Demand for new Tesla is wild, but limited to fans of technology

Demand for Tesla’s new Model 3 has been eye-popping, with consumers pre-ordering about $13.7 billion worth of the electric sedans nearly two years before they go on sale.

Yet experts aren’t yet ready to proclaim it’s a tipping point with mainstream America moving from burning gasoline to charging batteries.

The reason? Most of the 325,000 people worldwide who put down $1,000 deposits are tech-savvy, environmentally conscious early adopters who see Tesla as an innovative brand that meets their needs. The $35,000 price tag and the Model 3’s 215-mile range are important, but the brand’s tech image and CEO Elon Musk’s success in cars, rockets and solar panels is the main driver.

“We’re tech people. I want integration with my phone,” says Charles Butler, a 40-year-old manager with a cloud computing company in Austin, Texas, who was among the first to make an order. “Musk and Tesla, that’s what they do with their customer experience.”

Researchers say other automakers’ electric cars haven’t caught on because their range is limited to around 100 miles. Even General Motors’ Chevrolet Bolt, which will go more than 200 miles per charge and is priced similarly to the Model 3, won’t attract a frenzy of buyers because Chevy doesn’t have Tesla’s tech image, they say.

Surveys by the University of California Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and by Carnegie Mellon University show Butler is a pretty typical Tesla buyer. The brand is well-known in the U.S. Tesla buyers always have rated cutting-edge features — huge touch screens, freeway autopilot and overthe-air software updates — as paramount, said Tom Turrentine, director of electric and hybrid vehicle research at UC Davis.

Early electric cars didn’t have those features, although the new Bolt will have some of them. “There’s a big overlap in people who think about the future and green technology,” Turrentine said. “Tesla is really sitting right on that.”