Why do HNers like Tesla so much? Surely Tesla start the era of electric vehicles,but for me it's just yet another American luxury car.I fancy something more exquisite and fun to drive.
Especially when Tesla keeps pushing the bleeding edge of killing the right to repair that has been on life support in modern cars for decades now. Every auto manufacturer used the invent of digital tech as a means to kill the right to repair (in much the same way almost every industry did - digital tech has proven to be sufficiently magic that commoners won't even recognize what they give up when they go from an easily discoverable and repairable analog solution to a proprietary locked down digital one... at least not until its too late like farmers with tractors) but Tesla blazes trails in how much of a car they can cripple with a proprietary computer so that nobody except Tesla can know how it works, how to fix it, or how to change it.
That is wholly antithetical to hacker culture. If the major tech players of the 80s treated personal computers the way auto manufacturers are treating cars today (or more appropriately for the last ten years) whole categories of software would never have existed. And cars, like the IBM PC architecture, show a seemingly inevitable destiny of the genie being put back in the bottle - for decades you could know how your car works so completely you could replace any one part by hand. In large part the same could be said of many transitionary computer systems - before systemic abstraction layers could cordon off the hardware from the user and render it wholly proprietary and black box (again) there was a short stint of time where you could get the programming manual for your chip and often diagnostic manuals for the mainboard that contained CAD documents related to it for self-repair of capacitors.
New generations of car geeks will be stymied when the cars they grow up with will be magic metal boxes that do things themselves and prevent them from understanding how they work because its more profitable for all involved if you are beholden to someone else to create, operate, repair, and improve the thing than yourself.
Just the same as how new generations of hackers will be stunted by growing up on Android and iOS devices that don't even have an included compiler or any way to install one, on locked bootloaders and proprietary drivers, filled to the brim with planned obsolescence and non-removable batteries and body frames designed to disintegrate if you force it apart to see whats inside.
Thats not to say nobody will push car culture forward the same way hacking won't die, but large corporate interests have certainly done their best to put up all the barriers they can to prevent anyone from developing an interest.
Oddly enough, I've had the chance to briefly drive a trolleybus, and while it doesn't accelerate quite like a Tesla, it's still surprisingly quick off the line, for a multi-ton vehicle. All that torque is available from a standstill.
Calling it a luxury car with that interior is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Sure it's much better than the cheapest interiors but other than the big screen it doesn't present any luxury over a normal modern mid-ranger sedan (ford, hyundai, peugeot, etc)
