Here in Beijing there are special "un-official" taxi services that have Teslas. I was once in one of them, one the way to the airport. I was very silent, and looked a bit futuristic (all meters are actually screens) and kitsch ala eigthies: The whole car looks fat, plasticly cheap. I would not trust the door knob to always work for instance, and the seat are not giving this confident feeling, compared to normal European cars. It is also slightly ugly. But obviously that's just the diff between Europe and US on cars, and Tesla has nothing to do with it (but if Tesla wants to get market share in Europe, they have to make another model, or license their techno to someone else.)

I took a test drive with a few friends who have BMW, Mercs and they had the same impression. The cars they compete with in terms of cost in the UK (engine etc aside) the build quality and the interior is more line with a Ford at a quarter of the price.

that's an interesting view of teslas... anyway, they're not really having problems getting marketshare in europe:

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/automobiles/tesla-powers-a-surge...

And at least when this article was written, China just edged out Europe for Tesla's second largest market: http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/07/31/analysis-o...

From what I heard, the Model S 85 with Dual-Drive has a vastly improved interior quality. I agree that the normal Model S is not on par with BMW/Mercedes/etc.

> the whole car looks fat, plasticly cheap.

That's every American car

BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar (among others) are all struggling right now to find a new design direction. The most recent push to really change things, Chris Bangle's tenure at BMW, didn't really lead to a decisive new direction. A lot of people WANT boring shit.

Oh sorry the design aesthetic of the S is fine. Though when i see one I can't work out which of the large saloon car it is.

I mean the cheap plasticy build quality, mainly the interior. It doesn't look nor feel like a luxury car inside.

Every car in general, really. Everything else is marketing.

Sure: As I remember from my college physics course in electricity and magnetism (E&M), a series wound electric motor has, with the simple mathematical model, infinite torque at stall, that is, not yet rotating. The torque falls off from infinity quickly as the motor starts to rotate.

So, yes, the Tesla can get some fantastic acceleration from a standing start.

Also, yes, as used in some ocean going ships, it can be good to use Diesel-electric with no transmission. That is, the Diesel engine drives an electric generator, and the electric power from the generator drives the electric motor to drive the propellers and move the ship. In this case the motor-generator combination provides essentially an ideal transmission -- "Look, Ma, no gears!".

Tesla has done better on both power and range than I expected. Good for Tesla.

But I would still be concerned about battery charging time -- there's no royal road shortcut to the energy that 4600 pound car needs, even if the braking captures kinetic energy. Or, driving at highway speeds requires pushing air out of the way and, then, putting a lot of velocity, thus, kinetic energy, into that air. Also will want A/C or heat for the car, and that's more energy.

So, the batteries need to store a lot of energy. Then to charge the batteries, also need a lot of energy. Do some simple arithmetic and can discover that charging via 100 A at 240 V in the garage of a house will result in hours of recharging time. Okay then use a charging station: For a full charge in just a few minutes, that will be one heck of a powerful electrical connection. And, that charging current has to pass through the batteries which traditionally heats the batteries.

Next worry: How long with the batteries last, and how much does it cost to replace them?

So, mostly I'd be concerned about recharging time. For a trip to Grandma's 900 miles away, with a range per charge of 200 miles, charging time will be an issue.

But Tesla's done better than I expected.

In europe, practically everyone would fly the 900 miles or take the train.

Just to put that in perspective, 900 miles is ~London -> Vienna. 99% of people would fly/take the train.

In the US, 900 miles was just from where I was in DC, north to Pennsylvania, west to Ohio, across Ohio to Indiana, south to the town Fort Wayne in NE Indiana, west to Warsaw, IN, and then south 15 miles to the farm of the family of my girlfriend and, later, wife. So, before we were married, I drove the 900 miles often, commonly mostly at 90+ MPH, and after we were married drove it usually at least once a year, at Christmas.

When we went for Christmas, we were carrying way too much stuff to fly or take a train! And when we got there, we stayed for a few days and still wanted our car to get around, to restaurants, movies, friends, more shopping, etc.

In Europe, they think that a car engine with 3.0 liters of displacement is large. The engine I was using had either 5.7 liters of displacement or, in two cases, 6.5 liters of displacement.

US and Europe do some things in different ways!

That part of Indiana is sparsely populated. So, from the farm, the nearest airport with much in service is at Fort Wayne about 50 miles away.

Let's see: The 6.5 liter car I used most often had a 2.56 rear axle ratio and at 90+ MPH got about 18 MPG. Gas cost about $0.25 a gallon. Then the cost of gas for the 900 miles was

     900 * 0.25 / 18 = 12.50

dollars, $25 round trip. Heck just the taxi fare from the Fort Wayne airport to the farm would have been about that. To use a plane or train, round trip, would have meant four long taxi trips, total cost much more than the gasoline for driving my car.

For trains, actually at one time the US had one heck of a rail network with relatively good passenger service. Mostly the rails are still in the ground. Actually the little cross road town three miles from the farm did have a rail line and a station -- not used by passengers, if at all, in years. Sure, at one time could have caught a train at that station and, with lots of transfers, gone to Chicago, New York, San Francisco, etc. Lots of transfers and then waiting between trains.

In simple terms, in the US, by about 1955 or so, cars put the passenger trains out of business. The US still has one heck of a good freight rail network.

While Indiana is sparsely populated, keep going west to Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, etc., and we're talking miles and miles and miles of hardly a person in sight.

In the US, there's density enough for trains to have a shot between, say, Richmond, VA north to DC, Baltimore, Newark, NYC, Greenwich, Stamford, Hartford, and Boston. And we do have such trains; spent a lot of money on the trains; our VP Biden spent a lot of time on those trains between Baltimore and DC; but those trains lose money. And parallel to those tracks we have airplanes -- maybe they make money, but the TSA has made airplanes a little less comfortable than either an unanesthetized root canal procedure or a barbed wire enema. "Open wide, look at the birdie, and then grab your ankles and back up to the officer .... Have a pleasant trip."

"Next time it's my car; even for 2000 miles."

In the US there are lots of other efforts to spend big bucks to have trains across the Midwest, north and south along the west coast, e.g., LA to SF and maybe up to Seattle, maybe between Houston and Dallas in TX, etc. Lots of efforts. For decades.

For commuters to NYC, NY has trains north to Poughkeepsie and NE to Greenwich, Stamford, Hartford, or some such. At least the one to Poughkeepsie has been losing money, and now when register a car in that area have to pay a special tax to support the trains.

How do we pay for roads, bridges, etc. for cars? We're supposed to be covering that out of gasoline taxes, which are not trivial. The result is called the Highway Trust Fund; it may have a stack of IOUs from loans for other purposes.

I live 70 miles north of the Wall Street area which is at the southern tip of Manhattan in NYC and for a while worked in that area. I found that except in the worst of the rush hour, my car was, door to door, faster than the trains. And I was not using a high performance car.

Apparently the NYC subways work well -- I can believe that. But Baltimore put in a subway, and while I was at Johns Hopkins University there in Baltimore, once was in a lecture that analyzed the welfare economics of the Baltimore subway; welfare economics is where add up all the costs and all the benefits and see for what projects the total of the benefits is greater than the total of the costs. The lecture reported the totals of the costs and the benefits, and the costs were higher than the benefits. So, from the point of view of welfare economics, the optimal decision, given that the subway construction was done, was just to brick up the entrances and f'get about it. Or, if there were some really good benefits for that subway, adding up the value of the benefits still didn't have the benefits exceed the costs. That's what happened in that case; just why I don't know.

Drawing from several decades of recent history, broadly, passenger trains don't work very well in the US. There are lots and lots and lots of people who very much want passenger trains to work well here, but the golden age of US passenger trains was from, say, 1930 to 1955 or so. E.g., there are several Hollywood movies, North by Northwest, The Sting, that show something about what train travel was like then. Basically in the US, the long distances, low population density, Interstate highway system (Ike regarded as crucial for military logistics for US national security), etc. shot the passenger trains between the eyes. One biggie reason: People already owned a car, say, just to get to the grocery store, the coin laundry (people commonly had cars before they had washer/driers at home), schools, friends, etc.

Another factor was that trains had a bad reputation because at one time they were seen as exploitative monopolies. To push back, we got the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) with a lot of economic regulation of the trains. If a road needed a bridge over some train tracks, then maybe the train company was asked to pay for it. The unions saw the train companies as soft targets and, with the help of Congress, took advantage. So, by 1955 or so, many people in the US regarded passenger trains as something they would like never to see again.

So, for the 900 miles to Grandma's for Christmas, with lots of luggage, presents, camera equipment, and on and on, and the desire for a car when get there, the cost was really just the direct marginal operating cost, so I and nearly everyone else with a car took their car. E.g., when I drove that 900 miles, it was less than five miles from my apartment to an Interstate highway, and then I was on Interstate highways or similar for all but the last 15 miles where the traffic was very light and the roads fine.

Yes, people have thought of the idea of having a car drive onto a special car of a train and then let the train do the driving while the people sat in the car, listened to the radio, now watched a movie on a laptop with a DVD, talked, etc. Didn't work -- not enough people came.

Since the 1950s, the US has had a love affair with cars.

Europe and the US have some significant differences.

Actually, for shorter distances, there are good intercity bus lines in the US. Typically can get to/from a smaller city easier on bus than train or plane.

As I recall, all of Germany is smaller than just the smaller US state of Oregon.

There are a lot of places in the world where distances are large and population density low; we will see what they do about passenger transportation -- Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, most of Africa, most of Canada, most of South America, much of South Asia around, say, Afghanistan, etc.

Great info, well stated. I have two quibbles:

1) $0.25 gas ended circa 1973 if not before.

2) Your area estimate of Germany ended in 1990. Today's Germany is significantly larger than Oregon. The former West Germany was about the size of Oregon.

> 1) $0.25 gas ended circa 1973 if not before.

The car I was driving was either a 1967 Pontiac Firebird with a 4 speed manual transmission and a 400 cubic inch engine or a 1969 Camaro with a Turbo 400 three speed automatic transmission, a 396 cubic inch engine, and a 2.56 rear axle ratio.

> 2)

Sorry about the area of Germany -- I was drawing just from memory from a remark in some history video. I should have looked up the area.

I should also add detail to the welfare economics cost/benefit analysis of the Baltimore subway system: The analysis counted the construction cost as $0. The only costs considered were the direct marginal operating costs and the on-going maintenance costs. Still the cost/benefit analysis failed. Net, in the US it is just super tough to make passenger trains pay.

> This means that you don’t have to touch the accelerator during stop and go traffic because it will do it for you. Soon Model S owners will be able to change lanes by only tapping on the turn signal stalks. No, they do not have to buy a new Model S to get this feature, they can simply connect their car to a wi-fi connection and get firmware updates.

As someone who grew up in NYC and never learned to drive that is not only really cool but immensely appealing.

I got adaptive cruise control in an Audi A3 last year and was amazed to find out it was first introduced in the mid 90s!

That being said it feels very futuristic having a radar in your car and makes driving on the motorway a lot more pleasant. However I now seem to spend the brain cycles I was using on judging speed imagining up bugs that could cause me to accelerate into the car in front :/

Does it work if you're following a motorbike? I'm not sure how wide a vehicle it needs to get a decent radar return.

Edit: Just looking at a Honda manual online[1], it says: "ACC may not recognize motorcycles or other small vehicles ahead of your vehicle". That's more than a little worrying.

[1] https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/om/JA0606/JA0606O00...

Mine tracks bikes well, I think it also uses a camera mounted above the rear view mirror.

It also uses that camera to dip the headlights, which is often tricked by two lights close together (reflectors on bollards or traffic cones). It's also has to wait to see the headlights, where as I can tell they are coming a short time before.

And it doesn't dim the lights for bicycles/motorcycles. Audis are the bane of my existence. If you can turn that feature off and manually control the brights I implore you to do so.

This. I'd played with all sorts of leap second adjustments, time zone switching, etc.

A really rolling road (Arizona has some of these) where the car might be one "roller" ahead of you but look a lot closer, then your car hits the brakes at the apex with a car tailing you.

There is a warning in the manual about sharp corners. There are times when on coming cars could look like they are in your lane.

The biggest issue is that it ignores stationary cars, so if you come around a corner to red traffic lights it would drive straight into any stationary cars. Which is why I only really use it on the motorways (highways).

* they can simply connect their car to a wi-fi connection and get firmware updates.*

Scary thought. What could possibly go wrong?

Automotive software should not have frequent updates.

> Automotive software should not have frequent updates.

Quite the contrary, I don't want to know how many integrated nav solutions or mediatainment systems are vulnerable to all sorts of exploits with no way to be updated except by an expensive visit to a service center.

Today, if it's vulnerable to an exploit, it's probably been exploited long before the vendor finds out about it. Patch-based security stopped working once the opposition became governments and organized crime, not script kiddies and email spammers.

> This means that you don’t have to touch the accelerator during stop and go traffic because it will do it for you

To be fair this kind of technology has been on top end Mercedes for a while (10yrs plus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU83G3OaJuU#t=115

I drove one a few summers ago as a chauffeur for Farmers Classic, it was all in/around LA so was incredible on jammed freeways, It's nothing new though or Tesla specific.

> Soon Model S owners will be able to change lanes by only tapping on the turn signal stalks

Not sure exactly how this will work: will the car change lane immediately (or just a few seconds after you turn on the signal) or will it first make sure that the driver behind you won't close the gap? Because if it doesn't do the second thing (i.e. making sure that the driver behind you will let you change the lane) then I'm not sure how it will work in cities with crazy traffic.

Quite a lot of cars have lane assist now, where they will have a light on the wing mirror if there is something in your blind spot.

They also vibrate the wheel if you go over lanes and aid in steering your back.

I imagine this is a combination of the two. My worry is how it deals with something like this http://www.op-online.de/bilder/2012/12/18/2669673/1360212316... Does it just stop?

Really cool feature - the adaptive cruise control feature is now becoming an option on more mainstream cars, and it is one of those "how did I ever drive in traffic without this feature" things. I think many people don't get how incredible that feature alone is - it isn't fully autonomous, but it makes driving in serious traffic so much less stressful. Add in Tesla's auto lane change and lane keep and you're 80% of the way to self driving.

I don't know about "brutally quick". Anyone who's driven an M3, S4, or any similar performance sedan isn't going to be blown away by the speed of the Model S. It's fast, but it isn't mind-blowing.

As someone who's driven both a 2011 M3 GTS and a 2012 Model S Performance around a track, they may be in the same class, and the around same speed on paper, but they feel very different. I'd classify both as brutal, but the Model S accelerates more explosively without seeming like it's even trying. I'm sure the relative silence has a lot to do with it but the car absolutely feels faster. It's difficult to explain, you've got to drive it to understand.

Even if fuel economy, maintenance, reliability, etc. were not factors I would go with the Model S every day of the week.

> I'm sure the relative silence has a lot to do with it but the car absolutely feels faster. It's difficult to explain, you've got to drive it to understand.

See my earlier post in this thread with a series wound electric motor has infinite torque at stall (not yet rotating). So, standing still or moving slowly, an electric car, with a lot of power, can feel like it has instant, effortless, and amazing acceleration compared with an internal combustion engine that has to use gears and a clutch or torque converter.

> fuel economy, maintenance, reliability,

Yup, a Tesla could have some advantages especially since its engine really has only one moving part, the armature of the electric motor, or two for the D model. That's a long way from the number of parts in an internal combustion engine with camshaft, push rods, rocker arms, valve springs, valves, pistons, connecting rods, ....

But, for a Tesla, there's a chance that in time the battery will need to be replaced.

Long ago a Ford executive said, "You build me a good battery, and I will build you a good electric car.". Apparently Tesla has made a lot of progress on the battery, but it remains an issue, for cost, weight, charging time, and lifetime.

But, no joke, an engine with just one moving part, and no transmission, has one heck of an advantage in maintenance and reliability.

> But, no joke, an engine with just one moving part, and no transmission, has one heck of an advantage in maintenance and reliability.

I guess you could say the same thing about the Wankel engine as well.

The problem is that a traditional engine is tuned to work well enough within the life time of a car these days, so it isn't really a problem.

Fuel economy wise though, the traditional piston engine outperforms the Wankel engine.

The Wankel was asking a lot of the seals at the edges of its special rotor; apparently it was asking too much.

> Fuel economy wise though, the traditional piston engine outperforms the Wankel engine.

Yes, piston rings work a lot better than the seals Wankel needs. And, now with pistons, we can use high compression ratios; the Wankel seals have problems which get much worse at higher compression ratios.

Why high compression ratios? Simple, classic Carnot cycle physics: The higher the compression ratio, the more get out of the fuel.

Why higher compression ratios now? Because now we can have direct fuel injection, directly into the combustion chamber, much as in a Diesel. So, then can do all the turbo charging and supercharging want, for still higher total compression ratios because don't have to worry about pre-ignition from the air being too hot from the compression it got before entering the cylinder. So, don't have to use an intercooler to cool the compressed air.

Why supercharging or turbocharging? Because get more power out of the same basic engine of pistons, cylinders, etc., that is, more power without more friction from larger pistons. So save on friction. So two savings for fuel economy: Higher compression ratios and less friction. That's what Volvo and others are doing: Small engine, lots of boost, good power and good fuel economy.

I suspect a good way to get both range and fuel economy with an electric car is to have a hybrid: So, have an internal combustion engine drive a generator to charge the batteries.

Here can have an advantage: The engine need run at only one power setting, its most efficient. Then for such an engine? Sure, use a gas turbine so that we are back to basically just one moving part. Yes, in an axial flow gas turbine, the part that rotates, at, say, 30,000 RPM or so, is darned expensive, but that part is also designed for the engine to have some ability to have a throttle. If give up the idea of a throttle and have only one power setting, then we can return to centrifugal force for both the compressor and the turbine. Then the metal for the high temperatures is expensive, so can use some ceramic.

Now we're talking: Just one major moving part, cheap ceramic, centrifugal force, single power setting (where the aerodynamics for the compressor and turbine work best). Might get 200 HP in a small package. Then run it only when charging the battery.

Then never bother plugging the car to charge the batteries. When driving around town, nearly never run the turbine. On the highway at 65 MPH, occasionally run the turbine. Blasting across, say, Nevada at 110 MPH, run the turbine a lot. At top speed of 150 MPH or so, sure, run the turbine 100% of the time and still have the battery run down.

Sure, get some losses when generate the electric power, when stuff it into the battery, when draw it out of the battery, and when drive the electric motor. Yup, several losses.

> I suspect a good way to get both range and fuel economy with an electric car is to have a hybrid: So, have an internal combustion engine drive a generator to charge the batteries.

Isn't that how the Chevy Volt/Opel Ampera is operating?

I suspect so, and for some other hybrids as well, but I don't think anyone is using a gas turbine yet except maybe in a hybrid for, say, a city bus.

Well, there's always the Tesla P85D, which they briefly mention in the article. That's the real performance version. It's quite a bit faster at 0-60 mph than the M3, roughly 3.2 seconds vs 3.9 seconds.

And the Tesla is quiet. Here's a great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QERGldfZA5A

I don't know how well a Tesla corners compared to German or Italian competition.

It feels pretty great in corners because the suspension keeps the car level. I don't have experience driving many other higher end cars to compare it to, though.

It will never hold up on the track. The battery can only handle the max load for a short amount of time, before the computer limits the engine and make the car more of a sunday driver. That's not a problem for every day driving, it just isn't comparable to other supercars on the track. It however means that for normal usage, it means you have the efficiency of an EV and the "burst" ability of a supercar.

Cornering on the P85D is pretty amazing due to the low centre of mass. I got to drive it on public roads rather than the track, so I didn't get to push too hard, but even then I was surprised how quickly I could hustle it through bends (for comparison my usual drive is a BMW Z3M Coupe, and I've been lucky enough to drive most of the present M cars on the Spartanburg track).

Agreed, 0-60 in 5 seconds isn't slow, but it's not brutally fast by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm less interested in the speed and more interested in the handling. I am a BMW guy through and through because they are just so much fun to drive and just feel right. How would you compare taking a Model S through the twisties to say an M3 or even a regular 3 series?

Model S is a heavy car - with something over 2 tonnes, it is in weight category of 7er.

3er/M3 are different league in handling. Those extra 700 kg you simply cannot hide.

it's 3 seconds, not 5.

No, the review was the non-P version which is the slower model.

That's the P version rated at 700hp or so, not the one reviewed. But I would absolute rate 0-60 in 3 seconds as brutally fast. That's Porsche and Ferrari territory.