If u need the extra seats. why wouldn't you just buy an SUV etc?
Tesla will be unveiling a 7-seat SUV online on the 9th of this month. It'll also have 7 seats.
I'll
hopefully be interviewing CEO Elon Musk at the Geneva show, and one of the things I intend to ask him is why both the Model S and Model X will have 7 seats.
To answer your question though, if people are buying a Model S it's unlikely that they'll have chosen it specifically for the extra seats... I suspect the seats are there to enable people with larger families to buy the car, where they might otherwise buy a smaller, less expensive EV, and then a minivan or SUV as well. This way it pulls customers towards Tesla.
Then theres still the problem of limited range and hardly anywhere to charge it. Electrics still not they way forward for me.
Limited range doesn't really apply to this car.
Forgetting the fact that most EV buyers buy their cars with the range considered (i.e.
nobody buys an EV and then thinks "what, it only does 100 miles?"), the Tesla has a much greater range anyway - 300+ miles for the top-spec versions.
Now I dunno about you, but my regular petrol car doesn't do 300 miles on a tank. Fair enough, recharging takes little longer, but then generally when I do long distances my stops tend to be longer anyway. A fast charger should allow Model S drivers to do pretty decent distances.
I cannot believe legislation would allow kids to sit in the boot facing the rear window like that! it looks extremely dangerous. If you have a rear collision it game over
Why would you even want it anyway when the car is already a 4 seater!
5 seater
The rearmost seats are numbers 6 and 7, not 5 and 6.
That aside, I can see your point, but it's certainly not an unusual layout - many, many estate cars sold in the past have had a rear-facing third row.
And let's face it - I wouldn't want to put a couple of young kids in the rear row of basically
any smaller estate or MPV, as they're invariably only inches away from the rear window.
It's a big, murky grey area as far as legislation is concerned, I expect. Clever construction techniques probably make it safer than ever and distribute most of the impact around the occupants, but the subtext is that they're only "occasional" seats and you wouldn't want to stick someone there too often.