In my London situation, 80% of my journeys will be within 20 miles.
However, I don't have a garage or even a house. I park on the street and I would need at least 1 weekly trip to some charging station.
In the 5% times I go over that distance, I will need to stop to charge when leaving and coming back ( considering I have never driven in the direction of a SuperCharger, so the only one available is in London )
So well, it was already a stretch to adapt my lifestyle to accomodate a Tesla, this missing feature is like a mail from Musk explaining me I'm definitively not the target demographic for his car.
Accepted, I wouldn't want to be solely dependant on a supercharger. I'm not even sure I need a supercharger. Has to be home-charging for me.
It's possible, at this point in time, that maybe you aren't the demographic. I wouldn't blame Musk for that, really. More of an city infrastructure issue. I mean, I don't see a huge push towards generic charging points all over the city despite things moving in that direction.
There was some green deal thing a year or two ago where they were subsidising charging points at home ... of course, they scrapped that ... I guess that wouldn't help you anyway.
Maybe you're better off with a hybrid and get a Tesla when either the city charging situation improves or your home situation changes.
> I mean, I don't see a huge push towards generic charging points all over the city despite things moving in that direction.
In London at least, the push is to get less car on the road, regardless if they are electric or not. There is no need to encourage electric adoption, only discourage cars and discourage more the one that are not electric.
I had a breakdown earlier this year and managed just fine over 2 months without the car. We fixed it because there is just no convenient way to go see the family or move children around easily and safely.
The fix for that however is probably coming from a combination of Uber-like services and automated car rental ( as long as they get to your home and back to the rental lot, you can manage the rest of the way ), rather than personal car ownership electric or otherwise.
We are not quite there yet, but considering my last car lasted me 15 years and counting, if I have a next one, it will be my last.
edit: BTW, no blaming Musk. It's not his fault if his products are desirable outside his target demographic.
Average travel time seems to be about 25 minutes in the US (https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf) so I suspect that for most of the driving that people actually do the Model 3 will be more than adequate. The problem is what counts as a day trip in the US is much further than in the UK. Of course you could just rent an ICE car for longer journeys. I have a colleague in Raleigh NC who rents a car when he drives to Florida (long weekend, not day trip) even though he has a perfectly good car of his own. His reasoning is that he can often get special offers so it is cheap, reduced wear an tear on his own vehicle, and if an incident occurs he won't have much to do and no impact on his car insurance.
But then for a lot of people in London (although maybe not in your case?) they won't have easy access to a charger at home, so public chargers might be the easiest way.
The US, for example, is one presidency away from complete democratic failure. By which I mean all that data, which now is effectively, "in all likelihood", private via volume, can and will be abused.
Giving up and allowing privacy to fail now only makes disastrous consequences more likely later at the whim of that centralised power you mention.
The funny thing is that your "disturbing trend" has been the status quo for a long time and not far from a more efficient version of the Communist despotism you fear.
Also, your statement that the "democratized political environment is far from perfect" was the understatement of the century.
Honest comment. As a neutral (UK), it's a tough call as to which country I'd prefer in this scenario.
In terms of data, I imagine the US to be just as bad if not much worse (my prejudice) than Russia.
Someone can school me on this if I'm wrong but I prefer Telegram as a platform and I'm ambivalent as to which country my data ends up in (given this choice).
(Editing this comment based on above: "Small correction.
With Telegram your data ends up in Germany.
They are Berlin based and against the current Russian government")
Thanks for the link, I don't doubt that. But I meant specifically on the point of data-handling. Some Russian hackers or spooks vs American hackers and the NSA, etc
The UK sucks just as bad. The current PM has just announced plans to regulate the web if they win the next election.
I did a similar thing a while back and, although it was one of my favourite shows as a kid, I have to conclude that re-watching it was a mistake. Same with Knightrider.
I've been re-watching Knight Rider on-and-off for a while now, and it's actually fairly good. I wouldn't compare it directly to anything modern, as long as I accept it for what it is - a 1980s show.
In my London situation, 95% of my journeys will be within 50 miles easily.
I imagine it's more of an issue in the US and similar.