It gets lauded because the range is enough. It's not great, but it's enough that you can mostly treat it like a car, rather than a glorified golf cart. 265 miles is enough to treat it as gas^H^H^Hcharge and go, rather than needing elaborate planning for everyday activities.
You're completely right that the range and price demonstrates the limits of current technology. But the Model S is great because it makes different tradeoffs from usual, and tradeoffs that make it a great car if you have the money. Other attempts at electric cars have tried to keep the price down, and that means sacrificing range to a huge degree. Tesla responded to this tradeoff by making an expensive car with a good range that has comparable features to other cars in that expensive price range, rather than making a cheap car with crappy range the way others have done.
And yes, dual motor is no real innovation. It's cool, and 3.2s 0-60 is fantastic, but all it really took was throwing extra money into the machine.
As for 200 mile affordable electric cars in 2017, we'll see. The battery is the limiting factor right now. The Model S battery pack by itself costs more than an entire Nissan Leaf, and you can't reduce the energy needed for that range that much beyond what the Model S needs. Battery technology, whether chemistry or manufacturing or both, needs to get substantially cheaper for that to happen. I assume that's what everybody's betting on happening.
You're completely right that the range and price demonstrates the limits of current technology. But the Model S is great because it makes different tradeoffs from usual, and tradeoffs that make it a great car if you have the money. Other attempts at electric cars have tried to keep the price down, and that means sacrificing range to a huge degree. Tesla responded to this tradeoff by making an expensive car with a good range that has comparable features to other cars in that expensive price range, rather than making a cheap car with crappy range the way others have done.
And yes, dual motor is no real innovation. It's cool, and 3.2s 0-60 is fantastic, but all it really took was throwing extra money into the machine.
As for 200 mile affordable electric cars in 2017, we'll see. The battery is the limiting factor right now. The Model S battery pack by itself costs more than an entire Nissan Leaf, and you can't reduce the energy needed for that range that much beyond what the Model S needs. Battery technology, whether chemistry or manufacturing or both, needs to get substantially cheaper for that to happen. I assume that's what everybody's betting on happening.