Most of the advantages of the car are based on electric cars in general, though Tesla has a few boosts specifically. I fully support other EV companies as well, unfortunately so many of the big brands are doing them quite poorly. For example the Hyundai ones are quite good from what I read, but they just don't make any real quantity of them and you can't buy one if you wanted to.
-Instant torque / acceleration / handling are good across all EVs, but the Model 3 has the best of all of them for a "reasonable" price tag (I've heard the Taycan is super fun to drive as well, but is over $100,000...and of course ignoring the various small volume $1,000,000+ super cars people are making). Though I do know people with a bolt and an i3 and they are both happy with them.
A lot of people talk about the software updates and such, which is certainly nice but not really life changing, and I'm confident others will catch up on that eventually.
-My first car was an Oldsmobile that I got relatively new when my Grandfather passed away. It was a fine car, treated me well-ish, but the crash test ratings on that car were HORRIBLE, it was something like an average of 1.3 stars. I'm not going to say I'm risk adverse or unnecessary scare of death / getting injured, but Teslas are the safest cars ever made, by a fairly substantial margin, and I like that. Personally I'm a good driver with 20 years of driving and zero accidents, but you never know. Thats the kind of thing that 99+% of the time has no real value, but on that 1% of the time when it matters it is priceless.
-Thanks for the good morning laugh about panel gaps. That phrase was literally invented by people desperate for things to find wrong with Teslas. Feel free to walk around a showroom / lot around a service center and see if you actually see any of those famous "panel gaps", or if you care unless you are 6" away and holding a ruler. This also comes back to my "try it on your own instead of believing the negative press" opinion.
-I'm not sure I understand your comment about a $26,000 car with 400 miles of range. I'm sure if your goal is price per range you could get a used car for $5,000 that could go 300 miles! Its always the first question I get "how much mileage do you get? How often do you run out of batteries on the highway?", etc, etc. I don't know about the rest of the country, but personally I don't drive more than 300 miles on a single day very often, perhaps a few times per year. Here's some math for you:
-It takes me about 10 seconds to plug in my car in my garage. Doing that weekly is approximately 9 minutes of my time per year.
-I used to stop at the gas station about every 10 days, taking about 10 minutes to drive out of my way / wait at 2 stoplights / fill up / pay / etc. That's approximately 365 minutes of my time per year. I'm not sure how you did that in 2 minutes, unless you literally have a race track pit stop on your way home. Maybe call it 5 minutes if you have a super convenient one.
-I've done half a dozen trips that I needed to charge mid trip, however none of them added any time at all. I have charged overnight at campsites (zero extra time), charged in parking lots of places I was going anyhow (zero extra time), or charged at hotels (zero extra time) - side note the campsites and hotel charging were also FREE CHARGING - how many times have you gotten free gas on a roadtrip???? If you happen to be driving 600 miles in a single day non stop, yes you have to stop for 30-60 minutes mid trip to charge, but could easily line that up with a lunch break or stretching break or something.
-Lets say you don't do that, and you literally wanted to drive 600 miles non stop without resting, you'd have to do that 5-10 times per year before your net time breaks even compared to a years worth of gas station stops. Do you drive 600 miles without resting 10 times a year or more? If so, yes the EV will add net time to your life. If not, you need to look at the broader overall picture, not the once a year that it is slightly inconvenient.
Honestly, please give me a good rebuttal to this, because I really truly don't understand why people care about range and charging time so much, its just silly.
Also, if you do happen to drive 500 miles per day on a regular basis and are pushing 30,000+ miles per year, yes you would have to use some time charging, however the savings of gas and maintenance would be MASSIVE at that point. That's a whole different discussion though.
The only good argument against a Tesla is for people buying a low cost used car and driving it minimally. Yes, obviously that is way cheaper and help you on your MMM journey very efficiently, and no I wouldn't even consider changing your mind against doing that. But if you buy a new car over ~$30,000 ish there just isn't a debate you should have purchased an EV or Tesla specifically if you really truly look at the facts instead of focusing on these arguments that are just plain silly. There is a guy in my group that recently bought a new Audi, I debated with him about the various details and you know what his only argument at the end of it was? He likes the noise of the engine.
So there it is. If you are willing to give up all of the benefits because you like the noise of the engine, that is your personal decision to make.
