This is a very good piece on Tesla. Be warned, it's extremely long, but a great read nonetheless:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla ... -life.html
If I could afford it I'd certainly buy one. The electric cars that Elon Musk is making (maybe not so much the competitors) are fantastic vehicles. Really high spec with incredibly low running costs and far fewer parts that could go wrong. The range is not such an issue these days, and it will become steadily less of an issue as time goes by. He's building a network of superchargers across the western world where you can drive in, connect up your battery and have it recharged in about 20-30 mins. There's a few that I'm aware of here in Sheffield, and the UK is a very small market for Tesla at present. As more people buy the cars then more filling stations will want to install them. There's also I believe plans in place for near enough instantaneous recharging where you drive up and a machine extracts your battery and replaces it with a freshly charged one, letting you drive off again in about the time it would take to fill up with fuel. Not that a 30 minute break is such a downer on a long journey, I'll often look to do that anyway if I'm driving long distance. And let's face it, how often do you have to do a 220 mile round trip ? For the vast majority of journeys you make the range won't even be a factor.
As for ramping up production, if anybody can manage it then Elon Musk is surely the man. Keep in mind his back story. He made $200 million dollars when he sold Paypal and ploughed the lot into simultaneously setting up a brand new car company making electric vehicles and also a private space launch company at the exact same time as he was going through a messy divorce. Both are now roaring success stories. He's just built what he calls a 'gigafactory' in New Mexico which is set to make more lithium-ion batteries than all the other facilities on earth put together. This man thinks BIG.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla ... -life.html
If I could afford it I'd certainly buy one. The electric cars that Elon Musk is making (maybe not so much the competitors) are fantastic vehicles. Really high spec with incredibly low running costs and far fewer parts that could go wrong. The range is not such an issue these days, and it will become steadily less of an issue as time goes by. He's building a network of superchargers across the western world where you can drive in, connect up your battery and have it recharged in about 20-30 mins. There's a few that I'm aware of here in Sheffield, and the UK is a very small market for Tesla at present. As more people buy the cars then more filling stations will want to install them. There's also I believe plans in place for near enough instantaneous recharging where you drive up and a machine extracts your battery and replaces it with a freshly charged one, letting you drive off again in about the time it would take to fill up with fuel. Not that a 30 minute break is such a downer on a long journey, I'll often look to do that anyway if I'm driving long distance. And let's face it, how often do you have to do a 220 mile round trip ? For the vast majority of journeys you make the range won't even be a factor.
As for ramping up production, if anybody can manage it then Elon Musk is surely the man. Keep in mind his back story. He made $200 million dollars when he sold Paypal and ploughed the lot into simultaneously setting up a brand new car company making electric vehicles and also a private space launch company at the exact same time as he was going through a messy divorce. Both are now roaring success stories. He's just built what he calls a 'gigafactory' in New Mexico which is set to make more lithium-ion batteries than all the other facilities on earth put together. This man thinks BIG.