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Tesla Model III preorders have started

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natto fire said:
This thread is all over the place, but I did want to respond to this post. Whenever I am talking up electric cars, I say that they have much less maintenance, and this is very true. The battery rebuttal is usually the first one I get, and it is not without it's merits. I am not in the auto repair field, but from my personal experience and anecdotal evidence from friends and family members, the batteries (both Ni-MH and Li-ion) are not as unreliable as some people think.

Consider the cost of maintenance items an ICE must endure for a 150K+ mile life such as oil changes, spark plugs, valve adjustment, timing belt/chain, filters, various emissions components. Depending on manufacturer, you could be paying a lot more or a bit less than a new battery on your BEV. With the electric vehicle, you also get the benefit of doing less brake jobs, or none at all if you don't drive aggressively, and have a vehicle capable of great regen.

You raise a good point about electronics, as they are prone to failure just the same as mechanical things. I don't know too much about Chevy's battery electric cars, or Nissan and Mitsubishi as well. I have always admired the Volt, and the scope of the Leaf and MiEV, I think Toyota really laid the groundwork for the counter to the battery argument. That is why I am disheartened they are skipping Li-ion and trying to go fuel cell with the Mirai. Anyhow, even ICE vehicles have a large amount of electronics to make the engines function within emission and power specs. I am not sure if you are implying that ICE cars are still running breaker point distributors and carburetors, but the failure-prone electronics is a check mark in both power sources, IMO. I get it that you are just responding in a realistic fashion to yinan's overly-enthusiastic post, and I am not trying to deride you, just keeping the facts straight.

I am probably in the minority where functionality is more important to how a vehicle looks, so the cosmetic argument is moot.

I am not going to grandstand for Tesla as yinan has embarrassingly done, but I believe the Model S is one of the most properly executed arguments for battery powered electric vehicles on the road today.

Also, I don't like the screen in that Model 3 interior one bit.
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There are volt owners with 300k miles on their cars with little to no battery degradation. the temperature control and charge/discharge rates seem to be the biggest factors.
 
Brovane said:
The 2014 Model tested didn't have AEB which the newer cars and the Model III will have.
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Neither did the tested 2014 Modeo, Passat and Outback. Hard to claim to be the world's safest car when it scores basically the same as mass market family sedans.
 
Accord99 said:
Neither did the tested 2014 Modeo, Passat and Outback. Hard to claim to be the world's safest car when it scores basically the same as mass market family sedans.
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What criteria are you using to determine "basically the same"?
 
michal1980 said:
any time I hear people use buzz words, and corporate jingo like you with 'agile' process, I smell a shill.
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The Agile stuff basically means they're doing continuous improvement, which means they keep on working the bugs out of stuff & adding new features rather than just sticking a buggy product out there & ignoring it forever. Which is actually pretty cool because the whole car is run by a computer & sports a 17" screen (the Model S, that is) & they can push out software updates OTA. For example, they were able to improve efficiency through a software update to the inverter algorithm & improve the 0 to 60 speed by about 0.1 second:

http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-car...will-make-the-tesla-model-s-p85d-even-faster/

So yeah, it's a buzzword, but it's legit because Tesla actually uses it effectively :thumbsup:
 
I'm not so sure that Tesla's ability to change has to do with their production philosophy so much as it has to do with the fact that they have 1/10th of the organizational overhead and a microscopic fraction of models compared to most other major brands. Other companies have a lot more corporate bloat that changes have to be approved through.
 
vi edit said:
I'm not so sure that Tesla's ability to change has to do with their production philosophy so much as it has to do with the fact that they have 1/10th of the organizational overhead and a microscopic fraction of models compared to most other major brands. Other companies have a lot more corporate bloat that changes have to be approved through.
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It helps when you have two-way communication with the vehicles and you can push software changes to your customers fairly easily. Also Tesla uses the information that comes back to make changes to the vehicle. Already the Auto-pilot has improved based on the information flowing back to Tesla.
 
Brovane said:
It helps when you have two-way communication with the vehicles and you can push software changes to your customers fairly easily. Also Tesla uses the information that comes back to make changes to the vehicle. Already the Auto-pilot has improved based on the information flowing back to Tesla.
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Absolutely. Still helps that they have one singular model (with some battery/performance/tech pack differences between trim levels) to focus on and a very abridged command structure compared to companies like Volkswagen, GM or Ford to approve or push change.

The real test will be production volume. How are they going to handle the need to crank out 200,000 Model 3's? That's 2x as many electric cars sold in all of last year. And how well do those attention to design hold up to attention to assembly under duress.
 
vi edit said:
Absolutely. Still helps that they have one singular model (with some battery/performance/tech pack differences between trim levels) to focus on and a very abridged command structure compared to companies like Volkswagen, GM or Ford to approve or push change.

The real test will be production volume. How are they going to handle the need to crank out 200,000 Model 3's? That's 2x as many electric cars sold in all of last year. And how well do those attention to design hold up to attention to assembly under duress.
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That is a huge one, the handling of the ramp-up in production and quality. I expect that the first cars off the line will have quality issues. They also have a price point to meet that will be a challenge. It is one thing to produce a car but you also need to keep control of the price of the parts. I remember reading how originally the parts of the roadster was more than the price they were selling the vehicle to. They had to impose a lot of discipline to bring that inline.

This move by Tesla to move out of just being a niche car manufacturer brings a huge amount of risk to the company. Can they start turning a profit before they run out of cash on-hand? However Elon has been willing to take bold risks before.
 
z1ggy said:
Can't wait for this to become practical for the masses. $35k is still too much money for a car for majority of people, but if they ever came out with a "slower" model or one that wasn't filled with bells and whistles for $20k, I think tons of people would join the EV band wagon.
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So you are after something like the Tesla Golf Cart? 😎
 
monkeydelmagico said:
Why does it need 20 fixes per week? 😱

Let's see how "agile" Tesla is in 30 years......if it survives that long.
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Eh, with appropriate analytics and the ability to mass distribute patches (see above posts on self reporting back to Tesla from their cars) they can continuously monitor and tweak the programming on a lot of things the car is doing.

You almost have to think of a Tesla as a "literal" mobile application.
 
I wonder how many of those put down the deposit are committed to buy, I know a couple dudes did it because it is 100% refundable.

For me I am not giving up on my stick shift.
 
Denly said:
I wonder how many of those put down the deposit are committed to buy, I know a couple dudes did it because it is 100% refundable.
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Yep, a fully refundable deposit is nowhere near same as an order. It's just an option to buy. Maybe they'll convert half of these into actual purchases, if the car is good. But who knows, it won't really be out in volume for two more years.
 
Apex said:
Even my little piece-of-junk Fiat drops only 10-15% range in the cold of winter.

30-40% would be horrible.
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That's because the Tesla has the energy equivalent of about 2.5 gallons of gasoline. I'm sure if the Tesla had 4 times the energy capacity, the penalty would be comparable. 1 gallon gasoline = 33.6KWH so a Fiat probably can store about 352KWH in its tank.
 
I suspect this post will be scoffed or ridiculed by most people in this thread but for those of you that may take the chance...

Tesla is the next Apple. Buy the stock now while it's cheap. Sit on it for ten years. You'll be glad you did. In fact, tomorrow may a cheap day after today's news.
 
DAGTA said:
ok. I work in software development unrelated to Tesla, SpaceX or Solar City. We use Agile (successfully) in our software dev.
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And Agile and other buzzwords in software development is similar to, and benefits from the concepts of Kaizen and lean manufacturing which were heavily developed by Japanese manufacturers, like Toyota and Honda and enabled their growth thanks to their advantages in efficiency, quality and cost.
 
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