Those doors lift quite high, and some garages or underground parking lots, have low ceiling. Though, this car is so expensive that probably a customer will have a garage the size of normal house..
A few minutes after that part in the video he shows a demo of how it "uses sensors to adjust the door opening arc" or something and discusses the height issue.
I don't care if it's overcomplicated, as long as someone besides Tesla can fix the vechicle when it eventually breaks down. I don't want to be stuck with a vechicle that can't be repaired reasonably, when that warranty ends? It seems like no one cares about repairability anymore. This post is not geared towards Tesla. I know nothing about servicing them.
I want vechicles/appliances/electronics/watches that can be repaired at a reasonable price. I don't like throwing stuff away, being held hostage, or forced to buy the next model.
Whenever my father bought a new vechicle, he would immediatly buy a Factory Service manual. At the time, I thought he was being cheap, but boy was I wrong. I ended up picking up a lot of my dad's traights. This one saved me thousands over the years.
My father's last truck had the option for power windows. I asked him why he didn't get that option. He was retired, and had money to burn. He told me, "I can roll up my own windows! Plus, it's another thing that will break down!" (This was before automobile companies finally got all the weak spots out of electric windows.) (I used exclamation points because he was always uptight/mad?)
Well that was his last vechicle. He died too soon. I miss you dad. I wish you were happier in life.
As an proud Union Electrician, he would have liked the Tesla, as long as he could work on it.
I'm with you on this one. Cars these days are too complex and while some of it is for a good reason (e.g. computerized engine controls to improve economy and emissions) but a lot of it is just gimmicks, like power windows or the fancy door handles in a Model S. I'd much rather see no electrical wiring inside the car doors at all, it's just another part to break down and are not essential for the car to perform the task it needs to - just a little convenience item.
I live in a place with rather hostile weather in the winter time. I'd be a bit wary of getting a Tesla, not because of the reduced range in the winter (it's still good enough for me) but because I'm afraid the fancy door handles would freeze shut. But I guess this is a moot point, because if I could afford a Tesla, I could also afford a garage to store it in.
"Cars these days are too complex" ... said everyone, at every stage in the history of motoring. We get comfortable with a certain level of complexity and after that, change is get-off-my-lawn bad. But it's a human thing, not a tech thing.
There wasn't much to complain about when going from flathead to OHV, OHC and adding basic EFI and maybe forced induction because those things were relatively small and self-confined changes that created large benefits. Now they're using technology to tie subsystems together and fine tune the vehicle system as a whole. The problem with that is that it creates inter-dependency within the system. How are you supposed to adjust your power mirrors|seats if the wiring for the courtesy lights keeps blowing the shared fuse.
Unless a major breakthrough in drive-train technology comes along that can be taken advantage of we're in the long slow march of the optimizing process where you spend 90% of your resources to get that last 10% of performance.
Check out right at 25:00 into this video, they have a pretty slick bike / ski mount that attaches to the rear of the SUV and still allows access to the trunk:
It's pretty impressive overall, but for an SUV (people very often take them for longer camping/ski/road trips) to have a maximal range of only 260 miles (super charger stations won't be very common on the way to Yosemite), and base price of $35k MORE than a BMW X5M (while being slower and has way less range), this is truly a niche product for a very niche demographic.
I think the technology involved is fantastic, but it feels more like a product where they built it simply because they can.
EDIT/Disclosure: I own shares of TSLA. I was hoping of a X5/Q7/Caynne competitor that starts at $50-$70k, not a X5M/Caynne Turbo competitor which in themselves are very, very ridiculous and niche cars.
I drove through all of Utah for the last three days, and there were Tesla destination chargers at both best westerns I stayed at, as well as a lodge at Brian Head near Bryce Canyon.
Charging infrastructure is the least of Tesla's concerns. They deploy, on average, one new supercharger station each day. This does not include the destination chargers I mention above, which are much cheaper and faster to install.
I don't think this is really aimed at people who "take them for longer camping/ski/road trips," though.
For a while now, SUVs, like the Audi Q5 and the BMW X5 that the Model X is trying to compete with, have been basically a "cooler" alternative to minivans. The key feature they share is the space and seating that they provide, but having off-road capability is useful to a small subset of SUV owners and is just there to add to the cool factor that differentiates it from a minivan.
Tesla is trying to grab the wealthy, 30-to-50-something parents whose focus on luxury and style prevent them from buying a minivan, which would probably suit them and their driving habits better than an SUV. Take a look at wealthier suburbs of San Francisco (e.g. Marin) and you'll see tons of luxury SUVs without a speck of mud on them.
The ads for these SUVs really reflect this trend. Audi demonstrates the prevalence of SUVs-as-kid delivery machines:
Most importantly for these purposes, the range on the Model X is sufficient to drive from Palo Alto to Lake Tahoe (220 miles) or Yosemite (165 miles) without issue.
Towing a small pop-up camper? At highway speeds the whole trip?
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if you ran out of juice before reaching Yosemite.
Grades and highway speeds have a huge impact on range IME. Not to mention an extra 500lbs in passengers, a couple hundred lbs in camping gear, and that's not even getting to the camper.
The type of miles you're driving definitely matters. A gas vehicle is most efficient around ~60mph. Maintaining maximal range in an electric vehicle is a bad bet if most of your driving is highway miles. At least if my Nissan Leaf experience is relevant.
Tahoe could be trouble with a camper in tow, but the distance to Yosemite is only 2/3rds of the published range for the Model X -- I'd be shocked if there wasn't sufficient range to get there. Curb weight for the X is ~5,400lbs, call it 5,500lbs with driver.. Adding 5 passengers averaging 100lbs (family of 6) and 200lbs of gear would only add ~13% to the vehicles weight which would only minimally impact range since drag is a much bigger determinant for highway trips.
I found a nifty little site that takes into account elevation / vehicle weight, etc. for the actual route. Looking at the Model S, base range on the road to Yosemite with normal driving is 240 miles. Adding 700lbs to the car results in a range of 210 miles. So a 40% increase in vehicle weight only corresponds to a 12.5% decrease in range. This can be partially mitigated by driving at a "3/10" instead of a "5/10" in terms of range-extending, which results in about 225 miles of range with the same weight.
I don't think he was implying off roading. Just a road trip. They did show it pulling an airstream with 10 bags of luggage. Surely they weren't implying a trip down the street. Camping is [typically] done in more remote areas, like Yosemite. So 260 miles is a pretty poor range for a vehicle like that when your destination may not have charging stations.
Do you care about safety? Then driving 260 miles without a stop is not smart. Do you have kids? Then driving 260 miles without a stop is also highly irrealistic.
But yes, more range would be nice for an expensive car like this!
c'mon, it's easy for me in europe to do 400 miles trip without stopping, on highways and no kids of course.
say what you want, albeit cool car, 260 miles is nothing for this category of cars. heading good direction, but not there yet. and if you head into real mountains, where you might end up doing 500-1000m vertical difference to get to some remote places, the batteries will last much less, pushing this super heavy monstrosity upwards.
Useless car for anybody but posh soccer mums. That doesn't mean it won't be popular though :)
The question isn't how many times you stop, it's driving 3.5-4 hours then needing to plug your car into a wall and wait many hours for it to be ready to drive again. It's so inconvenient to not be useful in road-tripping.
I have seen some fast charge stations in the UK, on motorway service stations where people usually stop for about an hour,these offer an 80% fast charge in 30 mins.
I care about safety and I have kids. I routinely drive SF to Orange County with 1 gas stop in the middle. 260 miles at free way speeds is 3.5-4 hrs. Not a huge deal. I often burn through a tank of gas before stopping ~400 miles.
It's not unrealistic. Also, it's not a question of going 260 total. The concern is you can, at most, drive 130 miles from the nearest charging station.
If you look at the livestream, the target is not for outdoors but more toward families. Car seat was mentioned numerous times and the having front storage for strollers are great. As a new dad i barely use my suv for outdoors anymore (baby gets fussy) and my trunk is always 75% full because of the stroller.
Model X is my dream comes true car. Except I can't afford it :P
Those price points are for the launch era P90D special editions, which are presumably aimed at the X5M and Cayenne Turbo customer. I imagine the prices on the base 90D and 70D will be closer to X5/Q7/Cayenne after Federal/State tax incentives, though probably still a bit higher.
Tesla website is pretty clear who they market to. People who buy SUVs to feel safer. See HEPA filter mentioned as central feature. Also this is not a niche demographic. I would not be surprised if the majority of SUVs are commuting and shopping vehicles exclusively.
I assume there are multiple steps you have to take in order to reach that performance, ie having to put it into ``Ludicrous mode'', then forcing the pedal to the floor. I assume it isn't something that could happen easily on accident.
It's also notable that Paul Walker wasn't driving when he died.
> The Carrera GT is a notoriously hard-to-handle car
It's a really well balanced car with a good weight distribution and handles beautifully. The issue is that it's very different feeling to having an engine at the front and the center of gravity further forward.
If someone who is not used to mid-engined cars gets it into a slide, they'll be caught by surprise and probably lose control completely. But with a little bit of practice, it can be driven hard and recovered from pretty nasty slides.
$140K and "falcon wing" doors only in the back. Epic fail. They seem like an afterthought that way. Sure, you can open them in tight spaces, but you won't be able to get into the car because the front door is basically the same as any other car door. Why bother with the back doors then?
The back doors have to be longer to accommodate both rows of rear seats. Shorter front doors open in tighter spaces than longer traditional back doors would.
Same reason they out sliders on vans and minivans - bigger openings.
Also you won't have child car seats in the front seats. Having rear doors that get completely out of the way even in very narrow spaces will be huge for parents of young children. Squeezing yourself through a narrow opening into a front seat is comparatively pretty easy.
As much as I admire the engineering that went into the design of this vehicle I'm not looking forward to sharing the road with inexperienced drivers with vehicles of this size and weight with this much acceleration.
Inexperienced drivers and drunk drivers. Where I'm from there are many inexperienced drivers with lots of money due to political connections. In fact inexperienced drivers are almost a target market for cars in that price range here. There are also brats with rich parents. There's also pretty widespread drunk driving across the board.
Wow. You must have never lived in an area abundant of trust fund kids. A lot of people I see drive $100k+ cars barely (if at all) have a job that could reasonable pay for such a vehicle.
When a soccer mom gets skittish and buries the wrong pedal do you really want her doing it in something with the weight of a Ford Expedition and the performance of a sports car?
I'm really not sure how the Model X is going to perform. I really don't think the European market will go for the gull-wing doors. On a sports car yes, but on an SUV? I sincerely doubt it but I'd be happy to be proven wrong if it works well even in our über tight parking spaces and seriously narrow lanes.
It seems to work well in the video here - the doors are pretty flexible, equipped with motors and sensors so they can adapt: http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx
Yeah it looks pretty good there alright. Like I said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong but a few things spring to mind.
1. Once fully extended, the door seems to protrude out from the car a bit which may cause a problem if you're tight against a wall. I'd be curious how they have solved this? It may be that we just can't open the door similar to a regular door when you're forced to park too close to the wall?
2. Similar to above, since the door protrudes a bit, what happens when there are Xs parked beside each other?
Other than the door questions I agree it looks like a superb SUV. If Tesla can manage to convince people on the door design and it reviews as well as the S did, then they've another great product on their hands.
This is just awesome. I'm hoping to get one of these next time I need a car, which will be in a good few years.
If you compare Tesla's X and S to other cars, nothing really compares. How many cars fit 7 people yet accelerate like a Ferrari? How many cars effectively have 2 boots without being a van? How many cars cost a tiny fraction of the price to drive the same distance?
At that price point, you tend to be looking at either a little sports car, a luxury tourer, or a family tractor. This compares favourably with all of them.
At the moment the downside isn't even that bad: battery life will probably improve with time, and you can already go as far as most people need. Yes, your grand tour of the continent will take a few more stops, but pretty soon I'm guessing it will be close enough. And already the car drives itself. That's a huge, huge win.
I am expecting some competition though. I can't imagine the established manufacturers letting Tesla take the market in electric cars. That will hopefully bring down the price and increase variety.
I wouldn't bet on the established manufacturers, they can cruise along making money for a long time without needing to change their mindset. There's a good video talk by one of the Tesla founders who points out that the reason they can build a car is that the big manufacturers outsourced everything, and so they can buy wheels, suspensions, wipers, windows etc. from the same places as the incumbents.
The only thing they didn't outsource, the thing they think of as their core, is the engines. Which is the one bit that Tesla, and the future, neither needs nor wants.
But I'd expect to see a few more new names in this area, like BYD (a battery company, so you know their priorities are well aligned).
It's a very nice car, but I could buy two Porche Cayennes for the same price. Or a bungalow in Manitoba. or a houseboat.
If Apple is looking to compete with Tesla with their rumored iCar, we should probably expect a similar price. Someone will probably buy them, but that person won't be me.
This is exactly the car I want: a six seat electric car with enough space for my wife and me, our two kids, a brace of grandparents, a stroller, pack & play, whatever crap we buy from the county fair we visit, and enough range for a weekend trip. It's ideal. It is, however, twice the new list price of the used Mercedes GL that currently fills that role for us and even zero fuel costs don't make up for that over 5 years. It's a downpayment on a house, or a four figure lease. Not for us.
I'm pretty excited for the future though. This kind of thing will get cheaper. Tesla may be able to swallow the risk of offering warranties on used vehicles as more long-life reliability data comes in.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadhttp://www.teslamotors.com/modelx
The gull-wing-in-a-tight-space starts at ~18 mins in
Those doors lift quite high, and some garages or underground parking lots, have low ceiling. Though, this car is so expensive that probably a customer will have a garage the size of normal house..
Edit: It is at 20 minutes in.
I get that their goal is to create some iconic look, and when someone sees that car/door shape, people would say "Oh, it's Tesla".
I want vechicles/appliances/electronics/watches that can be repaired at a reasonable price. I don't like throwing stuff away, being held hostage, or forced to buy the next model.
Whenever my father bought a new vechicle, he would immediatly buy a Factory Service manual. At the time, I thought he was being cheap, but boy was I wrong. I ended up picking up a lot of my dad's traights. This one saved me thousands over the years.
My father's last truck had the option for power windows. I asked him why he didn't get that option. He was retired, and had money to burn. He told me, "I can roll up my own windows! Plus, it's another thing that will break down!" (This was before automobile companies finally got all the weak spots out of electric windows.) (I used exclamation points because he was always uptight/mad?) Well that was his last vechicle. He died too soon. I miss you dad. I wish you were happier in life.
As an proud Union Electrician, he would have liked the Tesla, as long as he could work on it.
They still break. Just replacing the switch is over $300 for most cars. I'll stay with my crank windows.
I live in a place with rather hostile weather in the winter time. I'd be a bit wary of getting a Tesla, not because of the reduced range in the winter (it's still good enough for me) but because I'm afraid the fancy door handles would freeze shut. But I guess this is a moot point, because if I could afford a Tesla, I could also afford a garage to store it in.
Unless a major breakthrough in drive-train technology comes along that can be taken advantage of we're in the long slow march of the optimizing process where you spend 90% of your resources to get that last 10% of performance.
http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx
I think the technology involved is fantastic, but it feels more like a product where they built it simply because they can.
EDIT/Disclosure: I own shares of TSLA. I was hoping of a X5/Q7/Caynne competitor that starts at $50-$70k, not a X5M/Caynne Turbo competitor which in themselves are very, very ridiculous and niche cars.
With the current demographic of Tesla buyers? Give this three months.
Charging infrastructure is the least of Tesla's concerns. They deploy, on average, one new supercharger station each day. This does not include the destination chargers I mention above, which are much cheaper and faster to install.
For a while now, SUVs, like the Audi Q5 and the BMW X5 that the Model X is trying to compete with, have been basically a "cooler" alternative to minivans. The key feature they share is the space and seating that they provide, but having off-road capability is useful to a small subset of SUV owners and is just there to add to the cool factor that differentiates it from a minivan.
Tesla is trying to grab the wealthy, 30-to-50-something parents whose focus on luxury and style prevent them from buying a minivan, which would probably suit them and their driving habits better than an SUV. Take a look at wealthier suburbs of San Francisco (e.g. Marin) and you'll see tons of luxury SUVs without a speck of mud on them.
The ads for these SUVs really reflect this trend. Audi demonstrates the prevalence of SUVs-as-kid delivery machines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soJs3ZUYtLI
While Lexus tries to present the same car Audi was bashing as sexy but safe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rohl8v_IGKk
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if you ran out of juice before reaching Yosemite.
Grades and highway speeds have a huge impact on range IME. Not to mention an extra 500lbs in passengers, a couple hundred lbs in camping gear, and that's not even getting to the camper.
The type of miles you're driving definitely matters. A gas vehicle is most efficient around ~60mph. Maintaining maximal range in an electric vehicle is a bad bet if most of your driving is highway miles. At least if my Nissan Leaf experience is relevant.
I found a nifty little site that takes into account elevation / vehicle weight, etc. for the actual route. Looking at the Model S, base range on the road to Yosemite with normal driving is 240 miles. Adding 700lbs to the car results in a range of 210 miles. So a 40% increase in vehicle weight only corresponds to a 12.5% decrease in range. This can be partially mitigated by driving at a "3/10" instead of a "5/10" in terms of range-extending, which results in about 225 miles of range with the same weight.
http://www.jurassictest.ch/GR/
[1] http://i.imgur.com/AEAw6xN.png
But yes, more range would be nice for an expensive car like this!
say what you want, albeit cool car, 260 miles is nothing for this category of cars. heading good direction, but not there yet. and if you head into real mountains, where you might end up doing 500-1000m vertical difference to get to some remote places, the batteries will last much less, pushing this super heavy monstrosity upwards.
Useless car for anybody but posh soccer mums. That doesn't mean it won't be popular though :)
It's not unrealistic. Also, it's not a question of going 260 total. The concern is you can, at most, drive 130 miles from the nearest charging station.
Model X is my dream comes true car. Except I can't afford it :P
Killed Paul Walker (gas engine).
It's also notable that Paul Walker wasn't driving when he died.
Any car can kill you if you drive it outside its safe envelope.
It's a really well balanced car with a good weight distribution and handles beautifully. The issue is that it's very different feeling to having an engine at the front and the center of gravity further forward.
If someone who is not used to mid-engined cars gets it into a slide, they'll be caught by surprise and probably lose control completely. But with a little bit of practice, it can be driven hard and recovered from pretty nasty slides.
Also, it doesn't have a electronic stability-control system.
Of course the driver is likely at fault in this case, but I'd wager that he wouldn't have gotten himself into trouble in most other supercars.
Same reason they out sliders on vans and minivans - bigger openings.
1. Once fully extended, the door seems to protrude out from the car a bit which may cause a problem if you're tight against a wall. I'd be curious how they have solved this? It may be that we just can't open the door similar to a regular door when you're forced to park too close to the wall?
2. Similar to above, since the door protrudes a bit, what happens when there are Xs parked beside each other?
Other than the door questions I agree it looks like a superb SUV. If Tesla can manage to convince people on the door design and it reviews as well as the S did, then they've another great product on their hands.
If you compare Tesla's X and S to other cars, nothing really compares. How many cars fit 7 people yet accelerate like a Ferrari? How many cars effectively have 2 boots without being a van? How many cars cost a tiny fraction of the price to drive the same distance?
At that price point, you tend to be looking at either a little sports car, a luxury tourer, or a family tractor. This compares favourably with all of them.
At the moment the downside isn't even that bad: battery life will probably improve with time, and you can already go as far as most people need. Yes, your grand tour of the continent will take a few more stops, but pretty soon I'm guessing it will be close enough. And already the car drives itself. That's a huge, huge win.
I am expecting some competition though. I can't imagine the established manufacturers letting Tesla take the market in electric cars. That will hopefully bring down the price and increase variety.
The only thing they didn't outsource, the thing they think of as their core, is the engines. Which is the one bit that Tesla, and the future, neither needs nor wants.
But I'd expect to see a few more new names in this area, like BYD (a battery company, so you know their priorities are well aligned).
No one is going to cross shop this behemoth and an MX-5
If Apple is looking to compete with Tesla with their rumored iCar, we should probably expect a similar price. Someone will probably buy them, but that person won't be me.
I'm pretty excited for the future though. This kind of thing will get cheaper. Tesla may be able to swallow the risk of offering warranties on used vehicles as more long-life reliability data comes in.