Non sequitur. While the circumstances surrounding the different engines and technology are wildly different, it doesn't change the root issue: if you neglect your car, it will break, and it will be a very expensive fix.

Sorry, but circumstances matter a lot in life, and you can't just brush them off because you don't like them. Try telling your insurance company that the circumstances don't matter. Or the hospital. Or the police. Or your boss. Or your customers.

He's not saying that the circumstances are completely irrelevant, he's saying that the specific circumstances don't matter (as long as they add up to neglect), because it takes different circumstances to cause different problems. That's not at all like trying to ignore who's at fault in a traffic collision.

Precisely.

There's a lot of variables at play here. The fact that the battery is so expensive vs. what a consumer has become accustomed to paying for vehicle maintenance on a traditional gasoline car. The tech is new. The way the vehicles operate is fundamentally different, and require different attention to different things. But it's all noise convoluting the argument.

The root: if you neglect your vehicle -- any vehicle -- you are in store for an expensive repair bill. It could be a $2,000 transmission. It could be a $10,000 engine replacement. Or it could be a $40,000 electric car battery. Because of all the aforementioned variables, the largest of which being the cost associated, there has been a massive amount of FUD surrounding bricking your Tesla. This response from the company is attempting to bring things back down to earth. If you plug in your car, you won't brick your car.

Which should really be common sense for anything at this point. Regardless of cost, if you take care of your possessions, they will last longer.

The circumstances do matter here. First, electric cars are novel which means the market is susceptible to FUD, and manufacturers like Tesla have to be sensitive to their customer's fears even if those fears are overblown. Secondly, I don't know of any conventionally powered car that can be permanently ruined simply by parking it in a garage for a month, unless that garage is on fire or underwater. For every other vehicle on the road, a reasonable person would say that leaving it parked in a garage is taking good care of it. It's up to Tesla to overcome the cognitive dissonance that comes from the idea that simply parking your car for a long time without plugging it in can actually destroy it.

It will not run out of gas. But it can - and will - get damaged if sitting unattended for too long.

It might be the tires (check your owner's manual!), it might be the AC (again, manual - it should be turned on from time to time), you might now notice a strange smoke due to new oil leaks inside the combustion chamber, it might make horrible noises for a couple of seconds (because the oil drained to the bottom of the engine), etc, etc.

Hell, last extended trip we went on, we had someone to start the engines (and the damn AC) for a few minutes at least every week. It is just good practice.

If indeed the battery management system on a Tesla is able to keep the batteries alive for months at 0% reported charge, then it is a non-issue. Noone is going to leave such a car unattended for months, really. Specially if it is a Roadster.