnot, that they might just put off apps in their entirety, or at the least only allow them from "approved" vendors.

That big touchscreen had me wondering about the practicality of it. Is it a good idea to have relatively common controls, such as temperature, to be on a touch screen that you have to look at instead of something tactile that can use without looking at it while driving?

Tesla's steering wheel thumb buttons are also part of the equation. The left-thumb scrollwheel is I think hardwired to audio volume and the right-thumb scrollwheel is soft state, which you could assign to the fan speed, among other things. That lessens the need to touch the screen for common stuff.

In general, you can evaluate usability by breaking down a series of necessary steps (look for the button, navigate your finger to the button, press the button) and you can estimate the timings with remarkable accuracy (Fitts's Law is awesome). If I give you hundreds of little hard buttons, the time doesn't get much better. The empeg, on the other hand, doesn't require you to look for it. You can just feel for it and you can (eventually) remember the sequence of down-left-down-right codes and do the navigation without reading the screen.

That's for sure. As a matter of fact, when I personally thing of an Empeg rebirth I am really not specifically thinking of its physical layout, but rather its feature set and effectiveness in daily use. If I had to reimagine it on a Tesla screen, I'd definitely expand buttons size, and I'd use much more real estate to display album art, track info, etc. To mentionthe obvious bits.

I was impressed at the end of this electric motorcycle video by the way the rider pulled up to the old gas pump at what appeared to be some backwoods place and plugged in!