I think the difference is that you can just drive down to the station and fill up, but unless you have Tesla's expensive high-voltage charger, you're looking at several hours plugged into a standard wall outlet to recharge the Roadster.
I'm with you, but I sleep 8 hours a night. I'm generally home 12 hours at a minimum. If the car charges in less than 6 hours, it's doable.
250 mile daily limit is pretty good, that's 6+ hours of driving at average city speed limits.
Personally if I'm taking a trip, I'd likely get a rental and put the miles and liability on someone else. I wouldn't like to be driving my own vehicle with my own guests doing a trip from Ontario to Florida or PEI and blow a tire, or worse and it land on my insurance. I like the fact that I can sue the car rental company for up to $10 million, when I can only sue my own insurance for up to $1 million.
You don't need a pick-up truck, just because you might need to move some furniture every few months. You don't need a car with a long range, just because you might want to go on a road trip once a year. You can rent.
I grew up about 100 miles from the nearest decent-sized city. You couldn't use a Tesla there, because you couldn't head to the city every time you got bored and had a spare day (well, technically you could, but you wouldn't want to cut things too fine). But if you live in a big city, and are unlikely to go on long trips more than a few times a year, electric would be fine.
The 230 and 300 mile Teslas are perfect for large metro area use (like SFBA, metro Seattle, LA, etc.).
I still think most people buying $50-70k cars in general, and especially Teslas, are likely to actually own another car (either in a 2-car 2-driver household, or just by keeping their gas/diesel and augmenting it with a Tesla), vs. renting. It might depend on garage space more than anything.
It's not a general-purpose car, though. It was clearly intended as an extra toy for those with the money to spend on such things, so these sort of objections kinda miss the point.
No, you're not going to drive cross country with it. But it's still pretty cool.
