Covering several messages in one here...
I realize that everyone know on a conscious level that after buying any gas car, you keep making payments for the life of the car, to the GAS station. You also get to take your car back to the dealer every few thousand miles, for "service". This amounts to thousands of dollars.
Yes, with a Tesla, you pay more initially, but you don't pay for gas or maintenance. So, you say, you could stretch your budget upwards, but subconsciously, you think the gas car is cheaper, when in some instances, you end up paying for a Tesla, but you drive something that is so much less.
I have had my car not quite three years, have over 80,000 miles on it, have never paid for service or maintenance, and due to the fact that I have solar panels on my house that long ago paid themselves off, I do not figure I have paid more that a couple hundred dollars for "fuel", and that only at RV parks while on vacation before superchargers were "invented".
I would not repeat this over and over and over, but for the fact that just about every time anyone tells me why they cannot drive a Tesla is because it is too expensive for them, and yet I find that often they are driving a 4 door 4 wheel drive 4 speed automatic trans pickup truck for which they paid $50,000 plus, and will pay an additional 20, 30, or 40 thousand dollars at the pump.
So, continue to be frugal. Tesla is lowering the price of the battery, too. But make sure you count the rest of your costs, and realize the value to yourself and your children in owning Tesla.
No children here and I don't have solar panels, but I agree. We do have the cheapest electricity in the US ($0.08) and it's from the hydro plant just up the road. If I stay at the level of driving I do now, it will take me around 30 years to pay for the difference. Though I expect we'll be taking the Tesla more to run errands and we have talked about taking more trips. Right now whenever we go out together to run errands we almost always take my SO's car. She doesn't like my Buick and her car does get better gas mileage.
I was already getting bumped up market in the ICE world because I wasn't finding much that worked in the $30K - $40K range. When I started looking at Tesla, I had already started thinking around $50K. My SO had some property in Oregon she has been talking about selling for a couple of years. She's exited enough about the Tesla she's talking about getting it sold so we can get the car sooner.
Good points, but the auto-industry might be repeating the mistakes of the watch and camera industries when faced with crystal timing-keeping and digital images respectively. The swiss watch manufacturers got caned by the Japanese for a long time before managing to rebuild significantly (once they'd been rolled up in a few well timed and very affordable acquisitions, and Kodak and others floundered while Canon and Nikon grabbed the opportunity). My point is that the bravest companies survive by adopting the new BEFORE it is mainstream, because if they wait that long - they will only ever share their market with everyone else who watched, and waited. Cannibalizing your current revenue streams for a near certain future is a matter of timing only.
The worry of every bean counter in every company is what if we invest in the next technology and it doesn't happen? Some people were saying the future was BEVs when the EV1 was on the streets of California only to see them all round up and crushed. Nobody did anything with BEVs for another 6-7 years. In other industries there have been misfires that went nowhere and stayed nowhere. The old hands are frequently quick to say any up and coming technology is just a fad, and sometimes they are right. Sometimes technologies take a lot longer to take hold that originally expected. I think BEVs are finally here to stay, but it's still early in the revolution. Tablet computers had been around in small numbers since the 90s, but they never caught on until Apple made one. A lot of companies had spent a lot of R&D money trying to make tablets that consumers wanted before the iPad.
My father was a commercial photographer, but his work started drying up in the mid-80s as his contacts in the ad agencies started retiring. He wanted to keep working (and worked until his mid-80s) so my parents expanded a sideline they had had for a while to sell photo supplies to professional photographers. They had a direct dealership with Kodak (the only one in Central California) and my father got to know quite a few people in the company. The R&D people actually did see the handwriting on the wall early on, and they developed a line of batteries and cards for digital cameras as well as their own line of digital cameras. The problem was the company's entire structure was built around a large volume product. Film cameras have a long logistics tail between the film, the chemicals to process it, and the photographic paper to print it on. Digital has small to non-existent logistics tail. There was just no need for a big company to serve just the digital photographic needs. Most of the companies that survived in the shake out are either companies that also do something else or made photography hardware to begin with like Nikon, which still sells cameras and camera accessories.
I just watched a documentary called Pump which is about automotive fuels. They touched on BEVs (and if you didn't know anything about the BEV market you'd be left with the impression Tesla was the only BEV out there), but they also talked about the massive changes that have to take place to replace liquid fuel burning cars. Right now BEVs are only 0.1% of the market. That niche was growing at something like 50% a year there for a little while, though this year appears to be down because the price of gas dropped. Even when the Model 3 is in full production at 500,000 cars a year, that's still smaller production than the numbers for smallest company selling mainstream cars in the US (mass produced cars as opposed to limited production exotics) which is Subaru.
Subaru today makes about 900,000 cars a year. And that's the smallest. Mazda, Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, and all those other car makers you see on TV all make more than 1 million cars a year. Tesla may get big enough to produce as many cars as some of the smaller mainstream car makers by 2030, but they won't be able to produce enough cars to challenge the biggest: Toyota, VW, and GM for at least a few decades. The big companies are sitting back and playing a wait and see game while dabbling with alternatives such as the Audi concept but most of the alternative attention is on hybrids because they can still make a lot of money on them.
I've never met you or seen you, but one ergonomic question: how was the head room for you?
Headroom is not usually a problem, I'm only 6'2" which is average for a caucasian guy these days.
The leg problem is made worse by my tailbone which I broke when I was a kid. If my thighs aren't straight on a long trip, my tailbone starts to hurt and it seems to stimulate the sciatic nerve. I've tried those pillows with the cutout for the tailbone and it helps a bit, but there is still some pressure if my thighs aren't straight. I can drive for an hour or so without my thighs straight, it's long trips that kill me. When I did try the tailbone cushion in my SO's car on a long trip (she uses one all the time), it did push me a bit too close to the headliner. I wasn't touching it, but my hair was brushing against it and it felt like I had a bug in my hair.
I haven't been able to arrange a test drive at the Portland Tesla store yet (they have no weekend appointments and it's on the opposite corner of the metro area from us), a forum member who lives close did give me a test drive (we have awesome people here!). I was pleased that the driver's seat in the Model S actually went back a little too far! I have only come across one other sedan that did that.
