Thank you for the warm welcome, guys. You raise some excellent point in the responses. Since I'm still a new member and my posts go through the moderator (so I don't know when this will become public), I will try to combine my further thoughts into one post instead of individual replies. To clarify to those who wondered about the title, it is a quote from adiggs on the Model X sub-forum: "For me, the car market is literally down to 2 cars today... (S vs. X)." (
What will MX be cross shopped against?)
I always saw hybrids and plug-in hybrids as stopgaps, but I did use to think that the near to mid-term future of electric car was the gasoline range extender. It sort of made a lot of sense to me - make an electric car that can also charge from a relatively compact gasoline engine when necessary. I guess this is what BMW i3 (with the option) is targeting and others have shown similar concepts. What I didn't realize at the time is that the thinking radically changes when you take the bold step beyond that: remove the gasoline engine entirely.
The thing is, doing something like the BMW i3 really can mislead. Its problem isn't so much that it is a small car (that can certainly be attractive for many reasons, least of which is parking space and maneuverability in cities - I do see a future for small electric cars as well), the problem is that it is still inherently based on an idea that electric car thusfar is limited. This changes thinking and it is something that seems to set Tesla apart massively at the moment, because they don't share that belief.
The BMW i3 and many of the first electric cars (be it hybrids or whatnots) are smallish city spinners exactly because electricity isn't considered practical for longer ranges by the traditional automotive manufacturers. Similarly, by creating the range extender option, this point is driven further home - leave it to good old gasoline to get anywhere else. The Audi A3 e-tron (a plug-in hybrid) is also built on the idea that electricity is for the city and you'll need gasoline for the longer hops - the functionality of the car is built around this premise. Audi too was thinking otherwise with the R8 e-tron, but cancelled it because they got scared. Besides, it really wasn't the best proposition for the "new normal" electric car. I'll get to that shortly.
If you think electric cars are only good for short hops in the city, you are probably going to build a car that is only good for short hops in the city. If you think electric cars are a track curiosity, you'll probably build a track curiosity.
What if you think electric car is suitable for everything that your regular, normal or full-sized car is? You might just build one. This is when a brand new world opens up, because an electric car that believes it can cover any distance and dismisses the internal combustion engine, begins to enjoy immense benefits. Not least because that clarity and purity of vision, of an electric car world, means you are likelier to take better and bolder steps to make it happen. Traditional car-makers have a vested interest in the world of the past and are more inclined to take and prefer babysteps, so that their current business isn't hurt. After all, a lot of the R&D these guys have is about building internal combustion engines. Making those obsolete overnight isn't a good proposition for them. They'll dabble in the niches, so as to not hurt the volumes. A car-maker of the future has a vested interest in things like a supercharger network instead, because they are already living that future in their thinking and their interest is aligned with it.
It is so ingrained in our thinking, us "car people", that internal combustion engine and the characteristics it brings to cars. Many of us probably have a hard time at first seeing what the difference is when that is gone completely. So much of what makes a car, be it a regular car or some kind of hybrid, no matter how frugal, are the parts needed for internal combustion. There is piping and tanks for gasoline, motor oils, exhaust sprawling throughout the car. There is the massive engine somewhere (be it front, mid or rear) plus all the axles and gears going from there to the wheels, because the size of the internal combustion engine means it is often placed away from the driving wheels. To drive all that efficiently, you need a transmission system. And because an internal combustion engine basically burns and blows up stuff, it needs oxygen, so you build the car around vents and airflow in and out.
Absolutely none of this matters in an electric car. Electric motors are small and can be placed near the driving wheels with minimal gearing and axles, without any transmission or much piping, tanks, vents. There are of course bigger batteries and coolants still there, but the massive mechanical monster that is the internal combustion engine and all the parts needed to make it go is basically gone. There is no need to start an engine in the traditional sense, so there is also no need to stop it - the noise and vibrations caused by starting, running and stopping an engine are gone. Drive any distance in an automated start-stop internal combustion engine car and this point is well driven home, it is extremely jarring. In an electric car there are no more shakes, smells or fumes to worry about. (If you have a cold garage, maybe you'll miss that there won't be an engine running super-hot after a spirited drive heating up your garage with excess heat...)
Because the internal combustion engine is gone and a large battery sits in its stead, so is gone the need to power things through the engine - you don't have to have "the car running" to power things. This means you don't have to shut it all down in a cold garage for example or stop running a heater in a closed space. We don't have to idle the car to keep the heaters powered or the compressor running for cold air, in fact with Tesla one can just as easily cool or warm the car even when parked - something gasoline cars achieved through additional gasoline burning components, with the associated fumes and noises in tow (and usually these haven't allowed the cooling of the car other than ventilation).
Really, given a big-enough living room, you could drive your Tesla in it just as your kid could run their electric toy car. We not yet in the Tesla world have gotten so used to staring and stopping our car due to exhaust, and with the mechanical brutality of what starting, running and stopping an internal combustion engine entails, that many of us probably don't realize how much the world changes when all that is gone. When the car's behaviour, basically, gets the same elegance as your smartphone, instead of having echoes of the steam age. That changes things.
But in the end, all that goodness is gravy. And I won't even go to the lessened pollution in this post (not an unimportant point in itself of course). What having all that stuff removed, while still retaining the thinking that this is really any old car and not just a golf cart, really results in is unbelievable practicality and performance. If you don't care at all about the preceding stuff (some might actually like the character of a big gasoline engine), this added practicality and performance is what probably still makes you think twice. I know it certainly has made me think twice.
All that internal combustion engine stuff removed, a full-sized car is efficient enough to run like an internal combustion engine sports car, while having the storage capacity in excess of a large SUV. Tesla Model S, for example, almost has the storage space of an Audi Q7 because its trunk is huge and its front trunk quite unique - this in a non-SUV car that size-wise resembles competitor sedans that have half the storage space. Make an electric car the size of a Q7 and its storage space will be massive (see the Model X). And all this also translates into bigger interior: in an electric car, without the transmission and the drive shaft, passenger roominess in almost unprecedented both front and rear.
Consider that BMW i3 again. Do the above in a small car and you won't really get the full benefit. Either you have to spend excess space for batteries of formidable range or settle for a shorter range (probably one reason BMW i3's range is much smaller than Tesla's). Or waste space with a range extender. Even if you settle for a smaller range, you will not quite see the huge difference electric car can make, because you are still comparing small city spinner to another small city spinner. The advantage of electric car again becomes much larger when viewed in a regular or full-sized car context. This is why Tesla today is such a different proposition than anything else on the market.
An electric car is also quite practical from a cost of maintenance point of view. The obvious is, no more pouring in smelly burning liquids in the car at the tank (that in itself is a pretty big change to how a car is perceived because the stuff it now runs on is available at any modern home), but the less obvious part is how much of a car's maintenance is actually related to those burning liquids and the damage they do to a car. Those of us who don't maintain engines ourselves may miss this point, because we have just outsourced that work (at a cost) to a maintenance shop, dutifully going in when the car says it is time and then paying through our nose when some oil-filter-piston-serpentine-belt-swap is needed. Much of that is gone in an electric car.
So, massive space, elegance and cost benefits through removing the internal combustion engine. Yet this is a type of car that can move super quick. In a straight line, the Tesla Model S is almost as quick as a Lamborghini Gallardo and faster than an Audi RS5, a much smaller car in its makers quickest performance guise. And the power is available in a much more immediate fashion on an electric car, when there is no need to get the engine in its optimal zone of miniature explosions, nor waiting for the transmission to catch up with the act. Put that Model S and RS5 together and the former will be a car's length further on when you press the pedal. The roaring piece of glorious history next to it will be, well, pretty much history.
This is what you get in an all-electric car that is built with the same goals as a regular car in its pricepoint would be. And only Tesla seems to get it, so far.
But Tesla goes even a step further with that smartphone analogy: they stopped thinking of the car in car terms, and instead think of it as a smart member of the wireless internet age. Of course regular cars have used electronics and computers for decades now, but they have done so from a very automotive perspective - protected metal boxes that you have to take to an official maintenance shop to maintain, and usually then only done in a recall manner, not par course. The user interfaces have been very car-like, with the same gauges and physical switches that a 1930s car had, slowly being replaced by a little more digital gauges and physical switches. Many in-car screens still follow the double-DIN format introduced for radios in 1984. Thirty years ago.
Again, what happens when you simply throw that all out. Tesla Model S happens. As large as some of the screens in recent German premium brands are from an automotive perspective (at least freed from the double-DIN trap but sized still quite comparative to those smaller double-DIN screens), they are still miniscule compared to the television or two Tesla dumped on their dash. But more importantly, what you can do with those old-world small screens is still rooted in that quite limited automotive history, whereas Tesla took their cues from the tablet world. The difference is, again, quite similar to what the iPhone did to the traditional mobile telephone when it changed the rules completely.
And just like the iPhone introduced major feature updates to phones, so did Tesla to cars. Usually car-maker updated the software components in a car just like it did the mechanical ones: for warranty repairs or some other purely maintenance reason, and usually only in a maintenance shop. Basically just replacing the mechanical with electronic on an individual part scale. What if you forget all that history, rooted in the fact that mechanical parts actually understandably need physical maintenance (and even more so if they are mechanical parts of an internal combustion engine car), and understand that computers and software are inherently a different proposition. Not only can you update them, you can update them over the air and automatically. You may be able to fix and maintain some parts of the car remotely.
The more of the car is disconnected from the physical and moved to software, the more you can update and maintain it over the air. This is why those huge screens are such an integral part of this re-thinking. And is anyone else following suit yet? The user interface of a BMW i3, supposedly their latest and greatest e-wise, reminds me of a BlackBerry from 2005 compared to the enlarged iPad in the Tesla.
This is what happens when the car maker realizes the car is no longer an extension of the internal combustion engine with all the proud history attached to that, but now an electric smart device with wheels. Even Tesla could be probably braver still - their car still looks pretty much like an internal combustion engine car externally, but I guess we can't expect them to re-invent the entire concept all at once and still sell it to the public.
Now now, before all this sounds like a bunch of fanboy frothing, there are of course serious caveats to all this. On the lesser end, that touch screen is not the end-all-be-all best solution for everything - just like on smartphones or tablets, sometimes the physical keyboard simply is more efficient for the user (be it fast typing, controlling without looking etc.), especially until tactile touchscreens are developed - if even then. On the more serious end, the car is a massive battery float on wheels and when the time comes to replace that battery, expect to pay a pretty serious penny.
And in long-range practicality, the charging speed of the electric car is a serious limiter: whereas filling up at the tank takes mere minutes, even the fastest charging available will take 30-60 minutes to achieve the same and slower chargers take hours. Personally the longest I have driven without a serious break is 1000-1100 kilometers (600-700 miles), with just the occasional quick gas or toilet break, and this is not something a Tesla could do. Even in optimal circumstances such a hop would require an hour or two spent at superchargers, but in reality the network is not wide enough for me yet to do those particular trips. Same trip relying on CHAdeMO and AC chargers would probably require a night spent in a hotel and include some serious range anxiety along the way. Tesla has a solution in the supercharger network (and it is free thusfar), but in reality it is not there yet for many of us availability-wise, and it is still much slower than the gas tank. Automated battery swaps are still just a tech-demo too.
But for another reality check: I have driven such Tesla beating trips exactly three times in my life. Three. What I mostly drive is 20 to 200 kilometer drives, which I expect to do by charge the Tesla at home every night while I sleep and top up daily at the office when I work (plus using free parking charging stations where available). I couldn't do all I need to do in a city spinner like the BMW i3 without a range extender, it would make some of my semi-frequent trips impossible, but with a Tesla I expect I can, based on the numbers specced and user experiences gathered anyways - subject to future personal experiences of course. With Tesla I can also do those without the weekly or bi-weekly stop at the gas station I now have to perform. I just have to remember to plug it in for the night and perhaps for the day at the office.
So, today, it seems everyone else but Tesla is still trapped halfway at best, entirely at worst in that internal combustion engine age. With that realization, indeed, the car market is literally down to Teslas today. Nobody else is trying as hard, be it from industry building, supercharger network or trying to make full-sized cars in this new format. It is hard to see myself plunking down cash for anything else but its kind of "new normal" car made fully electric ever again. I guess if gas or fuel cells or something radically reinvent things in the future, those might be options too down the line, but at the moment it is a bit hard to see those either in my future. It just seems so beautiful to detach the production of the energy from the car itself. It seems perfectly simplistic to harness energy elsewhere (and have the benefit of being able to optimize that, instead of trying to do it in a moving car) and just transfer that (through electric wire) to the car.
The realization has just hit me too hard. Suddenly the onset of something new has made all that was previous normal, quite abnormal. The shaking of a large engine starting, the noise, the fumes, filling the tank, I'm kind of disgusted by them already - something that still just very recently felt like power and performance and made me consider such new cars mere months ago - and I don't even have my own Tesla yet. Kudos to you guys who've realized this much sooner, I know many of you have. But now I'm firmly in the club and not about to look back.
I guess it would take some major-scale disappointment with my future Tesla(s), failure of the Tesla company or serious breakthroughs in alternate techs (e.g. fuel cells) to make me consider otherwise. I'll keep an open mind in theory, but in practice my choices are now firmly locked in Tesla's favour.
