That is quite unreasonable to expect. The Renault Zoe came out at around the same time as the Model S and had over 150km of reasonable range, at half the price a Model 3 sells at today. It was already competitive.
150km of real world practical range is more than adequate. It's only 50% less than what the model S was when it came out, which is more than enough for the majority of people in the world.
At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry
I think you will find a much bigger 'silent mainstream' of those who Respect him for the significant progress he's brought into our world.
Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.
Nissan was selling the Leaf after the Roadster but before the S/X/3/Y.
The Leaf and the 3 basically met in the middle at the same time at about the $45K price point for similar cars.
Tesla was only first in the category of outrageously expensive cars for virtue-signalling rich people who fake-care about evironmentalism. And fake self-driving.
I bought a top-spec 2015 LEAF for $33K before $10K of incentives. If someone paid $45K for a LEAF around the 3's launch, it better have had $10K in cash in the trunk.
Looked at another way, if the LEAF and 3 cost the same, would many people have bought the LEAF?
Similar cars? Sure, they both have four wheels and are electric. I don't see many similarities though.
Tesla's emergence put the world on track to end ICE cars at least a decade sooner. That is a lot of CO2 that will not be put into the atmosphere. Getting people with expendable income to fund it is both a smart strategy and very equitable.
Their recharge network still sets them apart as well.
But why? Did tesla open source key scientific innovations in the scaling of batteries?
Don't think so.
See e.g. The seres f5 from Huawei. I don't know wether it's great but about the main metric, it has a higher range than teslas (1000km)
Zoom out a little and try and think about the bigger picture.
In many industries, you can see these "bar-raisers."
Starbucks didn't invent coffee, but they created a mass market for a more premium sort of coffee in a country that previously didn't see coffee as something more that a thing you chug down in the morning so you can wake up.
Nintendo didn't invent video games, but they raised the bar for home consoles after the "great video game crash" and have repeated the feat several times since despite rarely if ever being on the cutting edge of tech.
And so on.
Tesla did something similar. Previously, electric cars and hybrids were seen as dorky and decidedly uncool by most. Tesla changed that public perception. It's hard to imagine the "luxury" electric car market existing without them. Perhaps another company might have accomplished the same feat, but Tesla was the first one to pull it off.
From a raw innovation standpoint, these advances are huge because by creating new market segments, they ensure a flow of money into those markets. Tesla's expense has paved the way for billions if not trillions of dollars into EV R&D and battery R&D. That matters, a lot.
This is a bit of a "why dropbox when i can rsync" comment.
Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.
Great drive UX as opposed to what? Have you driven a modern Mercedes of the higher price tiers? They're pretty damn great to drive or be driven in (comfort and fun wise), but they don't have gimmicks like the door thing and such. If you're talking about those gimmicks I disagree, and if you're talking about "motor/battery/esc technology" I also disagree, they didn't innovate anywhere, they just hit the right market with their product in my amateur opinion.
If they "hit the right market" it means that market had not been hit before, so by definition they've done something new.
I don't have an interest in Tesla nor do I particularly like Musk, but objectively speaking, they must have done something right - they started a mass-car company from scratch in the third millennium, something very very hard; they popularized a technology that had failed to get traction for decades, and have taken the fight to behemoth corporations that had been bearish on the sector's overall future since the '90s. That simply cannot be just marketing or "gimmicks".
Glamor? Sure. Practicality? Eh. Maybe for daily commuting. When the IC companies convert over, Tesla shareholders are going to feel a ton of pain. The novelty will have worn off and the company will still pace at a mere fraction of its competitors. And at the very least, they'll all have vastly better QC than Tesla.
The "supercharger" network is something that no other manufacturer was doing or was seriously interested in doing, and it's an extremely practical concern.
> When the IC companies convert over
... a lot of them they might well end up buying batteries from Tesla. Tesla will also continue to be the benchmark against what EV will be measured, in the same way Ford continued to be a reference for decades after competitors matched them.
The only people who buy a car for their median usage are people who can afford two (or more) cars.
Everyone else has to buy to cover the 99% pctile or they’re screwed when they need to do something somewhat unusual (long drive to grandmas house, move, vacation, family emergency, whatever).
And for those who say ‘just rent!’ - I’ve tried, and most of the times you’d want to, you can’t get a rental, because a bunch of other folks got there first! Rental companies can’t buy enough cars to handle peak usage a few times a year.
Yes, but people don't buy vehicles simply for commutes, and IC vehicles will be around for decades for actual work. Nobody along the gulf or southern east coast is going to be buying an electric car as their sole mode of transportation if they have any common sense.
If 90% of the time one can own a median vehicle wherein they never have to go to the gas station, the vehicle lasts 1,000,000 miles, they aren’t emitting CO2, and gas prices go past five dollars…
it might be common sense to use the savings from the situation to rent vehicles to satisfy the other 10% of your needs.
"Common sense" = "I want to be able to get out of town without being stranded on an interstate when evacuating for a hurricane when traffic comes to a standstill and there's no way to recharge."
But hey, maybe your idea of common sense is to sit around 16 feet in the air with 120 mph winds blowing against the side of your moving brick.
Tesla dragged the rest of the auto industry, kicking and screaming, into the EV business.
EV was, at best, a curiosity and definitely nobody's main focus, until Tesla first showed EV cars are not golf carts (with the rooadster) and then that they can be a desirable higher-class sedan (with Model S).
If Tesla went bankrupt today, we'd still be firmly on the path to phase out ICE cars.
This was totally unconcievable just a few years ago. Tesla did that.
> Tesla dragged the rest of the auto industry, kicking and screaming, into the EV business.
I would say that the advance in battery technology, the laws introduced by state of California and north european countries did more than Tesla ever did.
Also the Renault Zoe, still top selling EV cars in europe, had her first concept car showed in 2005 and was on sale only 5 months after the Model S in 2012. The Leaf also predates the Model S.The 1st generation Tesla Roadster sold poorly like most other contemporary EVs and most of the sales happened in her last year in 2012. It was as niche as all other EVs in the market in its first 3 years of commercial life. The Mitsubishi i-Miev and its Citroën and Peugeot variant outsold the Tesla Roadster by more than a factor of 10. Almost 30000 cars between 2008 and 2014.
What Tesla achieved was showing the wealthy people they could greenwash their way to the same energy wasting life by going EV. A good publicity stunt.
Zoe was a concept car, as was VW eUp. At the time, established car companies were doing concepts that looked like golf-carts and taking about "e-mobility".
Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
Other car makers started paying serious attention only when Tesla inexplicably didn't go under and Model S started to be a success.
The first Zoe was a concept car, the second one was a production model and it didn't popup from anywhere. It has been the most sold EV in europe for many years already.
>Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)
The car industry do not care what the typical car lover love more. They have been a dying breed for more than 3 decades. The i-Miev and derivated counterpart sold 12 times more than the roadster because they are actually usable things and not enthusiast toys. It even outsold the Model-S in all the other markets than USA when they were both available.
The Model-S,X,3 and Y success came much later. The automotive industry definitely had a more cautious approach in the upper end segment but they weren't sleeping.
citation needed. many of these companies had documented plans to transition to primarily electric vehicles over a period of many years. why is it that you are so convinced that this market shift was causes by one brand? is there any evidence other than observation?
To answer your question, they did open source their innovations. In the future you should consider not asking rhetorical questions that you don't know the answer to. Also, when you don't know the answer, you probably shouldn't pretend to know. Other people might make the mistake of thinking you are informed rather than a productive citizen of the society which exists in your imagination.
As to why - ICE dealers didn't want to lose recurring revenue streams and ICE manufacturers didn't want to disrupt the means through which they would service the loans that they took out to build out their present ability to manufacture at scale. The incentives were perverse and in some cases still are perverse enough that the ICE industry has to be forced to help kill itself off, rather than dying willingly because it is right.
It is my belief that those "competitive cars" wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Tesla.