internalaudit
Member
The first real all electric, easily available car was Nissan Leaf, its sales were very interesting. Telsa must be praised because they are really pushing electric cars.
A big advantage of Tesla cars is about the fact they are selling them cheaper than they cost, this is not viable in the long term, but for consumers it's great, but it can't be like that forever.
The new Leaf sounds like a great car, the range of 230k miles is a big improvement and when most be able to buy the model 3, probably the range of the leaf will be even better. Model 3 is far from cheap, the base mode is very basic, when you start to add the great stuff, price skyrockets.
Normally the price of the cars is under evaluated on most reviews, but making something great at any price is a lot easier than making something good at a reasonable price.
Model 3 coolness is really good, but many of it it's impractical, that huge screen to control everything can't beat usability of dedicated buttons for dedicated functions per example (note that dedicated buttons is the more expensive solution - take the example of photographic cameras - cheap ones use the screen for most operations).
Currently Tesla and Nissan (maybe Chevrolet too now) are way ahead of everyone else regarding all electric cars, but I believe other current big car manufacturers will catch up very fast and will keep the lead they currently have (GM, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, ...).
Only thing holding some of them back is the battery price. Margins are likely thinner compared to ICE/transmission but if advancements are made, they will be quicker to jump on board.
It's as if patents can prevent reverse engineering of battery packs.