New Study From UK Has Looked At The Most Desirable Luxury Cars Based On Internet Searches And Found That The Tesla Model S Topped The Charts.
A New Study From The UK Has Looked At The Most Desirable Luxury Cars Based On Internet Searches And Found That The Tesla Model S Topped The Charts in more countries than any other car.
The American EV beat out traditional “money-no-object” luxury cars like the Rolls-Royce Phantom and Range Rover SVR, according to data found by money.co.uk. That’s interesting because the Model S isn’t really a luxury car. It doesn’t have nearly the same levels of luxury as something like a Rolls-Royce, despite some models breaking the $200k price barrier.
Tesla does offer some tasty levels of tech and the silent running of an electric car lends itself much more to the luxury status than a V8 or V12 but those advantages are quickly diminishing. Tesla’s Autopilot autonomous driving tech is good too but the Volkswagen Group, Mercedes-Benz and BMW systems are arguably better at a number of things.
A luxury car is generally a car you should be driven in, rather than a car you drive. The second-placed Audi A8 is a good example, as is pretty much any Rolls-Royce but the Model S is more of a high-performance sports sedan than a luxury car. Think of it more like a BMW M5 or Mercedes-AMG E 63 competitor.
Tesla rival Lucid pointed this out recently in its investor deck, released in February when the company went public, calling Tesla “innovative but not luxury.” According Lucid’s CEO, Peter Rawlinson, “a lot of slack was cut” with the Model S because “the electric car was such a fun experience that people forgave the build quality issues.”
The study also distilled the global results on a country-by-country basis and found that while Tesla is number one in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and North America, other countries had different preferences.
Russia preferred the BMW X7 while those from China, Brazil and Argentina opted for the Porsche Panamera. Searchers from various African countries preferred the offerings of Germany and Britain, with the Audi A8, BMW X7, Range Rover SVR, Bentley Bentayga and Rolls-Royce Cullinan all ranking highly.
This news was originally published at Stuff.