Judging from your name, you're a gearhead and don't know much about electrics and obviously have some angst against them. I've been driving and building electric cars for 20 years now.
With an electric car there is only one moving part vs hundreds of moving parts in a gas car. With an electric car you've eliminated 100s of points of failure.
Lotus doesn't make the Tesla. They supplied the Elise body for the Tesla Roadster which is actually stretched version of the Elise with reworked rocker panels but the rest is all built by Tesla including the battery pack and the drive components. The new Model S is all built by Tesla in California. Lotus in not involved in the Model S. I was given a Tesla Model S to test drive for two days. No problems and I charged the car from solar panels on my roof. The car can whip pretty much any gas car off the line. A four-door Model S does mid-12s in the 1/4 mile. We've done this several times with the car at drag strips across the country. Each time we put a Model S on the dragstrip we've pulled 12s with no effort. We're now pushing to get into the 11's.
I organize SCCA AutoCross events for electric cars and we have never had a breakdown on the course and we push the cars to the limits and race them in the pouring rain. As a matter of fact, Nissan came out to our AutoCross race three years ago because it was the first time a Nissan Leaf was raced in an SCCA AutoCross. They wanted to see what the car could do. We had a professional race driver push the car through the course as hard as he could. Some body roll in the really tight corners but the car stayed on course and never overheated or broke down. Same with the Teslas we run through the course. We've never had a breakdown and we push the cars hard in the blistering sun.
We also did the first drag race between two Chevy Volts on an IHRA dragstrip. Both cars did 16 seconds off the showroom floor with amateur drag racers behind the wheel. No breakdowns. We pulled consistent 16s with light charges between runs. No problems.
I've driven tons of Teslas including the new Model S and have driven my own electric Ford Escort for 20 years now. No major problems.
Electric cars are in fact easier to maintain. My electric Ford Escort has never had an oil change in 20 years. LOL. In that time I've changed out the battery pack a couple times and have done some maintenance brake work but no major brake downs and this was a conversion I built myself in my parents carport. NASA let me charge the car where I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center. Most of the time I never charged there. The car made it there and back with no problems.
If the Tesla has a glitch, the car uploads telemetry to Tesla and a service person calls the owner to discuss the repair. Often, it can be repaired without the owner taking it Tesla for repairs. Part of the cost built into the car is for service people to come out to the car if necessary. So far there has not been any major problems with the Tesla. The only big problem was with the 2-speed gearbox with the very first Roadsters a few years ago but they were reengineered and the problem was fixed before production was resumed.
Once you drive a Tesla you won't want to go back to gas. The car I drove had a 240 mile range. The electric car is here to stay. The naysayers can say all they want but it won't stop progress at this point.
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