Elon Musk gets a lot of hate, and I get it, he's not a *nice person*. But look, this guy broke the oil trust. If it weren't for him we'd still be sitting in our hands chanting "no realistic alternative" while our infrastructure slowly cooks us to death.
@kravietz
Proved that electric cars can be utilitarian, fun, and economical.
Tesla may be fun (never driven one) but how they are utilitarian and economical. For 27'000 GBP (cheapest 2014 model I was able to find in UK) you basically get a luxury sedan.
Disclaimer: I've been driving hybrids (Prius, Auris) since 2013 and considered EV once per since on average, but I just can't make any functional (size & range) and economical (price) sense of them. for my usage scenarios.
@kravietz
Utilitarian = You can use one as your primary vehicle to get places you *need* to be, it's not a toy scooter.
Economical = Costs will drop and quality will improve as they make more, i.e. "it scales".
Tesla certainly has demonstrated that it's possible to build a long-range general-use EV. This is a fact and should be respected.
At the same time there's no doubt it's a car in the luxury class that nowhere near the mass market availability.
Regarding prices, I certainly am in favour of electrification of everything (not just cars), and would switch to an EV as soon as it makes sense to me. There are physical and economical challenges to it though:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518302726
@kravietz
I think we're talking about the same thing here. There was a time when cars existed but were not obviously going to replace horses. But Henry Ford's assembly line + the electric starter made it clear that the horse's days were numbered. Still people used horses in the US up into the 1940s and even 1950s, in other countries they do to this day, but you can still look back and say Ford "killed the horse". In the same way, Tesla "killed internal combustion".
Ford made cars specifically for the mass market - I struggle to see how Tesla is even near to this category?
All EV available on the market (at least in UK), and there's now a dozen of them, have a theoretical range of ~150 km and can be at best classified as city cars suitable for commuting. The battery cost seems to be the primary factor here - if they extended the range, their cars would cost as much as Tesla, and that market segment is already taken by Tesla.
> Ton of battery R&D still needed to be able to bring EV costs down
That's my very point from the very beginning. The thing with engineering is that you can't say someone *made* a breakthrough until it actually has been made, otherwise it's just PR like cold fusion. Ford indeed did it, Musk didn't. Maybe he will in the future, but as of today we can't say that.
And I'm quite sensitive to semantics around this, because I've been watching VRE (variable renewable energy) market for the last decade, and it's hard to find any other place so much driven by hype. Tesla battery farm in Australia was trumped as some kind of revolution. In reality with its 150 MWh capacity it has practically zero impact on the whole grid whose annual capacity is measured in PWh, and happily continues to run on coal.
@kravietz
Ton of battery R&D still needed to be able to bring EV costs down, Tesla is leveraging luxury market to pay for that. Also they've made a brand decision to not be "cheap", but it doesn't matter because they've started an auto-maker stampede into EVs so the economy niche will be filled, esp. as battery tech improves...