Straight from the horse's mouth. Or something like that. I started driving my Hyundai conversion about 4.5 years ago. Though I've driven it about 40k miles, it has never given me the needed reliability. About two years ago, we bought a Leaf and put about 25k miles on it. No trouble at all from it. Except for premature battery decline. And the REALLY crappy instrumentation. It was good for my wife's work commute of about 60 miles and it used to do 90-100 miles for my trips. However, it's range declined to 60-75 miles and it was of little use to me. I took delivery of a Model S about two months ago and it has been a super car.
I wanted the Tesla for it's range and did not care about all the gewgaws or the performance. Indeed, minor irritations have been that the tire pressure warning false alarms to the point of being useless and that the charge port sometimes fails to open on command. Tesla still doesn't have an Android app that works; that is the one place where the Leaf was better. The Leaf was accessible either through an Android/iPhone app or a web page. However, the Tesla's instrumentation is almost as good as you could hope. If it says x miles left, you have x +/- 10%. Tesla regen is FAR superior to Leaf regen. On the Leaf, it is difficult to not use the brake pedal and it is not possible to tell when friction braking begins. And Leaf regen is far weaker than Tesla's. It is easy to drive the Tesla without using the brake pedal. About 5k miles on the Tesla and I'm happier with it than with any car I've had previously. And, the Tesla is about the 3rd fastest vehicle I've had. I think my 1964 Pontiac was faster up to about 110 mph and my Kawasaki H2 was faster up to about 100 mph. Both of those vehicles, you had to work to go fast: treat the clutch right and do a lot of fast shifting. On the Tesla, acceleration is completely without effort; just press the throttle. -- Willie, ONWARD! Through the fog! http://counter.li.org Linux registered user #228836 since 1995 Debian3.1/GNU/Linux system uptime 25 days 1 hours 06 minutes _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
