Back in 2010 - 2011 I started becoming interested in the development of electric vehicles. My sister worked for General Motors at the time. I had heard a little about the long dead EV1, developed by GM. Even though GM killed the EV1 (see the movie "Who Killed The Electric Car"), they were developing a new "extended range" electric vehicle called the Volt. In essence this is an electric car that once the charge drops below a certain threshold, a gas powered generator kicks in to charge the batteries until you can plug it in for a full charge.
The idea of the Volt kind of blew my mind. It sounded like the perfect mix of electric and gas. I thought that this was going to be my next car purchase, but I was only a couple years into owning my Chevy Malibu, so I decided it would be best to wait a few years. I was also hoping that given time, the battery and electric range would be improved.
This began my research and fascination with electric vehicles.
So I started googling information about the Volt, hoping to find what the future hold for such a concept. At the time there was a lot of speculation about fuel cell cars, and that it was going to be more efficient and cleaner than electric vehicles. I didn't understand how they could say that since there were so few true electric vehicles in development. This was when I started hearing about Tesla Motors.
I saw that they had this car called the Roadster that had been around for a couple years. Apparently only a few thousand were planned to be made. Plus that car was just way too expensive and impractical to even consider, but holy shit it was very fast.
About a year or so later I heard about the Tesla Model S. There was a lot of excitement about this car. It was still pretty expensive (for me anyway), but it clearly showed the potential for the affordability of electric vehicles moving forward. The S was eventually being sold to the public in June of 2012. People were paying thousands of dollars way before they would be getting their car, but the excitement made it feel like this company was going to be a game changer. I started watching Tesla very closely from this point forward.
The Model S is a sports sedan, but "sport" was putting it mildly. Some of the early versions were fast, but as things progressed Tesla released software update directly to the cars that improved their performance. Pretty soon there were high end Model S versions beating the best of the fast sports cars on the track.
My interest in Tesla wasn't really with how they are making these really fast cars, but I was actually more interested in the technology and where things were going. Will they make a car that normal people like me can afford? Will Tesla be able to withstand the pressures and negative attacks that are coming from the other big car makers?
In 2015 Tesla announced the Model 3. The car would be affordable, and would at a minimum would have a 220 mile range. I got really excited and started watching everything I could about Tesla. When they finally started taking deposits I was in line the first day (March 31, 2016). Telsa hadn't even shown pictures of this car. They took close to 150,000 deposits of $1000 that first day. I was not the only person that was exited by this car.
