Audi, Porsche and Mercedes preparing a rival for Tesla with 400 km of autonomy, namely, Audi plans to release a rival to the Model X in 2018, then take out an electric Porsche sedan and possibly 2021 Mercedes kick your electric sedan the size of a E-class or S-class. Article in german: Daimler und Porschen setzen eigene Elektroautos gegen Tesla - manager magazin Google translate to english: The German premium car maker Tesla want U.S. top dog attack with new, own electric cars. Mercedes and Porsche to models with more than 400 km battery range. Audi will present its Tesla-fighter until 2018. Mercedes and Porsche working on new electric cars. Both brands were planning sedans whose batteries guaranteed for more than 400 kilometers. The reported manager magazine in its new issue, which is available on Friday (October 24) on the market. They were responding to the success of the Californian newcomer Tesla with his Model S. The electric Porsche should be a way smaller version of the four-door Panamera, according to Stuttgart. The car will, however, not be on the market before 2018. Mercedes plane comparable with E or S Class electric car, says group circles. The Board has not yet decided about the project, CEO Dieter Zetsche is exaggerating but ahead vigorously. However, the E-Mercedes can not be placed on one of the current model architectures. For this purpose, the required battery is too big, tell stakeholders. Therefore, the Tesla Fighter will probably not even come on the market before 2021. Daimler's previous electric cars, a smart and an offshoot of the compact B-class, come only on a good 150 km range. Audi already for a long time has plans for a Tesla-hunters. CEO Rupert Stadler favored instead of an electric sedan, a SUV-coupe with more than 400 kilometer range. Stadler wants the car does not move against Tesla's Model S, but against the announced 2015 SUV-like model X of the California manufacturer. He wants to sell the car later than 2018, but preferably at the end 2017th.
Finally they start to wake up. This was always the strategy of Elon, to kick start the development of EV's. Perhaps they can look at Tesla's patents and have their newly developed EV's be able to use the Supercharger network? The future looks bright!
GoogleTranslate will only do about 20 words at a time, and I don't read German. Does the article describe a collaboration between those three companies? I assume not. Does it quote sources or is it just speculation? It is taking amazingly long for other manufacturers to respond to Tesla's awesome vehicles. By the time those companies release their long range EVs Tesla will be far ahead of them. But I am glad to hear that at least they plan to do something in the EV space beyond short range commuter/compliance cars.
This is absolutely not "wapor-ware", it's absolutely real. Recently a director of audi said we were crazy if we thought Audi was going to leave the whole market to Tesla, and after that they presented his "own Model X", call Giugiaro Clipper concep car. Do you remenber this pictures of that car?: I have edited my post to put the translation with google. No collaboration between the companies, except between audi and porsche as you know both belong to Volkswagen. This magazine does not mention the sources of time, but is a serious magazine that always has good information from someone within the companies.
Audi is the King of vapor ware. In one press release they giveth and another they taketh away. A concept car is just that.
This German news-article contains no news at all. It is only written to give the people in Germany a proud feeling about the German car-manufacturers. But the truth is that not one of the German car-manufacturers can compete with Tesla Motors. They just cannot come up with a car that could come anywhere close to the Tesla Model S. And it just doesn't look like that they will be able to do that in the next 5 years either.
That Audi concept vehicle looks wildly unrealistic. If Tesla is struggling to ensure that the Falcon Wing doors operate and seal properly, imagine the engineering issues involved in getting the door seals on that piece of Audi vaporware to work! I am sure that concept car was not actually operational. Audi is great at announcing vehicles that never happen.
Agree. This car will never see production. Audi knows the Model X will go into production soon and this is a naked attempt to trump all the publicity that will accompany the Model X's production and be yet another embarrassment to the German manufacturers. It's a totally transparent PR stunt, made all the more obvious by the gimmicky doors that attempt to one-up Tesla (note that the rears are gull wings, not falcon wings).
Might be worth noting that for ages folks called the Model S vaporware. Heck, some folks even say that about the X.
When Tesla unveiled the Model s in 2009 they said this car was going into production in 2011, sure they were a little late but it went into production. Have any of these manufacturers done the same thing or are they just prototypes that might go into production? If the latter is true then vaporware is appropriate
Well... If you believe the article as written, the major German manufacturers will be about 10 years behind Tesla in developing something that might be able to compete with the Model S. In the mean time, Tesla won't be standing still. Best of luck to them, but it sounds like too little too late to me. Not to mention, I highly suspect "400 km battery pack" will end up turning in to "100 km battery pack with a gas range extender" or some such uselessness.
And that front door, you have to "dive" beneath it, or else risk banging your head when entering the car.
"Audi plans to release a rival to the Model X in 2018... possibly 2021 Mercedes..." Lucky for them Tesla is standing still in the mean time. Huhh, just imagine if after they designed the Model S battery in 2010-2012 they kept working on improvements, or, say, started building the world's biggest battery factory to force price per unit down. Thank God for the VW group and Mercedes, right after the release of the Model S, Tesla fired all of their battery engineers... /s Seriously, though, if Tesla wants to bring in the final, lethal blow, they wait until one of these companies parades to the press their new 400km car, then releases a PR the next day congratulating them, and announcing that, BTW all Teslas manufactured in the last 2 weeks have a new battery pack in the 600-800km range. :tongue:
I stopped using GoogleTranslate and use Bing's version. Instead of 20 words there's a limit of 5000 characters: http://www.bing.com/translator/ Oh, and they translate from and to Klingon too