The business figures just published by the electric car manufacturer Lucid in the USA are, among other things, a reminder of how difficult it was for Tesla in the early days: Instead of 20,000, it wants Lucid is only selling 12,000-14,000 units of its luxury electric car Air this year deliver, and since the start in autumn 2021 there have only been a good 300. Tesla started out in a similarly modest way ten years ago with the Model S, but CEO Elon Musk has now shown little solidarity with the younger company.
Tesla canceled with huge range
Late on Tuesday, US time, one of Musk’s close Twitter followers first picked on Lucid. The company, led by the former chief developer for the Model S, may have delivered the first electric car with a range of 500 miles. But Tesla will be the first to mass produce one, wrote @WholeMarsBlog, alluding to the low Air numbers so far. The CEO responded by belittling Lucid’s performance. On the other hand, he gave the impression that he did not want to stick to previous Tesla statements about longer ranges.
Tesla could have produced a Model S with a range of even 600 miles twelve months ago, Musk explained in his Twitter reply. In his opinion, however, the result would have been a poorer product overall, because 99.9 percent of the time you are driving around with unused battery mass. This has a negative effect on acceleration, driving behavior and efficiency, wrote the Tesla boss. Even the up to a good 400 miles range for today’s Model S are more than almost everyone will use.
We could’ve made a 600 mile Model S 12 months ago, but that would’ve made the product worse imo, as 99.9% of time you’d be carrying unneeded battery mass, which makes acceleration, handling & efficiency worse. Even our 400+ mile range car is more than almost anyone will use.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2022
In fact, Musk had announced in June 2021, a previously announced and not to bring the Model S Plaid+ that can be ordered to market. Its record acceleration of less than 2 seconds to 60 miles per hour was inherited by the Model S Plaid without Plus addition, of which the first copies were delivered a little later. But the range of the Plaid+ should also have been spectacular, at 520 miles a touch longer than that of the Lucid Air. And here Tesla did not follow up at all with the new Model S, but fell short of the 400 miles achieved with the predecessor the US standard EPA.
No answer to Roadster and Cybertruck
The fact that the CEO was now dismissing everything about it aroused some fears that previous range statements would no longer apply to future Teslas either. Strictly speaking, this is already the case with the Cybertruck: In October 2021, most of the information about the e-pickup previously planned by the end of the year disappeared from the Tesla website. The range of the top model was previously stated as more than 500 miles, which then became “up to”. Even for the Roadster, Tesla dropped the prices on the web a little laterbut retained acceleration (1.9 seconds to 60 mph) and range (620 miles) data.
This data appears to have remained unchanged since the launch of the new Tesla Roadster in November 2017. But the Tesla CEO did not answer questions about the range aspect, nor did he respond to Twitter users who wanted to know how the cybertruck was doing. It may be true that almost nobody really and frequently needs more than 400 miles of range before the next charge, and this was mentioned several times in the reactions. However, several commentators also indicated that they may not necessarily need more than the previous Tesla maximum, but still want it.