My wife has found third row seating a necessity ever since we got a mini van with our first kids. Even though our kids are now teenagers she still needs that feature. I am excited as I will get her Model S when the Model X arrives.
The Model X looks amazing, but I hate the falcon wing doors. I don't see how those will not dump a lap full of snow or water on the middle seats when raining or snowing. In Colorado, those FWD will suck. Only makes sense in sunny California.
I assume they have done some testing, but the final winter of testing was a very dry one in California and the western US in general. I do suspect there will be problems with the falcon wing doors. They look cool, but new technology always has glitches and anything car related needs insanely high reliability.
Many years ago I recall a story of someone from an integrated circuit company who was trying to sell to the auto industry. He boasted something like 100,000 hours mean time between failures and the engineers in the auto companies told him an electronic part needed 10X that before they even considered it. When you're putting 1 million cars on the road, 100,000 MTBF rate means 10 cars will have a failure every hour on average. 1 million MTBF means one car an hour on average. And these things happen, it's called infant mortality when a new part fails in the field. It's a consideration Tesla needs to face when they get up to production numbers approaching 1 million a year.
Consumer Reports has a YouTube series called Car Talk where their three top car guys talk about some aspect of car testing. They released one when the car reliability numbers came out a couple of weeks back. In there they made the point that whenever a car is redesigned, whether it is a complete overhaul, or just many small changes, that car's reliability drops for at least a year. Some go from excellent to average, while others go to terrible. He went on to point out Ford's overall quality was near the top of the manufacturer's list a few years ago, but they released a slew of redesigned cars all at once which put them near the bottom. They are coming back, but still in the bottom half.
The Model S is just beginning to reach decent reliability, but the Model X is just beginning to the process. The parts of the car most vulnerable to failure are the most novel features like the falcon wing doors. I expect initial motor and battery quality to be much higher than it was with the Model S because these are parts shared with the Model S. But all the new stuff, especially moving parts are likely going to be failure points for a while.
