But comparing absolute numbers for a car you bought five years ago may be misleading because the majority of the increase is likely due to inflation.

Back of the envelope math: If you were in CA and got $7.5k federal and $2.5k state credits that means the Model 3 you bought in 2017 was ~$60k or ~$73k in today's dollars. If it's now $80k then that's a real price increase of ~$7k in today's dollars.

That's certainly an increase, but making an expensive car slightly more expensive doesn't seem particularly insane to me.

If you are in the market for a 3-row / 7 seater, you can spend $55k on a Toyota Highlander SUV or $40k on a Toyota Siena minivan.

It's genuinely pretty challenging to spend under $30k on a new car now outside fairly basic 2-4 door smaller sedan/hatchback vehicles in their base trim without options.

Nothing wrong with basic vehicles "in their base trim without options", we have two parked outside the house right now, and the vehicle we owned before them was similar.

I am only trying to illustrate that the line between luxury/excess in autos has shifted substantially in the last few years partially inflation driven and partially cheap credit / long loan terms driven.

The universe of under-$30k cars is now quite limited whereas 5 years ago, one could possibly describe $30k+ as being luxury.

My family also always only bought used cars (and I continued this practice), so I guess that further skewed my conception of car cost downward. I only just bought my first new car recently, and I still haven't really adjusted to the reality of both what current prices are like, and how much more expensive a new car is.

I try and remind myself that for the most part it's not that cars are that much more expensive but that dollars are worth so much less.

For a shit car with the interior fit and finish of a poverty-spec Skoda, and all the important controls replaced with a bloody great iPad that blinds you at night.

Oh, and it's from an obscenely "techbro" company.

Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?

I could excuse the drawbacks you cited and the cost if they were the Framework laptop of the automotive world. But at those price points, and a repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’ll buy a Tesla.

I have a couple of old Range Rovers. There are very few things you can't fix with a half-inch spanner and a hammer, and those you can fix with a 7/16th spanner and a bit of sticky tape.

They run on propane, so they get cheap tax and can be registered as Low Emission Vehicles, which is pretty hilarious for a 4-litre V8.

Combined they probably still have a smaller ecological footprint than making one Tesla Model S.

They've also got far comfier seats.

How does fueling work? Perhaps I just haven't noticed (because I have to reason to), but I have never seen a fueling station advertise propane, outside of tanks for grilling and similar.

To fuel up you just go to a filling station with an LPG pump (getting harder to find here unfortunately) and instead of poking the nozzle down the filler neck and holding down a trigger on the filler gun, you plug in a hose with a fitting like a BNC plug the size of your wrist and hold down a button on the pump until you've put enough in. It clicks off when it's full.

No difference in performance (in theory you could adjust it to get more because it's the equivalent of 115RON fuel!) and a bit more fuel consumption, but roughly 2/3 the price of petrol.

Common enough and cheap enough that I still feel a bit prescient for buying a 2017 Ford Focus wagon with about 30k km on the clock that was factory modified for LPG, in August 2021, for about half what the original owner paid.

But yeah, whenever I'm in a Tesla, the interior looks cheap, and the giant iPad (in the Model 3 at least) looks bolted-on rather than designed-in. Not to mention the real-time display of what's around the car is laughably bad, with cars and pedestrians flickering in and out, and sometimes not even showing up at all.

I'm glad people drive them, though; more EVs on the street is a good thing.

I am very impressed by their batteries and I like the look of the Model S but I'm utterly unimpressed by the build quality of the interior and the cheap materials used.

At that price I'd except to be entering a comfortable car using luxurious materials.

FWIW I tried the Porsche Taycan and the interior is leaps and bound ahead of the Teslas (but the batteries aren't up to par yet and the software ain't either I think).

Tesla exaggerates their range and few actually achieve the quoted EPA range, so you can deduct 10-15% for real world.

The Germans, especially Porsche undersell their range and real world you can get about 10-15% longer out of the BMWs & MBs and something insane like 35% more out of the Taycans.

InsideEVs has a nice real world 70mph highway range comparison, and the ranking would surprise you compared to the advertised ranges. https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

So an advertised 350mi Model S and a 225mi Taycan in fact meet somewhere in the middle, closer to 300mi +/- for both.