CAR BRANDS

[SteelCurtain]

I never mentioned anything about performance. I have no doubts it would perform just as well as petrol/diesel cars. I don't even knock what Tesla are doing in the slightest, they make some amazing shit.

But a petrol/diesel car is fundamentally different to an electric one. I believe Top Gear made a point in one of their shows remarking on the end of gas consuming cars as a sad thing. One of the reasons petrol heads will never have the same passion for electrics is that there's an element of sterility to electric cars. They have no personality, if you will. There's something fundamentally exciting about hearing a V8 roar up and you won't ever get that from an electric car company. It's for that reason, amongst many others that differentiates electric cars from normal cars, that they can't be compared. Not now, not ever IMO. You can maybe compare how they perform as a utility, in terms of whether they perform their role better as transport. They may well exceed what normal cars do right now in this regard in only a few years perhaps, but I don't think you will ever be able to compare them in terms of machines that are built to thrill you and give you enjoyment. People just don't enjoy electric cars the same way they do petrol cars.

That's ofcourse not to say electric cars are altogether boring, or that they can't be exciting. But it's not the same thing hearing a petrol car.

In case you have a spare 8 minutes:

I fucking love Top Gear. I hope they don't sack Clarkson.

I agree with everything you said. The sterility of the electric car and the lack of the thrill you would get when you hear the burble of the American V-8 or the hum of a Ferrari V-12 or even something like the spool of a turbo is something that cannot be replaced and is integral to the driving experience.

There is an entire industry that is ready to tackle this problem as much as it can be tackled. I don't know how successful it would be, but there are people that design what a car sounds like now. Every single manufacturer employs a team that designs what you hear when you turn the key or push the pedal. From the aforementioned burble in a Mustang to next to nothing the the MB S-Class, it's all by design. So it shouldn't be all that different if an electric sports car has a manufactured sound or feel. There will be an extra layer of cognitive dissonance in knowing that the sound isn't created by the engine, but the mechanics of driving other than the sound will move forward just as it has. The power plant is all that's changing here. Cars nowadays are very sterile as it is. Drive by wire is becoming ubiquitous; that feel you get where the wheels are connected to the steering wheel is going away. Suspensions on high end vehicles are more and more electromagnetic, able to be tuned from the cockpit to multiple different settings.

The point is that the mechanical, sort of "rope and pulley" feel of driving a car has been impinged on in so many different ways over the past 100 years, and the powerplant is the last bastion. I don't think the petrol car will be fully replaced in my lifetime, maybe when the petrol runs out--if/when that happens. I just think companies like Tesla are monumentally important in preparing us for a time when petrol becomes scarce. And the infrastructure that Elon Musk is creating, at least in America, is important.