Tesla

Tesla Model 3 Decision

Saturday 2nd April 2016

Well the decision has been made! It was definitely the right decision and in fact it was the only decision that made sense.

There has been so much publicity around the launch of the Tesla Model 3 this past week, in fact it has been somewhat crazy. People trying to speculate what the car would look like, what its range would be, how much it would cost, whether Supercharger access would be included, and… The list goes on.

We’ve spent all week going back and forth on the decision as to whether to put down a deposit or not. Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, oh who knows?

Well, the 31st March arrived and my sidekick decided to go to the local Tesla Store in Short Hills Mall to see what was happening and how many people were there queuing up.

The store opened at 10am and he got there at 8:35am and by that time there was already 50 plus people in the queue. A friend of ours Sal, had arrived before 7am and he was number 8 in the queue. Apparently, you had to be in line before Casey and Soji who arrived at 2:30am if you wanted to be first in line.

By the time I arrived at 10:05am there were over 200 people queuing. This is all very interesting as no one has any idea what this car is even going to look like. They are all happy to put down at $1,000 deposit for a car they haven’t seen and a car that they are unlikely to get until late 2017 at the earliest. In the queue were some familiar faces from our EV circle.

My sidekick had been chatting to people in the queue and what turned out to be the most interesting fact was that 90% were totally new to Electric Cars. The Model 3 was to be their first Electric Car – This is all very exciting! Tesla are definitely doing something right, with all these people happy to put a deposit down on something unseen.

The queue was moving but there was still a lot of people so, after an hour we decided to leave. Neither of us were interested in waiting in the queue and figured we’d just wait until the online reservations opened later in the day. After all, as current Tesla owners, that did push us up the queue a little bit anyway.

However, as the day wore on, we both decided that we might head back to Short Hills Mall as word was the queue had disappeared.

We arrived at the Tesla Store a little before 3pm and there was no one there, it was eerily quiet compared to the morning. We just walked straight into the store, like you would on any other day! We were greeted by Dan, who we already knew, and he was very happy that we were there to put down a reservation. All he had to do was take down our details and take our credit card details and after checking all was correct, that was it.

We had made the decision and we now have a reservation in place for a Tesla Model 3! I hope we made the right decision – Oh, who am I kidding, of course we did!

We watched the Tesla Model 3 unveiling on Friday evening, there was no way I could stay up until 11:30pm on Thursday to watch it. It was really good to hear Elon Musk not just talking about EV’s but also talking about the amount of pollution coming out of the back of all the petrol cars that are on the road today. Hopefully, this will help to make people question why they would want to drive one when they could have a nice quiet Electric Car instead. It’s that on the ground pollution that is really bad for all of us – it’s increasing Asthma and lung related problems – it’s silently killing us and our planet Earth.

It was also nice to hear him acknowledge the Roadster owners contribution to getting the company started; we do feel a little left out sometimes. After all, we are the ones that believed in Tesla Motors all those years ago.

Then came the unveiling of the Tesla Model 3… Oh my goodness after all this, will I like it? Oh, I do hope so… And… yes, I definitely like it. Phew!! Although to be honest it was rather unlikely that I wouldn’t like it. I mean Tesla really do not make horrid looking cars, do they now? The Model 3 does look like a smaller version of the Model S and X combined. The only thing I am currently not sure about is the glass roof, I’m not keen on sunroofs to begin with so really not sure on that design. But, you can get the Model S without a sunroof so there may be options for the Model 3 too. I like the 200+ mile range – that is going to be great and, combined with the Supercharger network – the world will be my oyster! I’m pleased to hear about the increase in Superchargers instead of any limitations on use and, I hope this will get the likes of ChargePoint, NRG and others to get a move on and get their DC charging networks rolled out.

I am looking forward to seeing what the colour options will be, although I am already pretty sure I know what I will go for and also, what the interior options will be, oh and of course the wheels – very important.

It’s very hard to remain balanced and fair when talking about different manufacturers electric offerings when Tesla announces a car that will be affordable, have the range we’ve always called for, will drive like an electric car (regen on the accelerator) and include the DC fast charging network we know we need. If Tesla can deliver on this promise and, as of today, that means delivering over 290,000 cars, what can the other manufacturers possibly do to compete?

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