Well, if you get your news from sources like Electrek, you'd think so.
Yet here we are with both Jaguar and very soon Audi selling fully electric SUVs that are competitive with the Model X on both features and price.
And in the second month after launch (March 2018), Nissan sold 11 400 units of the new (150 mile EPA range) Leaf; next year they have a 230 mile range model coming out. It may not be a Model 3 killer based on range, but they sold 300 000 of the old model, so it's no compliance car.
Nissan also currently has a monopoly on fully electric MPVs (e-NV200).
These may not all be sexy cars with ridiculous modes, but if they help save our planet, I'm all for it.
The first genuinely serious EV from another automaker in my opinion will be Porsche's Mission E, but take note of how well it can match the characteristics of a Model S, a family sedan, you can already buy today. Still, just the idea of an all-electric Porsche is badass.
> These may not all be sexy cars with ridiculous modes, but if they help save our planet, I'm all for it.
We're in agreement that any measure of EVing is good. Many of the challenges facing automakers are systemic, so they are in a tough spot even if they genuinely believe EVs are the future.
On that spectrum there's Tesla, a bunch of Chinese firms like BYD then a big gap before firms like Jaguar, Audi, Volkswagen all of whom are selling products that Tesla can rightly attack as being the past, not the future of transport.
I think every bit helps, including efficiency, smaller cars, public transport, city cars and non plugin hybrids like Nissan's eNote range but Tesla is setting the pace to a large degree at the moment.
Unbiased doesn't exist so I'm ignoring it.
and
> Perfect doesn't exist so I'm going to ignore better.
are not analogous. Now if the line were instead something like
> Unbiased doesn't exist so I'm ignoring less-biased (or efforts to reduce bias).
then you'd be onto something, but as it stands, what you've got there is a false equivalence.
You'll see that Tesla's press events have gotten plenty of extremely positive discussion/upvotes on HN. "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" has 1,493 upvotes:
But it is obvious you didn't do the search I recommended. Or else you would've seen how recent the most popular Tesla posts are. The second most popular Tesla story was posted just 2 months ago.