Tesla Delivers First Batch of Model S Electric Sedans

After years of tantalizing pictures and promises, on Friday the first 10 Model S sedans left Tesla's Fremont, California factory. This first handful of the new S has long been spoken for, and the cars have been delivered (or are on the way) to buyers around the U.S. Even with tax-supported subsidies, the new sedan isn't cheap: the subsidized base price is just under $50,000. Still, 10,000 people have put down five grand apiece for the chance to own one. Wired has a brief piece on what the S is like to drive. What's a 160-miles-per-charge, $50k car worth to you?

Comments

To streamline future posts

[Grayhand]

"What's a 160-miles-per-charge, $50k car worth to you?"

Just to save some time and energy for posts to come. Yes it's over 20K so you aren't interested.

Why can't they make one for under 20K? Batteries are too expensive.

160 miles isn't enough? It wasn't made with you in mind.

Gasoline suits me fine! Then be prepared for $5 and eventually $10 a gallon. Oil is running out and it will happen eventually. If you get solar panels to recharge from the cost of sunlight never goes up and the trend is for solar panels to get cheaper.

Re:To streamline future posts

[TooMuchToDo]

Let me get these out of the way as well.

I put $5K down 2 years ago. Yes, its expensive, but no more than a mid-level Audi or BMW (I love the S4 as well as the M5, respectively). I make over six figures, and have for the last several years, so I've already put a large downpayment aside and can easily afford the $400-500/month payment.

I wanted a luxury car that was all electric and could hold my myself, my wife, and my on-the-way kids. It also needed to be usable by my wife for errands, driving the kids around, etc.

I would buy this car even if gas was $2/gal. Someone has to eat the R&D costs for the price to drop for everyone else.

Re:To streamline future posts

[WindBourne]

You missed so many points.
Tesla is starting high-end and going towards low. In 2014, they are expected to introduce their sub 30K electric car. Unlike the garbage that is out there, it will likely be a 4 seater, and have decent performance and torque (i.e. 0-60 under 6 if not 5) and a range of around 120 miles.

If 160 miles is not far enough, then for 10K each bump, you can change to 220 or even 300. With the 300 mile range, you also get the improved motor that will drop your 0-60 in the 4's. However, if you can not afford, then you are right. Stay with a gas car or wait another year for a Natural Gas car. For now.

Sigh. Most ppl drive in the day times. So, installing panel do little for you, unless you have one that works based on night time charging. Regardless, electricity is less than $1.00 per gallon of gas equivalence (for most of USA, it is .80-.90).

Very little maintenance costs.

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[Luckyo]

I'd like to pitch in on this one. I live in Finland, city of Tamepere. we have ~200k living in the city. This is the site of our public transportation: http://aikataulut.tampere.fi/?lang=en (fully functional english version, we have a lot of exchange students and foreign workers due to being an industrial town). There is also a mobile version of the site and most stops have a printed upcode barcode that you can scan with your phone into an app to help with seeing timetables on the fly.

Full site has the following:
1. Per bus line and per stop timetable (which tends to be accurate within ~2 minutes).
2. Journey planner, where you simply input your start point and end point and set your desired departure or arrival time, and software will provide you with several routes that fit your criteria. You can also set details, like to ignore certain bus lines when doing route calculation or how much margin of error you want to switching lanes.
3. Traffic monitor of GPS-fitted busses (actually most if not all busses have trackers, but it seems only a few are enabled to broadcast to public at any given time).

Public transit itself here is excellent. The only times I ever need to use a car is when I leave the city or am in a big hurry. This in spite of the city being so big that it was classified as a "village" by early EU rules due to having extremely low population density, often considered a bane of public transportation. Night traffic also exists, timed with shift changes in bigger working places (for example shift changes for central hospitals or major factories).

Every bus has been equipped with GPS for a while now. Bus essentially has a notification board inside set to be visible from everywhere in the bus that displays the next stop's name and projected time of arrival as well as current time. Busses are modern Volvo and Scania models, fully air conditioned and equipped with heaters so they're comfortable through hot summers and cold winters. There are many other little allowances for comfort of people, like NFC tickets (you just wave your card through a NFC reader and it shows you the balance on the ticket in front of the driver where you enter, while people exiting the bus do so through middle and rear doors).

Pricing is reasonable by local standard: you can enter any bus for an hour after purchasing the ticket which costs 2.50EUR. By using preloaded tickets, you shave almost a euro off the price. You can also get a monthly card for something around 50EUR, and there are significant discounts for students children and elderly. They also have "workplace" tickets specially tailored for workplaces to buy for their workers.

We have bus lanes throughout city centre, which means that you will avoid most of the congestion especially during rush hour by taking a bus.

In general, if you want to make it work, it can be made to work and work well to the point where even a low density 200k city can have public transit good enough to allow to not even have a car if you don't want to own one. It's one of the major infrastructural advantages here, of you move with your spouse, one car for the family is more then enough, and a single person can go without a car alltogether in many cases. There have actually been calculations done that it's cheaper for an average single student/worker to have a bus card and grab a (very expensive high quality service legally mandated local monopoly) taxi for those few times that bus tables do not suit him/her.

Re:If you`re buying one of these . . .

[drinkypoo]

$50,000 is chump change given the market they're targeting; it's well in line with the purchase costs of similarly-outfitted gassers and it costs a hell of a lot less than the German models. If their build quality is somewhere in between typical American shit (Even the Ford GT famously has flimsy interior, and it's the most expensive American production car ever AFAICT) and a decent kraut kan then the price is eminently reasonable.

Re:If you`re buying one of these . . .

[WindBourne]

Same price as a BWM, Mercedes, Nice SUV, etc. The only difference is that the Tesla costs a fraction of the price to own and can outperform most of those cars.