Posted on 07/21/2014 7:37:53 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Tesla said this week that its $35,000 entry, due in 2017 (or thereabouts), will be called the Model 3. One of the keys to making a cheaper Tesla is battery technology, as CEO Elon Musk pointed out to Auto Express earlier in the week.
I chatted with John Voelcker, senior editor for High Gear Media, which publishes Green Car Reports, in the wake of the news. He offered insight into what impact a lower-priced Tesla might have.
Q: Tesla has sold very pricey cars to date. How might a $35,000 Model 3 shake things up?
John Voelcker: A list price of $35,000 is a very nice place to be as compared to the current Model S, which is selling well for its category, but this is a category that starts at $70,000 and goes up to six figures. So, if Tesla can in fact introduce the Model 3, as it's now called, at a base price of $35,000 with a 200-mile electric range, that will take them into a whole new order of magnitude of volume.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Our town car is a $12,000 Toyota Yaris.
You could have added "with thanks to Pete Barbutti for the joke" - if you're old enough to remember him, that is...
Until the Tesla’s can be recharged in roughly the same amount of time as a gasoline fill-up they will always be a luxury because they are not suitable to be a person’s only transportation. You always have to have another gasoline car in case you don’t have time to charge up the EV.
Tesla Model S hacked in Chinese security contest
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/chi-tesla-model-s-hacked,0,7108232.story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyFjGVodG1g
$1500 won’t even get you the charging station. Where will the electricity come from, especially in California and Minnesota where they want to close all the coal plants?
With the optional battery pack, the model S will do 0-60 in 4.0 seconds, the quarter mile in 12.4 seconds at 112.5 mph.
Depends on the styling... The Model S is a gorgeous car. If the Model 3 looks like a Leaf it won’t be a blockbuster. TSLA, Musk, Space X are all good at design so I’m expecting it to be a good looking vehicle.
Hell of a good move by Musk although not for altruistic purposes. He opened up his patents in order to have people accept them as the defacto standard thereby driving volume to his planned gigafactory.
Lol. Right. That is what you want them to think. Most Americans can’t afford $35K for a car.
I see dozens a week... Have a few friends who own them. All say they are the best cars they have ever owned (one traded a Porsche Panemara and one traded a Mercedes S 500).
The British top gear guys say electric powered cars is a dead technology...........that’s good enough for me.
Yup, the altruism is just spin.
Musk got what he needed out of the patent system. Now that it poses an obstacle to him ...
35K will buy me 35 of the cars I normally buy...
I normally get 2 years out of a 1000 dollar car.
I see no use for the model 3.
What was his reasoning? I’m intrigued by the Japanese hydrogen powered cars. http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/06/toyota-takes-aim-at-tesla-motors-inc-with-hydrogen-car/
The same factors which make wind and solar power so difficult to cost-effectively utilize make electric cars make sense.
With wind, solar and nuclear, you aren’t paying for raw materials; you’re paying for facilities construction and maintenance. The problem is that wind and solar production doesn’t necessarily coincide with demand. (Solar production peaks 3 hours before demand, and God knows when wind production will peak.) You need some sort of battery or battery analog to store the produced energy until it’s needed. But no battery or battery analog has been economically feasible.
On the other hand, mobile power sources are very expensive. So expensive, that we continue to rely on obscenely expensive petroleum combustion for most mobile power sources.
What electric cars essentially do is use the fact that petroleum combustion is so expensive to make it economically feasible to use a mobile power source (your car) as a battery for poorly utilized energy produced during off-peak demand hours.
Not to mention that the electrical grid cannot handle 50 million electric cars plugged in all at once.
yup, I would own a model s if it came with a 500+ HP petrol engine.
Actually, Musk would be more useful to creating a healthier economy if he made it clear that he was NOT being altruistic. Far better that he demonstrate that government-protected productivity dampening is a lose-lose all around, and make clear that he intends to profit off of releasing the patents.
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