![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
OK, we've had the Model 3 about six weeks now. The new car smell is (mostly) gone, and I've got a pretty good idea what I think.
First off, the technology gap between this car and the 2009 Accord (our newest prior vehicle) is astounding, though I'm not sure how much of that gap is just the nine years of general automotive advancement (I suspect more than I think), how much is the upgraded trim package (the Accord is the top trim package available, but Honda is not a premium brand), and how much is the Tesla-ness of the thing (I suspect actually not very much, outside the power train).
A partial list of technology features that make driving the Tesla qualitatively different than driving any of my previous cars:
- Adaptive cruise control: The car detects vehicles ahead of it and slows down, or even stops if necessary to avoid hitting them. I know this isn't a Tesla exclusive because I've had low-end rental cars with the feature, but this is the first time I've actually gotten to sit with the feature for long enough to get used to it. Now that I have, I think it's a must-have for all future vehicles if it's available. If there's enough traffic to keep me from ever being the front car at a stoplight, I can make almost the entire driving leg of my commute without touching either the accelerator or the brakes.
- Regenerative braking: My Accord Hybrid had regenerative braking, but only when I explicitly applied the brakes. The Tesla engages regeneration as soon as my foot comes off the accelerator (and in fact before I come completely off it), with the effect that the car decelerates more quickly than it would if I were managing the process. The upshot is that I rarely have to actually apply the brakes except to bring the car to a final stop at a particular point. It also gives me much more control over the speed of the car, because reducing pressure on the accelerator gives me some braking, so I don't have to move my foot back and forth between the accelerator and the brake pedal, just manage my leadfoot. This made driving Old Highway 30 along the Columbia Gorge even more fun than I was expecting, and I've been overdriving that road for years.
- The touchscreen: Having no dashboard and putting the controls for the vehicle on a touchscreen off to the side is...not implemented as well as it could be. Many controls require at least two taps of the touchscreen, and the buttons are smallish and hard to hit accurately when you can only glance away from the road. The motion of the car makes hitting the controls even more difficult, even for the passenger. Much of the display is in a fairly small font, again making it difficult to find and process information in short glances. Aggravating this is the fact that, on top of age making it more difficult for my eyes to focus, my right eye has macular degeneration in the center of the field of vision, so things that might be accomplishable with a glance from a younger driver with undamaged eyes require a longer look for me. To be fair, most of the essential controls are mapped to the steering wheel and the two control levers, but the tour we got of the car did not describe most of those shortcuts, and we didn't know enough at the time to ask the necessary questions. It was almost a week before I could consistently get the turn signal to stay on longer than three blinks, and I formulated two false models of how that system worked before I got it right. (RTFM helped, but TFM is 169 pages and does not include screenshots, so if you don't see the control it tells you to click, you can't tell whether the control is missing or if you're just in the wrong place in the UI.) I'd still much rather have an additional display panel in front of the steering wheel, where I can glance more safely.
- Automatic headlights, highbeams, and windshield wipers: The Accord has automatic headlights, where the car detects the ambient lighting conditions and turns the headlights on as it gets darker, but the Model 3 leverages its detection of other vehicles and turns the brights on and off as it feels necessary. Its algorithm for this is not perfect, as it tends to think bright yellow road signs are also cars for this purpose, so it dims when it sees them, and if there's a car on the fringe of its distance threshold, it can catch itself in cycling the brights quickly, which makes me look like an asshole to the other drivers, so I so exercise my prerogative to turn the auto-brights off, but usually it's a neat feature. And auto wipers? Since I discovered *that* feature, I haven't adjusted my wipers once.
As far as actually driving the car, I think I love it. It's mostly comfortable to sit in, gives a solid-feeling ride, settles nicely into turns, and accelerates better than anything I've ever driven before. I haven't observed (yet) any of the fit-and-finish issues that owners reported with earlier builds.
When the cruise control is off, it's a hell of a lot of fun to drive, especially if the road has interesting curves. (Though a caveat: with no engine noise, it's much more difficult to judge speed, and at least early on, I found myself having trouble with curves because I entered them ten to twenty mph faster than I thought.)
When the cruise is *on*, driving is boring. Because the cruise integrates braking, when you set a speed, that's the speed you go. Uphill, downhill, doesn't matter, though it will slow down for curves, which doesn't make it *less* boring. There's a valley between home and Silverdale that makes for a nice roller-coaster feel in a normal car, as you accelerate down the hill and then pull some Gs as you get to the bottom and start back up. In the Model 3, though, it's 44 mph down, 44 mph at the bottom, 44 mph back up. You barely even notice. I *guess* this is a feature.
The biggest concerns folks have about an all-electric vehicle are probably range and charging. The short answer here is "no problem".
The advertised range for my model (long-range, dual-motor AWD, not the high-performance package) is 310 miles on a full battery, or ~270 miles at 90%--Tesla tells me that charging the battery all the way all the time is bad for longevity, and I prefer to keep my cars for at least 10 years and/or 100,000 miles--and that seems to hold up pretty well. *I* burn the range down faster than that, but I drive faster and harder than average, let alone ideal, and I'm pretty sure I'm still getting ~240-250 miles off that 90% charge, which is plenty to get us down to Portland without stopping, plenty to get us to Vancouver BC, especially if we grab a ferry instead of driving south through Tacoma to get there. Longer trips would require 1-2 stops per day at superchargers, more about which below.
When we built the house, we wired all three bays in the garage with 240V outlets, so charging at home is a non-issue; even if the battery were flat, we can charge it back to full in 8-10 hours. For daily commuting, it takes about an hour or so to get back the charge I burned that day. We haven't had it that long, and it's hard to tease electricity usage changes month-to-month, so we might never know how much it costs us to keep the car charged, especially when you try to account for the solar panels.
Out on the road, Tesla supercharging stations are plentiful, and even though I bought in too late to get free lifetime supercharging, they only charge me 25 cents/kWh, which means a full charge from 0 to the 85kWh my battery holds would cost me about $20. Many places have "destination charge stations"; the lodge we stayed at on our last Portland trip (our first and so far only Tesla road trip) had one, so it was free to recharge the car overnight, and that took care of all our charging needs the whole trip. We did try other charging options as we were out and about, but that was to get an idea how the infrastructure works, not because we needed juice.
The big practical difference between refueling and recharging, of course, is the time. As I mentioned above, a 240V outlet takes overnight to recharge, which is clearly not workable when you want to go farther than 300 miles in a day. Even the supercharging stations take around an hour to recharge you, which obviously compares unfavorably to a five-minute stop at a gas station. Supposedly, Tesla chooses locations for supercharging stations such that there's something to do (restaurants, shopping) while you wait, but we haven't had much opportunity yet to test that out.
All in all, I think the Model 3 is too small for long family trips, especially with the amount of gear the three of us travel with. So for our purposes, we'll probably be in a gas-powered or hybrid SUV or crossover when we go farther than Portland or Vancouver. I might go farther than that on a solo photography trip; I usually drive (as opposed to flying) as far out as Kalispell or maybe Yellowstone. Assuming I ever have the spare vacation time to go on solo photography trips again.
Left out of the narrative: customer support that ranges from unresponsive to bad; terrible delivery-day experience; software UI designed poorly for while you're driving.
First off, the technology gap between this car and the 2009 Accord (our newest prior vehicle) is astounding, though I'm not sure how much of that gap is just the nine years of general automotive advancement (I suspect more than I think), how much is the upgraded trim package (the Accord is the top trim package available, but Honda is not a premium brand), and how much is the Tesla-ness of the thing (I suspect actually not very much, outside the power train).
A partial list of technology features that make driving the Tesla qualitatively different than driving any of my previous cars:
- Adaptive cruise control: The car detects vehicles ahead of it and slows down, or even stops if necessary to avoid hitting them. I know this isn't a Tesla exclusive because I've had low-end rental cars with the feature, but this is the first time I've actually gotten to sit with the feature for long enough to get used to it. Now that I have, I think it's a must-have for all future vehicles if it's available. If there's enough traffic to keep me from ever being the front car at a stoplight, I can make almost the entire driving leg of my commute without touching either the accelerator or the brakes.
- Regenerative braking: My Accord Hybrid had regenerative braking, but only when I explicitly applied the brakes. The Tesla engages regeneration as soon as my foot comes off the accelerator (and in fact before I come completely off it), with the effect that the car decelerates more quickly than it would if I were managing the process. The upshot is that I rarely have to actually apply the brakes except to bring the car to a final stop at a particular point. It also gives me much more control over the speed of the car, because reducing pressure on the accelerator gives me some braking, so I don't have to move my foot back and forth between the accelerator and the brake pedal, just manage my leadfoot. This made driving Old Highway 30 along the Columbia Gorge even more fun than I was expecting, and I've been overdriving that road for years.
- The touchscreen: Having no dashboard and putting the controls for the vehicle on a touchscreen off to the side is...not implemented as well as it could be. Many controls require at least two taps of the touchscreen, and the buttons are smallish and hard to hit accurately when you can only glance away from the road. The motion of the car makes hitting the controls even more difficult, even for the passenger. Much of the display is in a fairly small font, again making it difficult to find and process information in short glances. Aggravating this is the fact that, on top of age making it more difficult for my eyes to focus, my right eye has macular degeneration in the center of the field of vision, so things that might be accomplishable with a glance from a younger driver with undamaged eyes require a longer look for me. To be fair, most of the essential controls are mapped to the steering wheel and the two control levers, but the tour we got of the car did not describe most of those shortcuts, and we didn't know enough at the time to ask the necessary questions. It was almost a week before I could consistently get the turn signal to stay on longer than three blinks, and I formulated two false models of how that system worked before I got it right. (RTFM helped, but TFM is 169 pages and does not include screenshots, so if you don't see the control it tells you to click, you can't tell whether the control is missing or if you're just in the wrong place in the UI.) I'd still much rather have an additional display panel in front of the steering wheel, where I can glance more safely.
- Automatic headlights, highbeams, and windshield wipers: The Accord has automatic headlights, where the car detects the ambient lighting conditions and turns the headlights on as it gets darker, but the Model 3 leverages its detection of other vehicles and turns the brights on and off as it feels necessary. Its algorithm for this is not perfect, as it tends to think bright yellow road signs are also cars for this purpose, so it dims when it sees them, and if there's a car on the fringe of its distance threshold, it can catch itself in cycling the brights quickly, which makes me look like an asshole to the other drivers, so I so exercise my prerogative to turn the auto-brights off, but usually it's a neat feature. And auto wipers? Since I discovered *that* feature, I haven't adjusted my wipers once.
As far as actually driving the car, I think I love it. It's mostly comfortable to sit in, gives a solid-feeling ride, settles nicely into turns, and accelerates better than anything I've ever driven before. I haven't observed (yet) any of the fit-and-finish issues that owners reported with earlier builds.
When the cruise control is off, it's a hell of a lot of fun to drive, especially if the road has interesting curves. (Though a caveat: with no engine noise, it's much more difficult to judge speed, and at least early on, I found myself having trouble with curves because I entered them ten to twenty mph faster than I thought.)
When the cruise is *on*, driving is boring. Because the cruise integrates braking, when you set a speed, that's the speed you go. Uphill, downhill, doesn't matter, though it will slow down for curves, which doesn't make it *less* boring. There's a valley between home and Silverdale that makes for a nice roller-coaster feel in a normal car, as you accelerate down the hill and then pull some Gs as you get to the bottom and start back up. In the Model 3, though, it's 44 mph down, 44 mph at the bottom, 44 mph back up. You barely even notice. I *guess* this is a feature.
The biggest concerns folks have about an all-electric vehicle are probably range and charging. The short answer here is "no problem".
The advertised range for my model (long-range, dual-motor AWD, not the high-performance package) is 310 miles on a full battery, or ~270 miles at 90%--Tesla tells me that charging the battery all the way all the time is bad for longevity, and I prefer to keep my cars for at least 10 years and/or 100,000 miles--and that seems to hold up pretty well. *I* burn the range down faster than that, but I drive faster and harder than average, let alone ideal, and I'm pretty sure I'm still getting ~240-250 miles off that 90% charge, which is plenty to get us down to Portland without stopping, plenty to get us to Vancouver BC, especially if we grab a ferry instead of driving south through Tacoma to get there. Longer trips would require 1-2 stops per day at superchargers, more about which below.
When we built the house, we wired all three bays in the garage with 240V outlets, so charging at home is a non-issue; even if the battery were flat, we can charge it back to full in 8-10 hours. For daily commuting, it takes about an hour or so to get back the charge I burned that day. We haven't had it that long, and it's hard to tease electricity usage changes month-to-month, so we might never know how much it costs us to keep the car charged, especially when you try to account for the solar panels.
Out on the road, Tesla supercharging stations are plentiful, and even though I bought in too late to get free lifetime supercharging, they only charge me 25 cents/kWh, which means a full charge from 0 to the 85kWh my battery holds would cost me about $20. Many places have "destination charge stations"; the lodge we stayed at on our last Portland trip (our first and so far only Tesla road trip) had one, so it was free to recharge the car overnight, and that took care of all our charging needs the whole trip. We did try other charging options as we were out and about, but that was to get an idea how the infrastructure works, not because we needed juice.
The big practical difference between refueling and recharging, of course, is the time. As I mentioned above, a 240V outlet takes overnight to recharge, which is clearly not workable when you want to go farther than 300 miles in a day. Even the supercharging stations take around an hour to recharge you, which obviously compares unfavorably to a five-minute stop at a gas station. Supposedly, Tesla chooses locations for supercharging stations such that there's something to do (restaurants, shopping) while you wait, but we haven't had much opportunity yet to test that out.
All in all, I think the Model 3 is too small for long family trips, especially with the amount of gear the three of us travel with. So for our purposes, we'll probably be in a gas-powered or hybrid SUV or crossover when we go farther than Portland or Vancouver. I might go farther than that on a solo photography trip; I usually drive (as opposed to flying) as far out as Kalispell or maybe Yellowstone. Assuming I ever have the spare vacation time to go on solo photography trips again.
Left out of the narrative: customer support that ranges from unresponsive to bad; terrible delivery-day experience; software UI designed poorly for while you're driving.
Tags:
