This is one area in which I think Tesla really screwed up on.
There is this thing called Van-Life right now, and it's a pretty big deal. You'd think it would just be a few twenty somethings living life off-grid, but it's not. It's lots of different people from various walks of life.
It sounds a bit nutty until you look into everything involved.
The way mass automation has pushed people out of the job market. Robots aren't stealing peoples jobs just yet, but the way technology makes a person way more efficient is.
The way home prices have gone through the roof in places like Seattle, SF, etc.
With a small RV like a converted Sprinter Van you get both a vehicle you can park in a normal parking spot, and something livable for one or two people if everything comes crashing down. It also gives you a way of getting away from the millions of people that are your new neighbors.
Now I don't think Tesla should have made an RV, but they should have made a Cargo van where they allowed other companies to convert it into an RV. The cargo van itself would sell like hotcakes to companies that want to give a green image let alone the companies where it would lower overall cost.
The vans also sell for a reasonable chunk of change.
A new 4x4 MB Sprinter Van is around the $50K-$60K mark and it lacks basic things like adaptive cruise control.
Making it reasonably adaptable to converting to an RV would also net quite a few sales especially if they had options that made adaption easy.
The quoted lead times from companies that convert the vans are somewhere around the 18 month range because the demand is so high. They are because people like myself want a stealthy RV.
What would make a Tesla Cargo Van based RV so cool is it would be cheaper to convert than a sprinter van. What happens when they convert a Sprinter Van to an RV? They add a bunch of batteries to start with, and the really expensive ones have lithium ion batteries to give the customer a lot of capacity. To do things like running an A/C unit.
Tesla also sells solar panels so obviously they'd sell the everything as a kit to an RV manufacture like Winnebago.
I don't know why Tesla didn't do the analysis. Why they chose to go after the Semi market first which takes a new charging infrastructure. They already had the charging infrastructure to support cargo vans.
They also already had a customer base that was into sustainability. The exact kind of people that would buy a Tesla based RV.
Tesla didn't have anything viable so sometime in March I'll have a Winnebago Revel next to my Tesla. It replaces my Jeep Wrangler as my weekend fun vehicle to take to get up into the Mountains. Now I didn't pay the full MSRP for it. They go for about 20-25% off MSRP. I couldn't find anything close to what it does in the $100K mark so I got it. I'm excited for it, but it's not the same excitement as what a Tesla RV would have been.
To Tesla's credit the fact that I'm able to sell the Jeep means that the Tesla Model S I have is a viable primary means of transportation. I had the Jeep as a backup for things where the Tesla wouldn't be viable for. But, now days it's tough for me to justify that pair. So that means I'm replacing the Jeep with something even more different than it was to the Tesla.
