I love the autobahn. I travel on it frequently while doing business in EU, and there's something special about travelling at 200-250km/h(120-150mph) without any problems. But I am afraid you will not find a lot of sympathy from other HN readers - the autobahn is such an exception in today's world, that for vast majority of people it's really not important how a car drives at 120mph+. That makes me sad personally, but rationally autobahn driving is not a major component of any discussion.
> that for vast majority of people it's really not important how a car drives at 120mph+
That's why Tesla increased max speed for the new model to 250 km/h?
> That makes me sad personally, but rationally autobahn driving is not a major component of any discussion.
'Rationally driving' is not a part of any discussion of a car in this class. Nobody needs such environmentally unfriendly cars like a Tesla S or the cars of the German brands...
Well, the first one is mostly a bragging right, and also something that some clients will use on closed circuits, so it's not completely meaningless.
And I didn't say anything about rational driving. I said that rationally, since only a very tiny minority of people in the world can experience driving on the autobahn, autobahn driving is most probably not very important point of discussions for majority of people in the world.
>>The amount of people who can experience driving a Tesla is much much smaller.
So is the number of people who buy S-Klasse AMG...your point?
>>Well, here in Germany a lot of people use the Autobahn. I see lots of people from France, Poland, Denmark, Austria, ... using it
Yep, I am not German and I use it too(thank you for it). Even if you added all Germans, Austrians, British and Poles together it's still going to be "only" a couple hundred million people. And most of them are not interested in going that fast on the Autobahn. When I drive through Germany there's plenty of people driving in the fast lane going 200km/h or faster, but there is even more "regular" people in "regular" cars going at 130km/h.
In fact I don't know what (and even if) we are arguing about. Tesla is awesome. And I would love to take it on the autobahn.
The Model S P85D is not for the "vast majority of people". They increased the max speed to appeal to the tiny fraction of people who care about that number enough to spend a lot of money on achieving it.
> At 250 km/h the battery will be empty quite fast…
Then again, the typical high-performance sedan doesn't have much range either at 250km/h. At that speed, a 3-series will burn through 30L/100km and they have a 60L tank. A 5-series has a 70L tank but I don't know how much fuel it goes through at 250. I don't expect significantly better efficiency though.
