I m talking more about the technology than tesla. tho isn t tesla opening their patents and battery tech? awfully nice of them. 
see. we had a naysayer and a watcher so far. I ll be the cheerleader.
three cheers for elan musk!!!
Iām no naysayer, I think the Tesla S is the best attempt so far at a āno-compromisesā EV. The cost of doing that is reflected in the price, and the teething pains have been significant.
The Tesla X will be similar to the S, similar price, too. Itās the āreasonably pricedā upcoming model that might make a real impact, but other makers are already sniffing around that price point (Leaf, BMW i3, MB 200). Weāll see.
While I confess to not having read the entire 27 pages of comments, there did seem to be a dearth of comments from individuals with EV experience. As a very satisfied lessor of a 2013 Volt for the last year and a half I would highly recommend it. I did read the comment about the Volt not being a true EV when running on the battery, because the engine would engage and drive the wheels under what circumstances I do not know. I have not experienced the engine starting up while I still had a drive able charge in the battery. You do know when the engine kicks in. Not that it is loud, but the electric drive is so quiet. And anyway, who cares. Here is a fact. 13,782 miles/100.2 Gal. You do the math. I buy 6-7 gallons of gas about every 2 months. I do not believe you can call the your standard hybrid.
The Volt is without a doubt the smoothest, quietest and with the possible exception of the Volvo 1800E of my youth, the most satisfying drive I have ever had. I imagine the Tesla experience must be awesome. Barring something drastic to change my mind, I expect I will have another one in 2016. Iām hearing there will be a new design with an entry price rumored to be 29k.
I assume you are a Volt lessee.
Slackdawg - it is funny you mention the Volvo 1800 (beautiful car by the way) because the Volt is actually a SAAB design.
With that said, and i will say i did not read all comments - you should remember the first cars where electric even before the gasoline engine was around.
Where I live, Volts are a fairly common sight but not as common as Prius, which are ubiquitous. Occasionally I see a Leaf and I have spotted maybe three Teslas, although it may have been the same Tesla spotted three times.
From that limited exposure, itās pretty obvious that the Tesla is the car most likely to sport vanity license plates.
Elon Musk is NOT making the technology available for free because heās a nice guy
Heās doing it, because heās calculated that it makes good business sense . . . for him
He's doing it, because he's calculated that it makes good business sense . . . for him
I think heās doing it because he thinks it will make EVās more ubiquitous, which may make him more money in the future, but he doesnāt give a rip because heās already rich as hell.
And it will make EV more ubiquitous. Look at Apple vs IBM. IBM opened up their architecture to clones. Apple did not. And look who has the lionās share of the home computer market.
@insightfulā You are correct. lessee.
@Harrisjb78 I did not know the Volt was a SAAB design. I guess I appreciate things Swedish. That little 1800 was a really nice car. Tight as a drum and fun to drive. I did know that there were some early electrics that did not make it. Victims of range anxiety I suppose.
All that aside, I would like to reiterate the purpose of my post. And that is, the extended range electric vehicle is a nice compromise. I do about 80% of my driving on electric and I have no range anxiety. And, if you can make do with a small vehicle, it is a very nice ride. I hope to never go back to the standard ICE vehicle. I also have hopes for something a little bigger in the future.
IBM opened up their architecture to clones.
IBM did NOT open up their architecture. Companies like Compaq reversed engineered it. The only thing Compaq had to reverse engineer was the Bios. The CPU was just and 8088 chip from Intel.
Microsoft (who did the operating system for IBM) had a license with IBM that gave them the rights to sell the operating system to other companies. IBM agreed to this because they thought the money was in the hardware - NOT the software. At the time it was. But now the software costs way more then the PC. Microsoft wonā¦and IBM lost.
Apple did not. And look who has the lion's share of the home computer market.
IBM is no longer in the home computer business. So Iād say Apple is definitely doing better in the home computer market then IBM is.
@āMikeInNH
The CPU was not always just an 8088 chip from Intel. AMD, which is still around, and Cyrix, which is not, also made PC-compatible chips.
IBM agreed to let Microsoft sell MS DOS to other manufacturers because PC DOS (which was also written by Microsoft and was pretty much the same thing) was very popular, people didnāt want an IBM if it didnāt come with DOS, and IBM didnāt want to lose sales entirely if MS decided to take itās OS ball and go home. Microsoft, as with many of its early deals, played hardball and won.
Further, IBM did not lose because it allowed Microsoft to sell MS DOS. IBM lost because it decided the letters āIBMā justified charging more for a computer with lower specs than the competitionās more reasonably priced alternative even though they both did exactly the same thing, with the exception that IBMās machines didnāt do it as quickly.
IBM lost because it got greedy and stupid. Period. If it wanted to sell enough overpriced machines to make the effort worthwhile, then it should have catered to a boutique demographic by making them think that all the cool insert-demographic-hereās were using IBMās, the way Apple did with the ācreativeā demographic.
I didnāt go into detail in the discussion because itās a car forum, not HardOCP, and I figured most readers wouldnāt be interested in the minutiae. 
That said, I did not claim that IBM won anything - but the marketplace certainly did. IBMās move allowed anybody to come in and make a PC-compatible computer. The result was that the PC presence in the home exploded, with Windows currently running on around 92% of PCās computers, while Appleās OSX, wheezes along at 6%. And in fact, amusingly, Windows XP, which is 13 years old and 3 generations behind the current, still has greater penetration all by itself than Appleās latest and greatest.
This is especially telling when you consider that MacOSās GUI was light years ahead of Windows until Win95 came out. While we PC geeks were still spending long nights editing config files tweaking QEMM to get that extra k of available ram so Doom would run properly, Mac users were double clicking on pictures and not worrying one bit about making adjustments under the hood.
I suspect Musk has a similar outcome in mind for what heās doing with Tesla: He wants to see all of us driving around in electric cars, and the best way to do that is to make it really easy for any company to contribute to EV infrastructure and components.
Put another way, if every car manufacturer had to drill, refine, and formulate its own special fuel formula that was not compatible with any other manufacturerās vehicles rather than using āPC-compatibleā gasoline, the automotive industry would look very, very different today.
If, as I suspect, it really is Muskās goal to make EVās the dominant automotive technology, then opening the door to standardization of power storage and delivery is a really good way to get that ball rolling.
The CPU was not always just an 8088 chip from Intel. AMD, which is still around, and Cyrix, which is not, also made PC-compatible chips.
It doesnāt matterā¦either 8088 or AMDās versionā¦it still had to run the 8088 instruction set. The ONLY Intel processors Iāve ever used were from work. All my home systems are AMD.
IBM's move allowed anybody to come in and make a PC-compatible computer.
Absolutely NOT. IBM and Apple both used off-the-shelf chips which anyone could buy. IBM put up many attempts to block the BIOS from being reverse engineered. They even sued Compaq for reverse engineering the Bios. IBM used off-the-shelf hardware because it was cheap and it kept the profit margins high.
When IBM started loosing out to the clones - they tired several attempts to making it propriety. First with their own IO bus and then with the own version of Windows. But it was too little to late.
IBM put up many blockers to STOP the clones and even lawsuits. But it didnāt work. The major reason for the IBM boom was companies like Compaq and Dell who reversed engineered IBMās bios and Microsoft who built and distributed the operating system. IBM admits that they made a mistake by not licensing the software.
The result was that the PC presence in the home exploded, with Windows currently running on around 92% of PC's computers
Apple sold more iPhones, Macs, iPads and iPod Touch devices than the total number of computers sold by the entire Windows PC industry in the holiday quarter.
PCās are on the decline. The VAST MAJORITY of people who buy PCās is just to access the internet. You really donāt need a PC for that. You do need a bigger screen then my Iphone-5s.
Why didnāt anyone clone an Apple?..They did. But where did you get the software? Apple wrote the softwareā¦thus making it very very difficult for people to clone. IBM did NOT want other companies cloning their systems. They wanted complete dominance. IBM just screwed up thinking the hardware was where the money was.
IBM didnāt lose completely. They sold the PC business to Lenovo for over $1 billion and transferred a half billion in debt. Plus they got almost 20% of Lenovoās outstanding stock at the time. That allowed them to get into other things, like servers, that felt more like the old multiuser IBM. They continue to evolve and had almost $100 billion in revenue last year. I donāt think they are in financial trouble at all. While they had a huge share of the PC market, they seem to have put their profit to very good use.
PC's are on the decline.
That is utter hogwash. Funny how Iāve been seeing that since the Playstation 2 came out, and yet itās never come to be. People take minor industry trends and make, frankly, idiotic statements about them (graphics card sales fall off because everyone bought the latest and greatest when it came out and no one needs to buy a new one for a couple of years, and that gets translated into āohmigod the PC is DEAD!ā)
Desktop computing is not going anywhere. Gaming on tablets sucks. Word processing on tablets sucks. Spreadsheets, desktop publishing, etc on tabletsā¦ Well, you get the picture.
I purposely left out discussion of iPhone because then Iād have to point out that, again, Apple is losing decisively to Android - which is in the same boat as PC-Compatibles were ā itās available from multiple manufacturers and is absolutely crushing Apple in market domination - weāre talking 78% to 18% in Q4 of last year.
This isnāt to say that Apple is unsuccessful - itās not. Neither is Bentley - both companies lag completely behind market leaders in numbers of units sold, but both companies are also quite healthy financially, and for the same reason - both companies sell overpriced goods to people who buy them for the image the goods project.
Back on topicā¦
@Slackdawg - Have you had any problems with it at all? for awhile there there where many horror stories (granted you can hear it from any car and it isnāt always true).
what is the regular maintenance? same as a ānormalā car?
Back to cars. In a week I will be loading my trailer up with enough old Apple computers, printers, and devices to fill the trailer. Its free recycling day and Iām cleaning my basement.
I donāt have a clear enough memory anymore but remember well the fights between the Apple guys and the IBM guys. Apple wasnāt compatible with anything except itself so 100 people had apple email and couldnāt talk to the other 900 people with IBM. Then the cheapskates wanted to save $500 and buy clones instead of IBM regardless of their reliability. I do remember software availability being a very important issue for business anyway and pretty much doomed the Apples for anything except our graphics people. It was a real blood bath though standing in the middle of it back then. Actually like I said, the biggest fights I had was with the mainframe computer folks that saw no use at all for desk tops. Guess I won.
@Harrisjb78 These posts do seem to stray far and wide donāt they. Those are good questions and I am glad you asked. I thought about adding information along those lines to my original post but was not sure anyone was interested and did not want to drone on and on.
Problems: I have had exactly 1. The GM supplied 120 volt charger quit working a few months in. This was replaced under warranty. Of course they did not have one in stock. So all in all it required at least 150 miles and a long weekend of gasoline only driving. If it werenāt for that, I would still be under 100 gal of gas used.
Maintenance: Oil changes are required at 24,000 miles or when the computer tells you to, which ever comes first. I just took mine in for the first service a couple of weeks ago at a little over 13,000. All they did was change the oil, check the coolant systems and put in a couple of software recalls. So far so good. With a little luck, I wont change the oil again before the lease is up.
Yeah they do!
It is good that it was covered under warranty but they really had you drive that far to get it yourself instead of ordering one? and i would never have guessed it was a 120 line that supplied power i thought it would be a dedicated 220.
Sounds good to me! iām bored of changing oil every 4K miles haha
That allowed them to get into other things, like servers, that felt more like the old multiuser IBM. They continue to evolve and had almost $100 billion in revenue last year. I don't think they are in financial trouble at all.
IBM has been into servers for 30 years. This is nothing new.
Never said IBM wasnāt doing great. My remark was a rebuttal about how well IBM PCās were doing against Apple. Since IBM is out of the PC businessā¦they arenāt doing as well as Apple. It was kind-of-a tongue in cheek remarkā¦but true.
Desktop computing is not going anywhere. Gaming on tablets sucks. Word processing on tablets sucks. Spreadsheets, desktop publishing, etc on tablets.. Well, you get the picture.
Sorryā¦but Iāve been in this field for 40 years. I was already had 10+ years as an engineer when the PC hit the market. Iāve been doing software development on PCās ever since. I will never get rid of my PCās. Although I donāt own a desktop anymore. I think our household of 3 have 5 laptops.
Gaming is one of the big advantages right now with a good powerful PC. But itās changing. Tablets and IPads are not ready to take over the PC market any time soon. But PC sales are on the decline. Thatās a FACT. Sorryā¦but itās true.
When the PCās came out it was a toy. We thought they could NEVER replace the miniās at the time. Our PDP-11ās and Vax systems could run circles around any PC. PCās couldnāt do anything close to what the mini systems could do at the time. No one thought the PC could even come close to taking any sales from the miniās. The mini market continued to grow for another 6-8 years before the PCās were powerful enough to take over tasks only miniās or mainframes could do.
Now 30 years laterā¦Iām seeing the exact same trend with tablets and cell-phones. Right now they canāt compete. But thatās where many companies are now putting their R&D money into. NOT into PC development. My Iphone-5s has a good 64-bit processor. Faster, more memory then my desktop of just 5 years ago.
The problem is GOOD software (which is changing - Microsoft is putting MILLIONS into developing software for these devices). And the other problem is input and display. But that can easily be remedied with a docking-station (which some phones already are capable of).
But PC sales are on the decline.
No argument there. But itās not because no one wants a computer anymore. Itās because computers arenāt improving as rapidly as they did in the past. Back in the 90ās, I was on an every 2 year upgrade cycle because the difference between a 486-DX2-66 and a P100 was night and day.
These days I upgrade when something breaks, because weāve pretty much hit a wall as far as end user experience goes with speed and graphics. While there are (compared to improvements in the old days) minor improvements, they tend to come at a shocking cost - $600 for a graphics card thatās just a little bit better than the $300 card thatās 8 months old is absurd, and few would be willing to pay the steep premium.
I acknowledge that tablets/phones sell faster than PCās right now, but thatās because, as you alluded to, those devices are in a similar position as PCs were in the 90ās - rapid improvements driving a 2 year upgrade cycle (plus incentives from telcos encouraging that cycle as well). At the end of the day, the iPhone is not going to supplant the desktop PC. It still needs to fit in a pocket, which automatically limits screen size, keyboard size, etc.