<story><title>Tesla Smashes Earnings And Revenue Expectations</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-q1-earnings-2013-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cloudwalking</author><text>This is the first of many profitable quarters for Tesla. The Model S is a better car &lt;i&gt;in every single regard&lt;/i&gt; (except for range), than any other car on the market. It is safer, faster, roomier, more fun to drive, has more storage, quieter, more convenient, and less polluting.&lt;p&gt;Electric vehicles will displace combustion vehicles. Everything that makes a car, the electric car does better.&lt;p&gt;Right now the electric vehicle market is small, but soon (one decade?) it will eclipse the combustion market. Tesla is ahead of ALL other vehicle manufacturers, and that lead will translate into significant market share. As the electric vehicle market grows, so will Tesla&apos;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lambda</author><text>&amp;#62; in every single regard (except for range)&lt;p&gt;And price, and convenience.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; more convenient&lt;p&gt;No it&apos;s not. The lower range, low number of charging stations, and long charging times make it quite inconvenient for long trips.&lt;p&gt;I bought a used car 3 years ago for less than the cost Tesla charges for replacing the batteries on its car (which you are estimated to need to do after about 8 years). This car is a station wagon, so has much more storage space than a Tesla. I go camping every year, about 550 miles from where I live. I can make that trip in about 10 hours including food and gas stops. For the same trip, I would need to make at least two hour long charging stops at Supercharger stations along the way (if I had the highest-end battery option). But there are no Supercharger stations along my route; so I would need to find places to charge with ordinary power sources. If I used ordinary 10 kW 240 V sources, it would charge at a rate of about 30 miles of range per hour, effectively tripling the length of the trip; now what was a long 10 hour drive has turned into a 30 hour trip, which means finding places to stop and sleep overnight (which hopefully can give you a charge).&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I live in an apartment, without a dedicated parking space. I need to park on street. So there&apos;s nowhere I could charge my car at home; I can&apos;t exactly run a power cord down and across the sidewalk to my car. Neither is there anywhere to charge my car at work. There&apos;s no way I could even use a Tesla for commuting right now, let alone longer trips.&lt;p&gt;With a gasoline powered car, I just fill up at any gas station, my car holds the gasoline overnight so it doesn&apos;t matter where I park, and for the above describe trip, I need to stop for gas once before leaving and once on the trip, each a 5 minute stop.&lt;p&gt;The Tesla Model S is an amazing car. But claiming that it&apos;s more convenient, or is a better car in every way but range, is a vast overstatement. It would be absolutely awful for me, and many other people with similar needs.&lt;p&gt;Some of these problems are solvable; there will be more Superchargers installed, the price will probably come down, there will probably be more electric vehicle infrastructure. But it&apos;s still a gamble to say that they will completely eliminate all of these advantages that a gas powered car has over an electric car, at least unless the price of gas spikes dramatically.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla Smashes Earnings And Revenue Expectations</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-q1-earnings-2013-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cloudwalking</author><text>This is the first of many profitable quarters for Tesla. The Model S is a better car &lt;i&gt;in every single regard&lt;/i&gt; (except for range), than any other car on the market. It is safer, faster, roomier, more fun to drive, has more storage, quieter, more convenient, and less polluting.&lt;p&gt;Electric vehicles will displace combustion vehicles. Everything that makes a car, the electric car does better.&lt;p&gt;Right now the electric vehicle market is small, but soon (one decade?) it will eclipse the combustion market. Tesla is ahead of ALL other vehicle manufacturers, and that lead will translate into significant market share. As the electric vehicle market grows, so will Tesla&apos;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>encoderer</author><text>Woah, stop that zero-emissions hyperbole engine before it runs away from you.&lt;p&gt;Seriously, it&apos;s &quot;safer, faster, roomier, more fun to drive, more convenient, etc,&quot; than &quot;any other car on the market?&quot; Really?&lt;p&gt;Some of that is true. But there&apos;s also a lot of opinion there and a few total inventions. The Model S is the safest car on the market? My Mercedes stops itself if I don&apos;t see traffic in front of me hit its brakes. It gives me night vision. It will nudge me back into my lane if I drift. There&apos;s about 100 more cool safety features I can talk about, and all this in a car that costs less than the 80kwh Model S. And there&apos;s even more safety tech on the S Class which is just another 10-15k on the top Model S price tag. And of course BMW and other manufacturers have similar.</text></comment>