But I can park it for a month, even after driving it hard, and not worry about turning itself into a paperweight. That is simply fucking inexcusable. Either use a power supply that doesn't care if it's discharged, or make it so that it can't get fully discharged. Solarpanel, an emregency capacitor, a goldern anti-brick fuel cell, something, anything. Cuz this is as stupid as a battery operated device with a big high current lamp that comes on to let you know when you've turned the power off. I guess I'll hold out the hope that this is anti-tesla agitprop until further notice. It ain't like I have to worry about it personally...
My fix for this would be an alternate power source( another battery!) that would come on either by valet or when the vehicle is turned off for a specified period of time. It would activate and take the power cells off line to reserve power for start up. This can be fixed with relative ease, but dropping $40,000 would make me shit nails and I would drive it into a wall for less. But I could be wrong.
I think the supplier chain is much more fragmented, agile, and competitive these days, so IMO that this is a major obstacle removed. The infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine isn't as rigid as it used to be. Aside from faith in Elon Musk, that's one of the factors that makes me think Tesla is realizable. I am basically betting on a startup disruption of manufacturing industries. More agility, less overhead, and more distributed. We shall see.
Presuming it's true. I used to build electric cars. They're hella simpler than gas cars. There's a pretty simple way to fix this: you put a floor on your battery discharge and if you get below that limit, you pop the contactor and throw all your auxiliary systems into hibernate mode. You get on your GSM network and you have the car send you a text saying "your battery is fucked, yo, hurry up and fix it." Finally, you set the thing to give off an audible alarm. All this stuff is easy to do, particularly when you have an operating system. Here's the thing: your iphone won't do this. Your Leaf won't do this. If Teslas really are doing this, it's a big fucking problem. The thing is nothing more than a Lotus Elise with an alternate drivetrain, and electric drivetrains are stupid simple. If there's anything to this, it's wholly inexcusable.
Of course, if Tesla isn't being forthright about the need to keep the thing charged, then they're at fault and the consumer is not an idiot. Otherwise, I stand by my frustration.
I imagine the type of people who drop $100,000+ on an electric sports car have more than one vehicle, and that the Tesla is likely just one of their hobby cars. Also keep in mind that battery power fades whereas gasoline doesn't; it very well could be the case that the last time our hypothetical Tesla driver parked his Roadster it was fully charged, but then depleted over weeks of neglect. Of course, you could also make the case that it's wastefully flamboyant to buy a car just because it's fancy and expensive and then not even drive it, and I would agree; but that's another conversation altogether. EDIT: additionally, even when you do run out of gas, it would still be excessive to say that you deserve to have to pay $40,000 to get a new engine (obviously gas-powered cars don't work that way, I'm stretching the metaphor a bit, but you get the idea).