Will most likely get one, but will probably wait a year or two after they come out. Had 46 solar panels installed on the roof last year - approximate 10 years to get the ROI - but of course if electricity rates go up, then it's shorter. Also not taking into account any value added to the house, which can be a positive or negative. Some may just not like the look of solar panels and be turned away, others may see that they are saving $3k a year in electricity and view it as a huge plus. The ROI was only 7 years before the SREC market collapsed in Maryland (sucks - don't see it recovering until at minimum 2019, if ever).

As far as batteries go - the technology is evolving so rapidly that it's best to wait. There is no ROI on them, especially since they have a limited shelf life (unlike the solar panels, which only lose about 10-20% efficiency in 30 years). So the only advantage to having them is if you want to pay a few thousand dollars to have some power when the power goes out. Unlike solar panels where the technology really isn't improving at a rapid rate, battery technology is growing by leaps and bounds seemingly every year in terms of both capacity and lower cost.

I can see in 5+ years down the road, maybe sooner, that it would actually be cost-effective to use the batteries to hold excess power during the day, and power your home at night, as well as provide emergency protection - and possibly be able to be off-grid with solar. But again, we are definitely some years away from that.

In regards to solar shingles - great idea, but again quite a ways away from being feasible. And they are much, much more expensive than panels currently - I think I saw where they are about twice as much. Not to mention possible service costs since they are basically your roof as well (solar panels are relatively simple, very rarely need repairs, and in the event they do - it's pretty easy).

One fire after a drunk driver crashed the vehicle - you can't possibly take that into consideration. There's probably more lives saved from Teslas getting to crashes where a gas tank would have ruptured and caught fire in another vehicle.

Not so sure about that - for years and years, seems like a decade, people have been saying Amazon stock is overpriced and will crash in the short-term because they show no profit, yet it continues to climb and climb. If Tesla can deliver their upcoming vehicle around their said price, and it gets decent reviews, I think they will be in fine shape.

Just wait until inevitably gas starts to go up again towards $4/gallon ... remember the last time it happened? Diesel, solar, started to be a daily conversation and sales had a huge spike - not to mention big investments in the technology.

Now that gas is and has been down for some time - it's not a daily conversation anymore. Diesel isn't even in the conversation anymore the way it used to be (of course Audi is partly to thank for that!).

Just wait until oil/gas starts to go up again - Tesla is poised to reap tremendous benefits. They just have to survive until that happens. But when it does happen - expect Tesla to take off exponentially.

I get where you are coming from, but saying Musk is a snake-oil salesman is just like saying Bezos is as well. They are using a very similar business model - they aren't primarily concerned about profits. It's smart - because once you get concerned about profits, it's all about "this year has to be better than the next" to please investors. Make 30% profit this year, next year has to be 35% or it's a failure. Make $10 billion this year, you'd better make $12 billion next year.

It's all in the long game, and smartly so. Amazon didn't become what it is today by focusing on how much profit they can get on their bottom line every year - if they did, they probably wouldn't even be around right now as they would have been eventually crushed.

And as another poster said - snake-oil salesman implies you are selling a product that doesn't do what it's sold to do. Elon built a car that somehow, in very close to their first effort, surpassed the ratings of every other car manufacturer. That's incredible - decades and billions of dollars in research from all the major car companies, and they allow a scratch-company to come up and build a car that gets the highest review ever obtained. That's just nuts when you think about it.

And I do agree with the original post - all the other car companies were simply too afraid to make the switch. Way too much pressure from the gas/oil industry. I guarantee you there were a lot of back-room deals going on to suppress any switch to electric over the years. Not to mention oil prices - ever since Tesla got serious, oil prices have never gone back up. Coincidence? Certainly not - the countries that export the oil know what is at stake. Oil prices go up - even better for Tesla and electric vehicles overall. That's why gas prices have never gone back up to what they were a few years back when it was a "crisis".

But electric just makes sense - it's such a simple machine compared to a gas engine. It should have been done a long, long time ago. The only obstacle was simply battery life. Figure out battery life - and you have a much simpler engine (if you can call it that), much more reliable, WAY more convenient in terms of going to the gas station, and to top it off - they're even fast!

It's a good thing none of the other major car manufacturers have recalls of vehicles or parts after they've been sold ... oh wait.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/14/news/companies/ford-steering-wheel-recall/index.html

.... so yeah, let's blame Tesla for repairing too many things before the cars even leave the factory. Meanwhile it seems you hear about thousands of cars being recalled every month from every major car manufacturer. What a silly article.

Yeah I noticed the same thing - Tesla is at the bottom of quality control and reliability? Really? Is that from The National Enquirer or something?

And Porsche is at the opposite end of the spectrum? The company that, along with their parent Volkswagen, decided that they would get by emissions testing by cheating, and risk their entire company, costing them billions?

Yeah, I'd take an investment in cross-country charging stations over that any-day. And it's certainly not a liability - they could sell their stations in a heartbeat to any competitor and probably actually make a profit on them.

Yeah, but you know anytime a self-driving car gets into an accident there is going to be one heck of an overblown reaction against it, just like what happened here. Instead of focusing on how many hours/miles a self-driving car goes without an accident, the focus is on the one accident where the car is technically not at fault. I live near DC, where there seems to be one pedestrian killed each night. I guess they need to stop running trains each time a train runs over someone as well since they can't stop in time. It's just silly. The cars will never be fully 100% accident proof, but they will almost assuredly reduce accidents compared to human drivers.

Just a note that this absolutely isn't true - Paypal doesn't take ANY time at all to notify you that a refund has been issued. It's virtually instantaneous. Yes it will take a few days after the refund is issued through Paypal to go back to your original form of payment. But Paypal will notify you immediately once a vendor starts the refund process, and it will show up immediately on your transaction activity on Paypal as well. Unfortunately this is 100% on Tesla, and it's either an uninformed Tesla rep, or something kinda shady to keep you from inquiring further until they decide to push the refund button.

Wouldn't be surprised if big oil is also somewhat behind companies like GM not producing more EV cars. They have an insane amount of money to throw around, and the last thing they want is a decline in gas vehicles - mileage standards have already impacted them heavily.

"The engineers estimate a total of $28,000 in costs to build the Model 3: $18,000 for materials and $10,000 for labor and production. “If Tesla manages to build the planned 10,000 pieces a week, the Model 3 will deliver a significant positive contribution to earnings,” said one test engineer. For a car eventually supposed to retail for $35,000, that sounds like a pretty profit for Tesla.

But it won’t be, argues Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. The margins on the Model 3 must still pay for a cost structure that legacy carmakers don’t have, including planned factory expansions, new automation investments, and its own dealership network. While Tesla has its own advantages, like integrated solar and energy storage products and no costly pension liabilities, the company is counting on fat gross margins of 25% to stay in the black. (Ford by contrast has 10% margins.)

The $28,000 estimate for building the Model 3 “shows there’s some possibility of making money at the low end,” said Gordon. “But it actually doesn’t leave very much [money] per car for all the other expenses. If they’re selling it for less than $50,000, I don’t think it’s a good business.”

The most expensive problem the electric carmaker faces is the ballooning cost of automation at its Fremont, California, factory. CEO Elon Musk boasted in 2016 that Tesla’s highly automated Fremont facility would be the “most advanced” car factory on the planet. He’s since admitted Tesla overreached, and had to rip out parts of the assembly line.

“We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts,” Musk said in a CBS interview aired in April. “And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.” The company bought the German automation company Grohmann to help get things back on track.

The supposed cost advantage is turning into a financial sinkhole, argues the Wall Street firm Bernstein Research. “Tesla seems to be spending over 2x what a normal [auto manufacturer] would invest per unit of installed capacity,” the March 28 report stated, citing $2 billion in recent facility investments. “The reason Tesla has spent all this money, the reason it bought Grohmann and the reason it can’t build Model 3s are all linked. Tesla has tried to hyper-automate Model 3 production.”

Curious - Tesla has built a huge nationwide charging network. Why doesn't another car company "rent" it's use? That's a huge expense and infrastructure investment. I can't believe that other car companies haven't thought about it. I wonder if Tesla would flat out refuse to enter into a contract with another car company to use them, or that other car companies just don't want to give Tesla a boost by using their network? Honestly I can't believe no other major car company has yet to make a deal with Tesla to use it.

Their name is just pure evil. "Boston Dynamics". It even sounds like the name of a company that will start a future robotic uprising.

"Using a supercharger instead of charging at home is not allowed under Tesla’s terms of service."

I'm not sure he's right on anything - I've found no evidence that the above is not allowed under Tesla's terms of service. I've actually found many articles that state that superchargers have been installed in specific cities due to the inability to install chargers at home, which seems to negate that statement as well.

I share the same opinion - Tesla is so polarizing, like a politician. It seems almost everyone either hates them or loves them, with no middle ground. I think Tesla has been great for the auto industry as a whole, and regardless of how much money they had to borrow - breaking into the automotive space and designing cars from the ground up that were able to score higher than any previous cars in ratings is just a huge feat. Having said that, Elon is getting a bit crazier by the minute it seems, and I think he really view(ed) himself as untouchable and could say anything he wants. This is a huge blow to Tesla and Elon made a massive mistake, and we'll just have to wait to find out the ramifications.

Actually I believe it's the opposite - stock price going up had nothing to do with "Elon stepping down". It had to do with both (1) resolving the issue 100% and (2) Elon NOT having to leave the company - he is still CEO and just stepping down as chairman.

Even Tesla haters would most likely agree that if Elon was ousted completely from Tesla, it definitely wouldn't cause the stock to go up - it would plummet.

Are you taking electricity cost into account with your fuel savings? It didn't look like it with the math, but not sure. 15k miles/yr in a model 3 would cost approx $600/yr in electricity costs.

This is just insane. How can a startup car company around for a few years create a car that is the safest car ever tested - competing with all these other car companies with decades of experiences and billions and billions of dollars into safety R&D trying to get the best safety scores they can? Remember when Volvo use to rely on the fact that they were the safest cars on the road to sell their vehicles? Yet it seems all you hear about are the one or two Tesla crashes and heaven forbid a battery catches on fire or explodes in a major collision - yet hundreds of gas vehicles each day get into accidents and burn to a crisp. Who cares if you hate Elon Musk, think he's a snake-oil salesman, hate Tesla in general, or think they are going to go bankrupt - they just created the safest mass market car on the road, when every single other car company has been trying to do the same thing with all their $$$ and experience. It's nuts. They've got some impressive engineers that do not get enough credit for what they have and are doing.

Not sure that's really a fair, much less perfect, example. If you watch the video, it's clear he's an employee that will probably get fired from just about any job. He is told to not wear shoes that have roller wheels in them, and he refuses and seemingly wears them every shift, and says the rules are "too square". It's not rocket science to know that any retailer is not going to allow employees to be skating around the store. The manager is pretty clear saying that it's for safety reasons. Just the fact they continued to allow him to work, despite wearing the shoes he was told not to - is pretty lenient.

It seems to me the more serious issue are there being no door handles to open a door. Tesla tells them to reference an emergency manual to open them manually from the inside - not exactly something you do with a few seconds to get out if there's a fire.

There's just no way this will happen - MAYBE in a few, very localized areas. I know Tesla is doing it's own internal testing with employees, but before any widespread autopilot comes into use, there is going to have to be significant testing outside of Tesla's own people. And that hasn't even started yet.

But the sad part is that when, not if, there is a significant accident "caused" by a Tesla on autopilot, it's probably going to derail things for a very, very long time - simply due to perception and media. Not to mention the financial implications that will cause Tesla to be heavily sued by anyone involved in a Tesla autopilot accident. It's one thing for the driver to be sued, it's another for the company because people will go after a LOT more $$$ from Tesla than if an individual caused the accident. And now there will be at least two parties suing - the owner of the Tesla and whomever else was involved in the accident. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome, and laws to be made.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most, if not all, of the autopilot accidents were attributed to mostly human error. Even when autopilot was at fault, technically the human component did something wrong (ie did not have their hands on the wheel like Tesla instructed, not paying attention, etc) that would have made the accident avoidable. Tesla even points this out.

Full autonomous autopilot is a different animal - there will be no human driver to pass all or part of the blame to. Public perception may be the biggest hurdle to overcome. And the first accidents will be major news. There's no doubt to me that full autopilot will be much, much safer than human driving, especially in the long run. I'd be tempted to say that I'd feel safer with my own daughter driving on autopilot than driving themselves (beginning driver).

Note that when I said this, I was talking about the future when full, autonomous autopilot is integrated into society. Not today's partial autopilot.

Yes it's all very odd - it just doesn't seem to make any sense. American born company, trying to break into an area from scratch that most deemed impossible, and actually created decent product. You'd think almost all Americans would be cheering for a company like that to succeed, yet there are so many that seem to just want it to fail. And no one can really explain why.

Agree 100% - it should really be inevitable. Sure there will always still be classic ICE cars that people keep. But there will be absolutely no upside to ICE cars once electric cars get better range and faster charging, as well as come down in price a bit more once technology gets cheaper and they are selling more. It's overall such a simpler car - less moving parts, fantastic acceleration, quieter, cheaper to drive, etc. You can throw out the whole environment argument for them - they are simply going to be better, more reliable cars overall. But in the meantime - you have the oil industry that is going to have to undergo one of the greatest changes in the history of the world. It's such a global industry, with entire countries dependent on it - I wouldn't be surprised in the future if the transition from gas cars to electric is actually some sort of age (ie the Stone Age, Iron Age, Electric Age) because it will have such a world-defining impact.

Because our government hasn't taken the lead on anything in decades.