Ah, here it is straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.teslamotors.com/ser... Pay $2400 for four years and you get unlimited valet service, and all consumables (brake pads, tires, fluids, etc) are included in the price and checked/replaced at the yearly appointment. Considering the price bracket and bleeding-edge nature of the vehicle, it's not unreasonable, but does add to the cost.

Be that as it may, I still don't get the cause and effect relationship of "bigger factory" => "higher prices". They only sell product for what the market will bear, and if the market will bear a higher price then obviously they want to sell more items at the higher price. But Tesla is not a big company squeezing margins while growing market share. They are still trying to establish their core product range--not upgrading a factory at consumer expense, but building one in the first place at investor expense.

The Model S was available for pre-order for something like 3 years before manufacturing actually started. During that time, less than 10% of customers pre-ordered the 40kWh battery, with the rest opting for the 60kWh and 85kWh batteries. Shortly before production started, they determined it would be cheaper to drop the 40kWh offering and fill the existing orders for those cars with software-limited 60kWh vehicles. Those customers now have the benefit of higher motor torque and faster charging, as well as the option of paying the extra $15k to get the full battery unlocked.

Software problem: They diagnose the problem over the air and push an update without you lifting a finger.

Hardware problem: If their local service center is not convenient for you, they send a tech in a loaner Model S to your location and either fix it on the spot or take your car back to the service center for repair.

This model will probably change when they have more cars on the road, but by then they will have more service centers as well. But if their propaganda is to be believed, by that time their cars will be so reliable maybe the individual service model will still work.

Umm, yes. They have won suits in New York, Washington, Massachussets, and Ohio, to name a few. Not all of those rulings were permanent, but this map is pretty recent.

Exactly! That's why every time a manufacturer builds a bigger factory so they can make more product to sell to more people, the price goes up and up and up. It would be so much cheaper if everything we bought were made by hand laborers working out of their homes.

Elon Musk has personally and repeatedly said that (a) His definition of SUCCESS for Tesla is when it gets put out of business by other automakers making better electric cars, and (b) He REFUSES to use any existing dealer infrastructure to avoid conflicts of interest when making gas versus electric sales. This position is exonerated by experiences with numerous other brands, where absurdly few dealerships actually bother to stock, or even know anything about, their manufacturer's electric offerings, making buying one unnecessarily difficult.

No one has demonstrated to me why letting the Big Three succeed in killing their franchises would actually have been a bad thing for consumers. If they had any shred of desire to preserve brand loyalty, they would operate their dealerships as well or better than the independent dealers, and with less pressure to meet the bottom line in any one location. If they messed that up, then they deserved to go out of business. The auto bailout was just as bad--if these companies are so poorly managed and so important that we have to use legislation to prevent them from killing themselves, why don't we just nationalize the whole industry and be done with it?

The E does not exist. The $45k Model S was the one with the smallest battery pack, which virtually no one bought so they dropped it from their lineup. The Model E will be a new design with new, cheaper battery packs and less expensive trim all around.

All the Tesla owners I know say the only maintenance they have had to do in the last year is rotate the tires, which Tesla did either for free or for a reasonable fee. I'd like to see where you got that $600 number.

Automakers were never forced to franchise dealerships in the first place--they did it of their own accord, as a business decision, when they were neither evil nor powerful. Then the automakers became evil and powerful, and the dealers wrote the laws to protect themselves, using consumer protection as a pretext (it was a pretext because I can't imagine how manufacturer-run dealers could be as good at screwing people over as the independent ones were). Now the dealers are even more evil and powerful than the automakers, and the situation is reversed, and everyone is realizing just how much the dealers duped them with these laws.

Ah, I see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "A pseudocapacitor has a chemical reaction at the electrode...This faradaic energy storage with only fast redox reactions makes charging and discharging much faster than batteries."

So, they made a new kind of supercapacitor, maybe with lower self-discharge than previous ones? A supercapacitor is exactly what I would expect in this application. Calling it a battery seems unnecessary and misleading.

If you're saying that a start-up energy technology that was poo-pooed by analysts for years could actually succeed in upending dozens of entrenched industries, then batteries seem like a pretty good way to go. The oil industry doesn't have a monopoly on Machiavellian corporate tactics.

Fact: The U.S. power grid has continually reduced its overall emissions for decades now.

Fact: Electric vehicles produce less overall emissions than a 35mpg car, even on the dirtiest grid in the U.S, and most EVs are operated on much cleaner grids.

Fact: Over 1/3 of EV drivers own enough solar generation to offset the power used in their cars, making them truly zero emissions.

Zero-emissions electric vehicles exist now, if you have the money or lifestyle to fit it. I too think it will be a great day when hydrogen cars actually compete with battery-electric vehicles. But the obstacles we have to solve before then are many:

1) invent a way to convert electricity into hydrogen that actually approaches the efficiency of batteries, if not equaling it, instead of making it out of methane like we do now or wasting half your power in electrolysis.

2) build hydrogen fueling stations everywhere before a solid base of users exists to pay for it.

3) convince the public that hydrogen cars won't explode like the Hindenburg (stupid but important).

4) make them cheaper than an equivalent battery-electric car, because by the time all that gets done BEVs will be so far ahead you will wonder why you bothered with hydrogen at all.

Once Tesla has created a super-cheap source of grid storage batteries, everyone with an electric car can get solar and go off the grid. Then the power plants and centralized distributors will be forced to shut down. Then local grids will spring back up so people can use communal backup generators on cloudy weeks, but we will never again need the complex monstrosity of our present power grid because all generation will be local. We already have new factories installing enough solar and wind to power themselves, so it's only a matter of time before the grid becomes redundant and uneconomical to maintain.

Batteries for cars are optimized for weight, size, power delivery, low maintenance and cost. Batteries for grid storage are optimized for power delivery, low maintenance and cost. Size and weight are bonuses that make them cheaper to deploy (less land/manpower). So they really aren't as different as you make out.

No utility in their right mind is going to deploy billions of lead-acid cells that will need constant watering and replacement in 5 years when they could buy EV batteries cheaply (due to combined scale of manufacturing and/or reuse) and leave them in place for 20 years.