ken830

Hello fellow Bay Area-r! Bay Arean? I live in San Carlos, which is the original home of Tesla before they moved to Palo Alto. I see at least 10-15 Model S's during my lunch break in Palo Alto! They're everywhere!

When I said "ownership experience", I meant not only the service side, but the car itself too.

I'm consciously keeping my expectations grounded. But to be fair, on the product-side, Lexus created a slightly (relatively speaking) better car. What I mean is that it was incrementally better. Tesla delivered a fundamentally different product. The electric platform, and the software-centric design of the Model S is inherently better and allows it to offer an experience that is impossible with an internal combustion-powered car. In nearly every metric, the Model S comes in shattering all records. That's not because Tesla did such a perfect job and designed a perfect electric car. I'm the first to admit that there is plenty, plenty, plenty of room for improvement and refinement in the car. But the electric platform simply has a higher performance limit in nearly all metrics. And so Tesla simply did a great (but not near-perfect) job and produced a car that easily surpasses what was once hard limits of the gasoline car. It's not simply a better-performing engine-replacement. This is what makes it different and better rather than just better. Lexus in the 90's played a better game. Tesla today is playing a different game altogether.


In regards to service, I know as they grow, they can not continue to offer the exact same breadth of service that a small company does. But they can keep the core depth of it. The ranger program is optional and at an additional cost, so that seems sustainable. And the loaner program seems totally feasible too with a managebly-small fleet because of how little service electric cars inherently need.

The "free" super chargers are not really free. Yes, for the 85 kWh models, they are built-in to the price of the car, but for all others, it costs several thousand dollars to "opt-in". I'm sure this will be the case in future models as well. This should be enough to fund the expansion of the network. If we ever see so many Teslas on the road that we have to wait an hour for Super Chargers, that would be a great problem for Tesla to have and solve.