Audi 250 mi e-tron, Tesla competition?

Yep, and very ironic that Tesla may have more freedom to sell it's cars in China than it does in Texas. <sigh>

 

While I think its crazy the ADA has so much power bought with a couple of million dollars to stop Tesla from selling the cars out of their stores, it is perfectly legal for tesla to sell its cars in tesla. In fact Texas has over a 1000 teslas and judging by the number of new ones I keep seeing those are growing strong.

Hoops -> Tesla needed to create a separate company to service the cars. That isn't a bad idea anyway, as management and compensation for service is quite different than manufacturing. You need to buy the car online not from the store. Again, not much of a deal breaker as most people configure on-line anyway. The biggest issue may be financing as tesla can not set financing in state, you need to deal out of state, or with a different texas financial institution.

I can't see how buying in china is easy. In china they have no supercharger network yet, while it is up and running in the US. The wait time for a car is much longer in china. There are 2 stores (austin, houston), 3 service centers (austin, dallas, houston) in texas. The service centers are within 2 hours of 90% of the potential bev drivers. Texas has 5 working superchargers (it might be 10 if you include the stores and service centers). China has one store in hong kong, and a store planned beijing. When you look at where the population is, china is not nearly as easy to test drive and buy a tesla. Somehow we get so corrupted by the poor way news is reported, it seems like a very active and supported market, is somehow been outlawed. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe in the future China will be a very good market for tesla, but it has a lot more hoops to jump through to build stores, service centers, and super chargers.

 

Tesla=Tucker?

 

I think tucker made less than 100 cars.

Bad press -> it seemed they tried to tucker the volt, not the tesla. These dealers association are not trying to kill tesla, they are trying to force it to set up dealerships.

 

A customer also can't arrange warranty work at a service center in Texas. They have to call Tesla corporate, who arranges the warranty work with the service center which then can arrange the work.
Sales staff at Tesla store are also not allowed to talk about the price, even if asked directly.

Yes, there are lots of Teslas available in Texas, but I suspect there would be a lot more, and life would be a lot easier if Texas didn't have so many restrictions.

 

Yep, but in the internet age, corporate just schedules the waranty work. When you call for support on software from a company that I used to work for, it would switch based on the time of the call, so if you call at 1pm pst it hits philladelphia support, 3 pm pst it hits India, since we didn't want to support staff work crazy hours, but wanted 24 hour world wide support. When I got damage in my lexus, the lexus roadside assistance plan number was out of state to. I don't think calling california to get work done in texas is a big deal, as long as they have a knowlegable person answering the phone. I had to call 3 times to the service department at my toyota dealer to get work scheduled, because it kept going to the sales people that were clueless. Now they let me make an appointment on the internet.

Yep, pretty stupid, but that's politics. They have to tell you to look at the internet. I'm not sure who wants a tesla that doesn't know how to use the internet. Its free at all the libraries (and there are even L2 chargers at many of them).

Its pretty damn easy to buy the car here now. I doubt I would see one more Tesla. As I said lots of bad journalism about what is going on. In many states the auto dealer assotiations (ADA) is fighting tesla, and for good reason. If the tesla model works they have less of a monopoly on taking a percentage of every car sale. In texas we have a billionaire, Red McColmbs, that owns a couple of toyota dealerships as well as some ford and hyundai dealerships, and he really doesn't like the idea of having tesla compete on a level playing field. He kicked in over $1M. Others in the ADA kicked in about $1M more. Tesla only put up a few hundred thousand to fight this year. The next fight is in 2015. The real money was in the political fight between AT&T and Timewarner, and now its google versus AT&T. In the meantime those toyota dealers that are fighting tesla can't or won't sell us a plug-in.