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Tesla scraps its plan for a $25,000 Model 2 EV
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Regarding the sales process: in Tesla's early days, they received an exception to the requirement for needing to use dealerships. Generally this is very shady and is outright unfair towards other car manufacturers—even Rivian didn't get this same special treatment because lawmakers saw how Tesla abused it.
Tesla's growing monopoly on charging networks isn't something to be proud of, in my opinion, and neither is their proprietary charging cable. We need open standards.
Also, Tesla's mileage estimates are notoriously exaggerated. Perhaps technically you can get the claimed range if the entire trip is downhill…
It would be better if direct sales were allowed, but unfortunately dealerships are required by law in almost all US states. The shady bit is how Tesla got one of the few exceptions and continues to be exempt despite being among the leading car manufacturers in the USA. All other leading manufacturers are required by state laws to sell their vehicles through dealerships.
Tesla's NCAS chargers only began to allow non-Teslas to use it from 2019, so this is kind of recent history in terms of car ownership and network coverage.
To be honest, this is like the ones from every other car, both EV and ICE.
That hasn't been my experience, but perhaps regulations are stricter in the EU.
EU uses the WLTP method of testing range and its way more optimistic that the process we use in the USA.
I've driven 120k miles on my Tesla, and have a different observation on range and efficiency. Even with sub-optimal winter tires and roof rack rails, I can still attain rated efficiency. It does require appropriate temperatures and speeds though, more sensitive to that than ICE cars in my experience. 80k miles in a Chevy Bolt demonstrated about the same tendencies.
We are getting the standard in the form of NACS, but Tesla still owns the chargers. They could always abandon NACS and switch it up/require a costly adapter.
We are a long way from hitting any limits in the number of deployed chargers. It’s a wide open market and there’s government money to make it easier. Any company could have as many chargers now, if they chose to spend the money. Any company could have chosen to do the maintenance to keep their chargers in working order.
While Tesla’s lead in chargers is one of the reasons I chose them, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to call it a monopoly. We’re still at the beginning of the market, with huge untapped potential and room for all to grow