Oloron
Member
Just out of curiosity, would you have bought the Model X if it didn't have Falcon wing doors?
I can't imagine anybody is rushing to buy the X because they've got to have those doors!
I just don't understand who makes these decisions at Tesla. They're nuts, whoever they are. Its an ELECTRIC VEHICLE that goes 250+ miles. That alone sells the car. Why the stupid gimmicks like FWD and disappearing door handles? Makes no sense to me.
Time will tell if they get all the bugs worked out in a timely way, I suppose. But rear seat accessibility aside, the FWD are huge attention magnets - and there's a lot of marketing value in that gimmick. There are no shortage of stories in these forums about crowds gathering when the doors are opened in parking lots.
Taking Ford as a benchmark, they spend about 3% of revenue on advertising (and much more than that on dealer incentives, etc.). Tesla effectively spends nothing, partially because of the gimmicks. On a $100k car, that's weighed against the $3k/car that someone like Ford would be spending. If it turns out that Tesla has to throw $1000 at a thousand or so of the first cars they produce to get things right, that's likely a trade off they'd happily make.