Tesla Model 3 revealed

[PKLD]

bhstewie said:

PKLD said:

I like 're-fueling' where I go, not where the fuel is. Once people realise how nice it is to wake up, pre-heat the car from your phone, and head off with a full 'tank' every morning it will be hard to go back to going somewhere to find fuel.

Do people really find refuelling that traumatic?

If I want to go somewhere 100 miles away I don't know of too many (mainstream affordable) EVs I can buy today that will get me there and get me back without forcing me to stick around a good while at a charging station if there is a charging station.

It may be easier once they're more mainstream but once they're more mainstream I'd assume charging points will become more like the queue on the garage forecourt.

Lol I don't find it traumatic - I just prefer that than dealing with diesel and the expense of it. I had to borrow my wife's car while me was in for its service and I spent over a tenner in one day?!? (Doesn't sound much but when I only pay for my fuel once a quarter as part of my electricity bill you realise how expensive diesel is!)

As for your comment about driving 100 miles to somewhere - why are people driving over 100 miles and then leaving with-in an hour? What's so important to drive for 2-3 hours and leave to drive 2-3 hours back in the same day?

Usually those trips are for a reason: a meeting, an overnight, visiting family most of which takes a couple of hours which plenty time to charge an EV!

And people still think about going somewhere to charge and queuing - you'll be 100% charged at home every day, use destitnation charging at your workplace or charge where it suits you, not the car!

(I've done 10,000 miles this year, just over 8,400 of which I paid for by charging at home so £352 for the year... Or 3.52p a mile. Would have been cheaper but I like driving with traffic rather than crawling at 55mph in the inside lane like other EV drivers ;-)

[kambites]

bhstewie said:

Do people really find refuelling that traumatic?

I certainly fine it irritating, mostly because there is no fuel station anywhere near my commute so I have to make special trips just to buy petrol. Being able to just plug the car into the wall when I get home would be far more convenient.

[feef]

DonkeyApple said:

Piersman2 said:

Tesla are being clever here and tying people into orders for a vehicle which will be fighting in a market about to be flooded by the usual suspect car manufacturers in the next few years.

The technology to build electric cars is now approaching 300 miles on a single charge, this is the tipping point for the big boys and they are all racing to release their own electric vehicles over the next few years.

Tesla will be dead in 5-10 years time as the big boys start releasing their own EVs and use scales of production to push down prices.

I certainly think that just as we've seen before in certain markets, the key players are sitting back and letting Musk and his backers firstly prove the market for EVs exists and then to start creating it to the point of genuine commercial viability. At that point, as we see time and time again in industry, the long standing major players will simply build a big factory and join the market at the profitability stage of the evolution rather than the embryonic.

It is quite common for the pioneer to not survive that point, as you point out, but Musk has seemingly placed his attempt to head that huge risk off by controlling significant elements of the infrastructure. Ie he has built the largest EV battery factory in the planet, has forged the key ties with the Chinese who control the South American lithium mines and is building his global charging network.

The latter is quite important as there are only so many gaps for charging stations and the reality is that manufacturers are going to have to club together to take on Musk's network.

Volvo are already talking about a 2019 release date for their EV

http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/volvo-first-ful...

[tadaah]

Oh and then for the real Luddite "it''ll never happen" naysayers:

http://insideevs.com/netherlands-moves-to-allow-on...

It already is

[DonkeyApple]

feef said:

Volvo are already talking about a 2019 release date for their EV

http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/volvo-first-ful...

I would think most of the main manufacturers will have a product in the market by 2020. Much of the Western population live in and around cities and I think very many have legislation pending that favours hybrids and EVs so there will be synthetic demand from that.

Something Tesla got from the off that all the main manufacturers ballsed up was that Tesla understood that the cost of the batteries being so high meant starting with premium cars was the right move, not kicking off with comically over priced economy cars that no one was really going to buy in numbers.

We won't really see big volume sales until batteries fall in price sufficiently to allow EVs to be much cheaper to buy than ICE, which they should be as they are so much simpler to build and also maintain.

[Don]

bhstewie said:

Do people really find refuelling that traumatic?

Yes I think they do. Judging by how often my wife puts petrol in anything at all, these days. Her strategy is to drive it until it gets to a quarter full and then take one of the other cars...and then the same again.

My mate's wife was just the same.

It's lovely not going to the petrol station. With my usage profile I save time. It's about ten to twenty seconds extra in the morning and evening to hook up for me. That's marginally less than the ten minutes a week it takes to fuel a petrol car for the same journey. Hardly a big deal but it is true...

[bitchstewie]

Don said:

Yes I think they do. Judging by how often my wife puts petrol in anything at all, these days. Her strategy is to drive it until it gets to a quarter full and then take one of the other cars...and then the same again.

My mate's wife was just the same.

It's lovely not going to the petrol station. With my usage profile I save time. It's about ten to twenty seconds extra in the morning and evening to hook up for me. That's marginally less than the ten minutes a week it takes to fuel a petrol car for the same journey. Hardly a big deal but it is true...

I'd be happy enough not to. But I'm not sure if it's a buying criteria for me.

I am curious if the UK has the electricity infrastructure to support streets full of EVs all connected to chargers overnight.

Oh and to be clear, I'd like an EV at some point, I'm certainly not asking this because I'm somehow "anti-EV" but I do have doubts about how the infrastructure will handle it when they go beyond being a niche product.

[Surfr]

I'm very tempted but the supercharger network will have to improve considerably. I live in mid Wales and the commute is only 3 miles town driving so I can survive all week on 1 charge but if I want to go elsewhere? Everything is 2 hours from here. Shrewsbury, Chester, Cardiff... And there currently isn't even 1 supercharger in the country of Wales. Bang a few in some obvious locations and things will improve.

[silent ninja]

Tuna said:

Exactly. It's fantastic the pace of change, and you can see the future from here (if you squint). Musk's ability to deliver is stunning - and I'm sure it's made a few car executives feel quite uncomfortable.

However as you rightly point out, this specific car isn't the second coming. Given the pace of change, even if you plan to chop it in in a couple of years, it will be outdated tech. That's ignoring the challenge of going from 50,000 cars a year to 500,000 with an entirely new model. For those who must have the latest shiny-shiny, it's cool, but this isn't the point that makes me want to jump on the bandwagon.

Still Meh on the styling too - someone mentioned Aston(!?) but it's just as much Hyundai to me.

The other issue here is the long term viability of all the 'perks' that get mentioned. Free parking and no fuel tax are only there as incentives to encourage new entrants. Once it goes mainstream (and it will, fast), those incentives will be withdrawn. I was in a car-park the other day and admiring the two free charging points (one in use, one being used by a mum with a toddler and a very old school Metro). That was in a car park of around a thousand cars. The moment usage goes up, things get a lot less convenient. Charging at home isn't necessarily any better - we're faced with brown-outs at the moment due to shortage in generation capacity. When EVs really take off, there will be some interesting challenges facing the government and electricity supply companies. You might see rules where you have to accept that your car might be partially discharged back into the grid during peak times, or specific times when you cannot charge.

None of this is the end of the world, none of this means this isn't an excellent step forward. All of these problems will be overcome. However, I'd rather let other people work their way through them first.

You sound like me. My sentiments exactly. Free parking, no congestion fees or tax etc will be withdrawn eventually.

I wonder how much it costs per year to charge an EV at home? I presume it's less than fuel but haven't done the man maths calculations.

[PKLD]

silent ninja said:

You sound like me. My sentiments exactly. Free parking, no congestion fees or tax etc will be withdrawn eventually.

I wonder how much it costs per year to charge an EV at home? I presume it's less than fuel but haven't done the man maths calculations.

Averaging 3.1 miles/kWh, so check your electricity bill: what ever you're paying per unit, divide by 4 for a efficiency slowly driven small EV, divide by 3.1 for a normal PH-driven EV and about 2.5 for a 500bhp+ Tesla

But thrown a few public charging sessions and some workplace ones, a couple of overnight hotel charging sessions and that will mean your not 100% home charging so overall cost falls further.

See my post above but it cost me about £350 for over 10,000 miles this year and I'm paying about 12p a kWH

[PKLD]

silent ninja said:

You sound like me. My sentiments exactly. Free parking, no congestion fees or tax etc will be withdrawn eventually.

I wonder how much it costs per year to charge an EV at home? I presume it's less than fuel but haven't done the man maths calculations.

Averaging 3.1 miles/kWh, so check your electricity bill: what ever you're paying per unit, divide by 4 for a efficiency slowly driven small EV, divide by 3.1 for a normal PH-driven EV and about 2.5 for a 500bhp+ Tesla

But thrown a few public charging sessions and some workplace ones, a couple of overnight hotel charging sessions and that will mean your not 100% home charging so overall cost falls further.

See my post above but it cost me about £350 for over 10,000 miles this year and I'm paying about 12p a kWH

[RobDickinson]

kambites said:

ash73 said:

The X is the SUV though, and twice the price, so I assume there won't be an SUV variant of the 3.

I don't see why they shouldn't have two SUVs of different sizes. The majority of manufacturers do.

Elon has already talked about a 3 SUV variant I think

[Dr Gitlin]

Mr Will said:

Refilling a hydrogen car takes 5 minutes, plus the time taken to drive to the filling station, queue up for the pump, queue up to pay and then drive back to the route you actually wanted to be on.

Recharging an electric car involves plugging it in when I get home at night and then unplugging it again the next morning. Total effort <30 seconds and it always has 200+ miles range when I get in each morning. I would go months without ever having to visit a public charging station.

Imagine for a moment that someone invented a hydrogen fuel cell for mobile phones (bear with me!). It is tiny and lightweight and would power your phone for a whole week on a single charge and recharge in just 5 minutes BUT you need to take it to a mobile phone shop to get it recharged - do you see how ridiculous the idea is?

Hydrogen is never going to happen. For one thing you can't store it for very long—the molecules are so small they diffuse out even with extremely fine tolerance on containment bottles (for this reason they do not use hydrogen fuel cells in space). Also, making hydrogen is very inefficient—about 35%. You'd think you just stick some wires in a bucket of water but it's mainly done by steam reformation of fossil fuels. Much easier to generate electricity and just put that in a battery than waste more than half turning it into a gas that you have to use quickly or it all evaporates.

Also, workplace charging is almost certain to be a much bigger factor in the future than nighttime charging at home. For one thing it means the utilities can benefit from peak production and things like solar rather than baseload. Also, the cars are already smart enough to talk to chargers and can draw reduced loads at certain times or only charge when the price is below a certain threshold.

Finally—and this is a message that for some reason is not penetrating well with the general public—the future is not going to be one size fits all. It's going to be multimodal and plenty of people may never even own their own cars, preferring instead to use autonomous ridesharing services. But there will still be a place for performance cars, they'll just continue to be a niche.

[Impasse]

Ignoring the fuel source, are the cars any good? It seems owners and prospective owners concentrate solely on how much it costs to refuel without ever mentioning the vehicle itself. I find that an odd concept.

[Tuna]

PKLD said:

Averaging 3.1 miles/kWh, so check your electricity bill: what ever you're paying per unit, divide by 4 for a efficiency slowly driven small EV, divide by 3.1 for a normal PH-driven EV and about 2.5 for a 500bhp+ Tesla

Warning: Man maths ahead.

Based on 'Average' fuel prices, that puts a Small EV at about 5p a mile and the Tesla at about 6p a mile.

That compares with (chosen at random) the Hyundai i40 coupe (£19K OTR) of about 8p a mile fuel costs.

So in an average year of 12,000 miles driving, you'd save... £240 quid in the Tesla. Assuming they are going to give a fair dollar to pound conversion, it'd take you about 20 years to recoup the extra cost of the Tesla, ignoring any special rebates.

I'm quite surprised the Tesla performs so poorly, given that the price of petrol is around 50% straight to the Government as fuel duty. Whether they will change the taxation towards EVs once they start becoming more common is another question. If we swapped overnight to purely electric vehicles, we'd need an entire new power station for each and every power station we currently have, and the government would be down by £29 billion a year in fuel tax. Neither power stations nor governments pay for themselves, so something would have to give.

[scubadude]

Staggering ignorance about EV's and charging from some posters... Perhaps the manufacturers need to educate people?

You don't need a Supercharger to charge a Tesla.
Even here is rural SW every supermarket and most town car parks have 2-4 fast chargers.

I do at times drive 100-200 miles then turn around and come straight back, Airport drop offs etc... I would have to modify my behaviour with a 200mile range EV- big deal! I have to do the same with the Caterham, after 150-170 miles it needs fuel and I need a break!

IMO Some people are looking for problems! It's all good from my prospective, more EV's = more fuel for Petrol Heads to burn as it should be- racing, rallying and ragging nice cars around on sunny Saturday afternoons. I'd happily drive a Tesla of similar Mon-Fri if it means weekends in the 7 :-)

[unsprung]

Interesting times.

The hundreds of thousands who are paying to reserve the Model 3 are not paying to reserve a saloon car. These people were not sitting around, saying, "Darling, I've gone through the Parkers and the latest from 'Which? Car' and I reckon we ought to get the saloon from Tesla."

These people are buying a new and better way of living. Which just happens to be available in a (smallish) saloon car -- a format that is arguably the most universal in terms of use cases.

The Model 3 is the closest we've ever got to best-in-class features and benefits without compromise. And the strategy behind its price point is not unlike the second coming of the Model T.

The promise of change will go on, with or without Tesla. Because, just as today's Model 3 buyers are not paying for a saloon car, the change that we face is not really about cars. It's about platforms.

For example: when current Tesla owners use the Autopilot feature on their cars -- the feature which allows semi-autonomous driving -- their vehicles are not operating in a vacuum. They are providing Tesla with data on wayfinding and traffic. And this data is used to further improve the Autopilot feature.

Eventually, when we couple autonomous vehicles with on-demand ridesharing, the total cost of ownership (for your transport needs) will plummet. What will you do with the extra dosh? What will low-income families do with their newfound freedom?

The principle of platform will help us to do ever more with real-time data, with batteries, with entertainment, with services -- the business model opportunities will feed decades of innovation (with ripples that extend far beyond transportation).

One thing you can bank on: Every petrolhead should welcome the onset of autonomous vehicles. Because never will you be more able to purchase (or possibly co-create) the most mental or personalised motor without any need to compromise for the sake of day-to-day duties.

Clearly, the unveiling of the Model 3 is very far from simply offering a saloon car.

[Matthen]

bhstewie said:

I'd be happy enough not to. But I'm not sure if it's a buying criteria for me.

I am curious if the UK has the electricity infrastructure to support streets full of EVs all connected to chargers overnight.

Oh and to be clear, I'd like an EV at some point, I'm certainly not asking this because I'm somehow "anti-EV" but I do have doubts about how the infrastructure will handle it when they go beyond being a niche product.

From what I can remember, the UK does not have the local capacity to support a huge number of EVs - the domestic network was never designed for a sustained high load. Local transformers will have to be uprated, as will I suspect some of the local network cabling. The backbone can more than support the draw - especially once the reduction in demand for petrol has translated to a reduced power draw from the refineries. We should not have to build many more power stations.

Edited by Matthen on Saturday 2nd April 18:44

[98elise]

Matthen said:

bhstewie said:

I'd be happy enough not to. But I'm not sure if it's a buying criteria for me.

I am curious if the UK has the electricity infrastructure to support streets full of EVs all connected to chargers overnight.

Oh and to be clear, I'd like an EV at some point, I'm certainly not asking this because I'm somehow "anti-EV" but I do have doubts about how the infrastructure will handle it when they go beyond being a niche product.

From what I can remember, the UK does not have the local capacity to support a huge number of EVs - the domestic network was never designed for a sustained high load. Local transformers will have to be uprated, as will I suspect some of the local network cabling. The backbone can more than support the draw - especially once the reduction in demand for petrol has translated to a reduced power draw from the refineries. We should not have to build many more power stations.

Edited by Matthen on Saturday 2nd April 18:44

The average driver will need 7kWh of energy per day. If your local supply cannot deal with that then you cannot be running electric hob or shower etc. Assuming most people will charge over night then the power required will be around a tenth of that needed to run a hob/shower.

Obviously i'm generalising, but the physics isn't wildly out.

[Dr Gitlin]

Impasse said:

Ignoring the fuel source, are the cars any good? It seems owners and prospective owners concentrate solely on how much it costs to refuel without ever mentioning the vehicle itself. I find that an odd concept.

When you drive one, it's evident that all of the money is being spent on engineering the platform and also the software. The P90D is stupidly fast in a straight line; I wouldn't say it's an amazing handling car and there's no getting away from the fact that it weighs 2100kg, but then an RS7 weighs almost that much and has less power (but is more fun to drive in my experience).

The Model X, on the other hand, might be the best SUV I've ever driven. OK, I've only been behind the wheel for about 15 minutes because Tesla still haven't got any press fleet cars (they're using all the production capacity to meet existing orders, which is probably sensible). But you get the benefit of an SUV's high-up driving position, and an amazing view of the road ahead thanks to the panoramic windscreen, without any of the body roll that you'd normally get (because the CoG is so low thanks to the batteries). The Model X P90D has 762hp and you can actually use that power more effectively than the S since you've got a much better view of the road ahead.

The thing that I have real problems with is the interior. There are acres of featureless cheap flat plastic, and both the design and the finish look like something you'd get in a mid-2000s econobox. Take the cubby underneath the screen in the Model S. In the customer demo car they lent me last year it was misaligned, so there was a 1.5cm gap at one corner that got progressively smaller as the other corner was where it should be. And there's no lip at the edge, so anything you put in there is going to be in the back seat the first time you mash the throttle from a standstill.

I'm extremely impressed with what the company has done in the few years it's been around, and I don't doubt they'll get there eventually with regards to the interiors, but I'm not a mouth-foaming fanboy and I find the cult-like nature of some of those people to be really off putting.