Motor Mouth: Why I’m not drinking the Tesla Kool-Aid – by David Booth (National Post – April 9, 2016)

http://www.nationalpost.com/

If anything is to be learned from the Model 3 hysteria, it’s that Tesla is now a religion, and Elon Musk is its unquestioned messiah

Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, I tuned in to Tesla’s online launch of the Model 3. I watched with appreciation as Elon Musk worked his showmanship and was nothing short of gobsmacked with the stories of loyalists lining up just for the right to buy a car. It was unprecedented. It was incredible. It might have even been uplifting.

It was also, for those of us who trumpet reason over emotion, a little disturbing. Lining up for three days to buy a car? Seriously? For a car you might not take delivery of for four years?

While others saw “a reinvigorated future for electric vehicles” and the long-predicted move to profitability for Tesla, what I saw, at least judging by the blissed-out visages of the show’s attendees, was a Creflo A. Dollar revival meeting — “Hallelujah, glory be to God” — giving thanks to the 200,000 acolytes he beseeched to buy him a private jet.

Mr. Musk certainly wasn’t shy about passing the “basket” around, fairly glowing in the reports, at the time, that almost 150,000 — now closer to 276,000 — had ponied up their $1,000 (all figures USD) alms, er, deposits for the right to buy a Model 3 at some undisclosed point in the future.

What disturbed me most — but seemed to impress everyone else in the media, however — is that 115,000 of those true believers ponied up their offerings without the slightest bit of knowledge about what they were buying, such was their faith.

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