Charging infrastructure really depends. In the northern country the alternatives are great and even Tesla owners would likely use alternative charging infrastructure - unless they want to take detours to get to Tesla charging points.

Edit: I meant to reply to u/petesergeant above.

At least in the UK, I've never had a problem with charging stations of payment yet - there are lots of stations (some now are "plug and charge" so you just plug and the payment is dealt with automatically, but those are currently rare but the rest pretty much all take contactless payments) and many now that are 350KW (which is way more than either my ID3 or the Tesla 3 can handle). Pretty much everyone now has settled on CCS as the "usb for cars" in Europe so that are no cable/adaptor issues to worry about.

The software on the ID.3 is ok. If you sit there for 20 minutes and fiddle with it yes it is not as smooth as using a modern smart-phone in terms of responsiveness. But really, 99% of the time all I am doing with it is changing the radio station or aircon for which it is totally fine. I've not used a tesla so cannot do a direct comparison.

You sure about that? From what I've seen, each of Tesla's models have a competitor of similar category and range that's order-of €5k cheaper.

Even with that aside, there's also the issue that Tesla doesn't have a broad range of vehicles, and there's now a lot of other competitors filling all the various niches, which means if all you want is a cheap electric city car you can get that for €17k* and don't need to start with the, what is it, €42k for a Model 3?

* For a Dacia Spring: https://www.dacia.de/nci-catalog.html?model.code=S1E&sortKey...

There is also the much cheaper Citroën Ami for just under €8k, but that's more of a car-shaped object, legally a quadricycle, but even then the point remains that it's filling in niches that Tesla doesn't: https://www.citroen.de/modelle/neuer-ami.html

BYD is as old as Tesla (2003) and XPeng is more than 10 years old at this point.

Koreans have far too many issues and Japanese are just making fun of themselves (albeit new Leaf finally might be decent).

Just looking at a sampling of Irish prices across the low end (including grants):

Tesla Model 3: min 37,500eur

VW id.3 (European): min 31,780eur

Dacia Spring (European/Chinese): 17,000eur

Hyundai Inster (Korean): 20,000eur

Like, certainly in terms of minimum entry price, Telsa's very much on the expensive end.

Untrue. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ra...

> Tesla would probably have been fine if Musk had quietly financed Musk

:D Did you read what was the plan for their first car?

It is like loving the planet eating soja, while ignoring the forests being destroyed to satisfy demand as planting fields.

Or farmable fields now being solar panel fields, because it is more profitable to sell energy, than living the farmer life, earning pennies for a hard work life, while kids die every day of lack of nutrition.

To fix the planet, first we need to get rid of profit driven societies.

Come on now, green energy is less bad than fossil fuels, often by a lot, but that's very different from having no impact. The mining to support solar panels does real measurable harm, as does disposing of old ones. There are similar environmental costs to every green energy source. I think nuclear is one of the least bad options and we should have been making more of it for decades, but it's hardly devoid of externalities.

That's not to say we need to consume less energy, just that we should be clear eyed about the tradeoffs. So far there's very little evidence of a huge productivity boost from generative AI, especially relative to the immense energy consumption. Things are changing quickly, maybe that will improve in the near future. But if utility levels off where it is now and energy consumption increases another one or two orders of magnitude, and we're still keeping coal plants alive to support it, I'm going to be pretty skeptical it's worth the cost.

That says that you don't understand the problems. We (Humanity) have 3 problems:

1. Mass extinction. It is a fact, we are living it, it's measurable and it's very bad. It is not at all due to climate change.

2. Fossil energy. It's harder to see in the US, but in Europe started feeling it in 2007. Fossil fuels are limited, and at the moment we've reached the global production peak in 2018 (2019?). Fossil fuels are of course a cause for global warming, but the end of easy access to fossil fuels is a problem in itself. A "degrowth mindset" is not necessarily an ideology, it's a rational behaviour towards a future with less fossil fuels and therefore less energy.

3. Global warming. Europe can feel that it gets worse every year now. It is just starting, and it's never going back. It will keep getting worse, and nobody alive today will see it get better. The only thing we can do to limit how worse it gets is by using less fossil energy, which brings us back to some kind of degrowth again.

Don't mistake everyone who plans for degrowth for people who desire degrowth.

The whole problem with the US is the growth mindset. Because the US will military invade other countries long before accepting that degrowth is unavoidable. Any country who believes that the US are an ally is making a mistake, and the US have made it exceedingly clear in the last few months: the US don't have allies, just (temporary) partners and no notion of loyalty.

Sometimes it is better to improve education than draconian measures.

Paradoxically, I think the closer you get to real self-driving without actually reaching it, the more skeptical people will become since it lulls you into a false sense of security. A car that mostly seems like it will drive itself but will occasionally and unpredictably try to kill you is much more concerning for most people than a car that helps you out but presents no illusion that you can stop paying attention.