If Tesla's Upcoming Minibus Looks Like THIS, Could It Take Over The Segment?

I'm all for more minivan choices in the market place given its practical and flexible design, especially those that will improve the minivan segment's fuel economy. If Tesla, fine, if other mfs, better.

looks good, but the weight of 7 adults can't be helpful to range

No - I use - and a lot of us use a Mini-Van(once used Station wagons too) for Vacations or Long Trips carrying things back and forth - and an electric one cannot suffice for a trip to a National Park or campgrounds.

This is a minivan, not a minibus. I think it will be much taller and squared off so that it can accommodate more people in the same footprint. Since it is designed to be autonomous, it may look quite different than anything that exists today. I would expect seating for 9-12 people.

Semi-Autonomous ! not autonomous.. it can't even get it right at the moment,, anyway frm tesla ? it's gonna be sh it...

I could see a disruption here, going up against shuttle type and smaller community bus systems. Where I live the full size buses typically carry no more than 4 or 5 passengers at a time. Fast recharge a must.

This is just an emergency redesign of the Model X to get rid of the falcon doors.

Funny - however, I doubt that Tesla will still be in business to get that new model/falcon door fix into production. Wednesday's Wall St Journal had an excellent opinion piece on Tesla, comparing it to DeLorean (which got similar govt handouts from No Ireland). Telsa is not here in a year is my prediction.

Wall St Journal - Weds 8/17

By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Aug. 16, 2016 6:58 p.m. ET

There’s a reason why European and Japanese auto companies, leaders in cruise control and other automated driving technologies, were slow to bring their innovations to America: the U.S. liability system.

Tesla has experienced one fatal crash as a result of imperfections in its self-driving technology—the death of a Florida driver when his car hit a tractor trailer crossing its path. Tesla founder Elon Musk makes a plausible argument that Tesla’s “Autopilot” is a net improver of safety. That won’t matter to trial lawyers making a case that Tesla didn’t sufficiently flag the system’s limitations. And Mr. Musk himself is guilty of statements that could be portrayed as encouraging excessive confidence in what he calls a “beta” system. Mr. Musk’s frequent recourse to hyperbole lately has many analysts wondering what Elon is up to. A Journal story this week detailed 20 cases, over the past five years, of him touting financial or production goals that Tesla failed to meet.

In just the past few weeks, he set an implausible timetable for rolling out his mass-market Model 3 sedan. He floated a pie-in-the-sky “master plan” to build tractor trailers and pickup trucks. He justified Tesla’s bailout of another Musk-related company, Solar City, by saying the two would revolutionize the world energy system. Last year, he even casually asserted that Tesla eventually would be worth more than Apple. His fan, the investor Ron Baron, told the Journal this week: “This guy wants to save the world.”......

OK, but another way of thinking about Mr. Musk’s public demeanor is suggested by a fascinating revisiting of the DeLorean case by economist Graham Brownlow of Queen’s University Belfast. Mr. Brownlow looks beyond the usual focus on the foibles of John DeLorean, the glamorous renegade GM executive who set out in 1975 to make a sports car now famous mainly for its role in the “Back to the Future” movies. He borrows a concept from the failures of socialism, known as the soft budget constraint, to note the incentives for DeLorean to run his company as if more subsidies could always be extracted from British taxpayers, who were backing the start-up auto maker.