you compare a current model luxury coupe to your hilarious car that sucks fuel, the Mercedes Benz C 220 CDI seems a very fair comparison.
I compare to the market where i live. ( and also back to my home country )
- diesel in the USA ? 1) good luck finding such a car 2) diesel is more expensive than petrol, so why would you buy one ?
- in europe they are now also trying to ban diesels due to 'fine dust pollution'. In belgium there is no more advantage ( out of pocket operating cost) to run a diesel.
I drove a golf diesel for years while i was living there because it was cheaper to operate.
Addressing your nod to the "free" electricity you can get from the supercharging stations, its free but you have to wait around at once since its unlikely they'll let you leave your car parked there and unlikely that it will be near enough to where you park for it to be the usual way to recharge.
Supercharging is not meant for daily charging . It is meant to enable long distance runs. Daily charging is to be done at home, overnight ( you can fill an empty battery in 5 hours on a 240 volt 80 amps circuit if you have the HPWC and twin charger in the car. ) plug the car in at 10 pm and it is ready to go 300+ miles by 4 AM ...
Supercharging is meant to :plug it in , go pee and grab a coffee , and drive off. you don't park your car at the petrol pump either. The other type of charging ( the example i gave in norway with the block heaters ) that could be a situation where you can leave it a long term. Superchargers are strategically placed to discourage people form going there every day and drink for free.
EV has its place but not in Australia at this time.
agree , based on the stuff you posted, but that does not mean other countries should not do it . The world is larger than Oz. In some countries it works , in some it won't ,. just like it works for some people and doesn't for others ( for whatever reason , becasue they like exhaust noise, because they must have a ford , because they live in an apartment and don't have access to solar etc etc etc ). point is : the Tesla is , currently, the only CAR , that happens to use electric propulsion. As opposed to being an intermediate in-between ,'not even usable beyond 35 miles one way trip' car like the Leaf is. With a Leaf i couldn't even drive someone to the local airport and make it back... ( airport is 45 miles away . leaf pack is 70 miles tops and needs hours to top off. As opposed to tens of minutes.
As the infrastructure is being deployed ( when the first cars came on the market you couldn't get petrol easily. they needed to install petrol stations in the early 1900's when cars were first around ) it will become more and more usable.
combine the rollout of different technologies : solar , local storage to unblock the grid , long distance supercharging and EV becomes a viable solution. For large area's of the population it already is ( barring the price of the car , which in the next years will come down drastically due to economies of scale ) , for others it will become avaialble in the next few years. some will need to wait longer than others. That is life.
When i bought mine i looked at the Leaf, Volt , Plug in hybrids and lots of others. The end solution was always : get two cars , an EV and a petrol one to compensate for the lacking capabilities of the EV. In the end the total purchase price ( two cars ) was higher than the Tesla. ( A Leaf is not exactly cheap... 28K$ , throw in some creature comforts and a maxed out leaf climbs to 38K$ ... add a second car ( another 38K ) and you just blew past the base Tesla ...
and you don't have 8 years unlimited miles warranty, zero maintenance , no supercharging , depending on a mediocre third party operated charger grid , you can only fit 4 eople, have the cargo space to hold an umbrella , it's a little dinky toy that takes 9 seconds to climb to 60 MPh , and ... wait for it : be prepared to lose 25% of your batteries' capacity in the FIRST YEAR !!! Nissan had a class action lawsuit on that one. their batteries failed massively because apparently they are not cooled correctly and get damaged ... The solved this partially and offered early buyers a new battery . Don't know what the state of their technology is now.
With the tesla i do not have to adapt to driving 'EV' in terms of range, charge times and planning around do long trips. It's always topped off and i do not need to alter my behavior because it does not have the shortcomings of other EV's. Ok, it costs more in purchase, but the 8 year warranty and zero maintence... i added the fuel, oilchanges, brakes, rotors, fuel and everything else ( a few repairs ) to my sebring and ended up at 90K$ over its 9 year i had it. So the additional 20K i paid over that amount gives me basically the upgrade form the 30K car to a 50K car spread over 9 years. ( operating cost + spread of the purchase price totals 10K a year , just like with the chrysler ) , but the car sits in a totally different bracket when it comes to creature comforts, handling , size etc. It fits me , and plenty other buyers very well.