Interesting story. Thank you for sharing.
What if they were purposefully testing all the super-charger slots? Including the old one?
As someone who has spent most of my automotive life following the German premium segment (as a customer), I'm 100% convinced Audi, just like BMW and we know Mercedes, are working on BEVs. Of course we know Audi had the R8 e-tron ready to go, but got scared of the cost. So an Audi BEV is a fact, albeit currently a cancelled-right-before-production fact. They will of course talk their hybrids up and dismiss the BEV for now in their PR, because that is what they sell today, but I have no doubt they are preparing to enter the market at a point they deem both possible and suitable. Clearly they are behind Tesla in the practical implementation, but also they have a lot of vested interest in their ICE research and the likes of g-tron and thus have other reasons to delay, so their reasons for not yet entering the market are probably numerous - I'm sure they could if they absolutely wanted to at any cost (e.g. Audi R8 e-tron, I'm sure, could be shipped within weeks), but they are trying to find a balance. This is of course a conservative and a dangerous approach - it didn't work that well for traditional mobile phone manufacturers when they stalled after the iPhone went from zero to hero in no time.
Hopefully for the likes of Audi, they won't be balancing on that beam for too long, because Tesla might just get a head start and carve a sizeable market for itself the traditional players can't recover. Come to think of it, for all of us who think the car market is down to two cars today (
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/34989-Car-market-literally-down-to-2-cars-today), more choice would be better, so let's hope the Germans and others quickly follow Tesla's suit.
Me? Sorry German car friends, but you've let me down. I'll get my kickdown kicks from the Silicon Valley from now on. And really, it is pretty sad to see what BMW, Audi and MB call electric cars, when the comparison is Tesla Model S. It really diminishes the forward-thinking, technologically progressive brand image I had of the Germans. They seem so old world now in every way. It seems hard to even imagine returning to those after they do catch up, from a brand emotion perspective, right now. I'm fairly certain Tesla will reap a lot of enthusiast benefit from its progressive thinking still over the next couple of years, while others fidget.
