Jeff Dahn, now working with Tesla (exclusively I think) does not agree, and has a fantastic lecture explaining some stuff about lithium ion degradation (specifically, how normal accelerated age testing doesn't work, but they have a different method which lines up very well with long term cell aging)
Tesla does pretty well on safety (passive and active) as well.
My main concern was did Hyundai skimp on the cooling and battery management system like Nissan did with the leaf. The result with leaf was rapidly degrading batteries that lost more than 25% in the first 3 years. Tesla's in comparison often manage 92% of new range after 150k miles.
With all that said, it does look like the Kona Electric is the closest model Y competitor I've found.
And seriously who on earth cares about acceleration beyond a certain point. I mean come on. Nobody is drag racing their car on the way to the supermarket to buy groceries.
I'm hoping there's a model Y killer out before the model Y ships, but if not I think I'll be really happy in a Y.
As for the acceleration. I'm married and have a kid. I drive pretty conservatively. I haven't had an accident of any kind or even a speeding ticket in 20 years. I did however find numerous occasions to floor the model S I was renting and every time it resulted in a huge grin. I'd wouldn't trade that acceleration for say a Hyundai electric that has a 0-60 in 7.6 seconds just for some extra knobs/buttons. Nor is the Hyundai cheap, starts around $38k. In a traditional ICE car the acceleration has significant down sides, cost, MPG, noise, weight, size, packaging efficiency, etc. On a Tesla the acceleration there's not nearly as much of a downside.
Being able to launch the car and be going highway speed nearly instantly is really useful whenever you have to merge in a short distance or take a right turn into high speed traffic. You can get by with an under-powered vehicle just fine in most of the country but if you're commuting in/out of a east coast city between DC and Boston it's going to come in really handy (possibly daily if your commute includes a really bad merge). Just last night some dude in a Maserati cut me off taking a right onto a two lane road where I was going ~70mph in the right lane. Had he been driving anything else I would have had to brake but he mashed the skinny pedal and I didn't have to do anything. If I had to take that turn every day I'd want something fast too. Sure it's a luxury feature but damn does it make things less stressful when you're in that situation.
I have seen a Tesla performance model described as a machine to convert money into smiles.
It does.
After all, everyone's worried about how degraded their batteries will be after 10 years, and there's no better way to get hard data on that than having EVs on the market for 10 years.
There's the Hyundai Kona Electric, with 258 miles for $37k-$45k. But I agree one car isn't a lot of competition :)