Tesla Is Cranking Out Model 3s—Now It Has to Service Them
"Gus Schmidt was so excited when he received his Tesla Model 3 sedan in August that he tweeted a photo of himself and his wife grinning next to the electric car. Six weeks later, the thrill was gone. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., resident damaged his bumper in a low-speed collision and then had to wait three months for the repair shop to get the spare parts from Tesla and fix his car. The unusually long wait for a repair underlines a drawback of being a Tesla customer. The upstart car company has created a coveted luxury brand but is still learning some of the basics of the auto business." Auto companies are incredibly difficult to build from scratch. Designing EV vehicles is the easy part, the network of parts, service, and repair shops, and logistics and inventory of parts are more difficult, not to mention quality control on the production line. With electric vehicles, the entire "fuel" delivery system must also be designed, sited and installed all at huge costs and little profit. The future of automobility remains the future, not the present. For the forseeable future, the electric vehicle will remain the future of the automobile. The cost mixed with the rest of the problems will doom these vehicles to toy status for a long time. If I could suggest, build an electric motorcycle. In America, motorcycles are toys, EVs are toys, this is a match made in heaven. Even a modest battery would give an EV motorcycle good range and a large battery would give the motorcycle better range. Plus, the existing charging stations would allow recharging in places where people already have EV autos. The big change is that EV motorcycles would be much less costly and complex than an EV auto. Now all Musk needs to do is lobby Congress for a new subsidy. OK, that last part is idiotic, but the rest isn't. Musk is out of buyers for his EV car due to price, but I suspect that an EV motorcycle with a 200+ mile range would likely sell well in many parts of the country bringing an entirely new customer to the brand and possibly allowing cross sales of EV motorcycles and autos. But Musk is not an auto executive so ...
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