superbaka
Member
Tesla, like many others, has succumed to the pressure of the vegan community to delete the traditionally prestigeous leather interiors on higher quality vehicles. Now even the steering wheel has changed from premium leather to common plastic.
Hard to blame them. Activists were relentless, at shareholder meetings, shaming Elon into eliminating any natural products. Even down to the glue used to hold the seats together.
Hope everybody enjoys their plastic seats...
The problem is that people still desire leather. Most luxury materials in world history for kings and queens are in fact not leather. The new E-Tron GT agreed with this notion and has some amazing textiles in place of leather. My friend was a designer at Audi and said the design chief actually put Persian carpets in his car (!).
I can find you textiles that are orders of magnitude more expensive and luxurious than leather.
Its generally a mental fixation that leather = luxury by consumers. While true bespoke leather can be quite nice, no cars have that. It would cost $15k per seat. So we end up with mass produced leather and then mass produced fake leather. But the rich never got very interested in leather. It was kind of a middle class aspirational symbol.
And BTW - I owned both leather (Porsche 911 with leather on the air vents option!) and fabric cars, and the fabric looked as good as the day I bought the car some 6 years later but not so for the leather.
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