Really? The man was independently wealthy. He could have bought his own island and lived in luxury the rest of his life. Instead he plowed his entire fortune into Tesla and SpaceX and was a couple of weeks away from losing everything. If the 4th SpaceX launch had failed like the previous 3 or if they hadn't figured out the drivetrain problems on the Tesla roadster he would have nothing now.

I'd think it's pretty clear that Musk is motivated by other things than money. You may agree or disagree with his dream, but there's no question the man is sincere.

Unfortunately GM figured out that there was much more money to be made in financing car buyers (GMAC). Before the bankruptcy GM was widely considered a financial institution who also occasionally made cars.

Lutz really is a car guy and I have much respect for him. He has had a very frustrated career at GM, fighting accountants and finance guys through the years.

That's the whole point of Tesla. Musk has stated several times that they want to push the big guys (Toyota, GM, Ford, VW etc) into building real electric cars, not just compliance vehicles. Tesla doesn't want to be the only on the market, they want to be one of many. That's why they opened up their patents.

Miles driven is a much better metric as charge/discharge cycles ages a battery more than age.

Such a chart was done on the Tesla forum where owners reported miles and the max range after a charge. The chart showed a very small deterioration with well over 90% capacity remaining after 100K miles (the highest mileage reported).

We haven't found the limit for Tesla batteries yet. How will we know what a replacement battery will cost in X years where X could be upwards of 15-20 years?

All aluminum (easily recyclable) car with very few moving parts and no tail pipe emissions vs just about anything else... I'd think it compares very favorably.

The charge/discharge cycles is what wears a battery much more than age (although age also has some effect).

The highest mileage Tesla Model S I've heard about has a bit over 100K miles on it. The owner reports it's on the original battery and has only lost a few percent of range (battery capacity) compared to new.

Finally someone uses the correct term. Thank you!

Tesla has a schedule function where you can set the time it will start charging. It's also geo-fenced (GPS), so the schedule is for a specific location. Pretty neat in that if you plug it in at home it won't start charging until your preset time, but plug it in somewhere else and it starts right away.

That who and the what now?

I live in Texas. I bought my Tesla in Texas. Thanks to the dealer lobby the paperwork says I bought it from California, but in reality the dealership bribes accomplished nothing except a slight tweak to a piece of paper. My car was delivered to the Dallas Tesla Service Center where I picked it up. Oh, and I had a California instead of Texas temp tag on it until I got my real Texas plates.

All in all the Texas "Tesla ban" is a non-event.

Tesla had a 2 month backlog (time from order to delivery of a car) of 2 months early this year. In the spring it grew to 3 months. Early summer they upped production to address this, but backlog grew to 4 months. Tesla is building more cars than ever, yet the wait keeps increasing.

"Stagnant" my ass.

All this for a car that was introduced almost 2 years ago and has had virtually no updates during this time. Shows how far ahead of other manufacturers they were.

This is standard practice for any large business. Texas just gave Toyota tens of millions of dollars in incentives to get them to move their headquarters here.

I've used Gigabyte MBs exclusively for 15 years and I only run Linux. My latest MB is a Z87 with UEFI. No problems with Linux. Boots to usable desktop in under 10 seconds. No problems booting Linux off a USB stick either. During these 15 years I've never had a Gigabyte MB fail.

Posting to undo accidental mod.
It can be debated WHY Linux has almost no viruses, but the fact remains that it is much less impacted. Since you don't need AV on Linux it tends to run faster.

The plans include 6,500 employees.

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Has been debunked already. Even when operated on 100% coal power, the Model S produces 1/2 the pollution of a small economy gasoline car.

Interesting comment considering no one has seen the Model E yet. Can I borrow your time machine, please?