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5,000+ miles with Tesla

I got a Model Y, and having now driven over three thousand miles with it (in a very busy couple months), I'm ready to share a few thoughts

Wired:

  • Driving an EV is dreamy. It's silent. It just goes—instant torque. It's dramatically lower in guilt.
  • Wow the performance is incredible. 0 to 60 in 3.7 secs, upgradable to 3.2. Enough said. It's just so powerful-feeling. That makes more of a difference than I thought it would, coming from a car where that time was more like 8 seconds.
  • It's amazing how much can be improved—or made worse—via software.
  • It's amazing how much you can modify the car to suit your preferences through 3rd-party accessories and hacks.
  • The software is actually pretty great. Particularly the way navigation works.
  • For some reason I can't really put my finger on, driving fatigue is so much less with this car compared to anything I've driven before. I really wonder why. I suspect it's how quiet it is, actually.
  • I don't miss physical buttons as much as I thought I would. Is it ideal, especially considering the lack of competent voice command? No. But I'm surprised how little I care about this issue now that I'm used to it. I'd still love buttons, though. Even little hidden ones under the screen would be nice.

Tired:

  • The suspension is bad. And this is the improved version! This is where the car really falls short of feeling truly luxury. It's not a very smooth ride on sub-optimal road quality. This is understandable given the weight of the car and Tesla's desire to have this be performant in a track racing context, though I would have happily sacrificed some performance to get a smoother feel. And I still may: lots of people fit aftermarket parts to fix this.
  • The voice control is non-existent. It's really, really bad. Basically unusable. This is all the more painful in an era when Siri et al are actually getting good.
  • Integration with your regular tech, an easy thing with CarPlay, is very sparse. iPhones, for example, can't communicate via Bluetooth that a text is coming in a group message, so that's not context Tesla will read out to you when it reads an incoming message while you're driving. I really think this would be fixed if Tesla allowed companies to build their own apps and if Tesla exposed more of the car's smarts via an SDK.
  • Lots of stupid stuff built-in. It really makes you wonder what useful things were cut from the roadmap to make these.
  • Elon's entire personality and daily actions becoming seemingly something people think you endorse or approve of.

Wanted:

  • Driver attention monitoring
  • Tesla app store
  • Provide alternate route comparisons in live navigation ala Google and Apple Maps in CarPlay
  • Voice control, please
  • Ventilated seats (this is coming)
  • Mood lighting (this is coming)

This story's cover image comes from one of my favorite mockup stores, Mockup Directory

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Material Culture

5,000+ miles with Tesla

I got a Model Y, and having now driven over three thousand miles with it (in a very busy couple months), I'm ready to share a few thoughts

Wired:

  • Driving an EV is dreamy. It's silent. It just goes—instant torque. It's dramatically lower in guilt.
  • Wow the performance is incredible. 0 to 60 in 3.7 secs, upgradable to 3.2. Enough said. It's just so powerful-feeling. That makes more of a difference than I thought it would, coming from a car where that time was more like 8 seconds.
  • It's amazing how much can be improved—or made worse—via software.
  • It's amazing how much you can modify the car to suit your preferences through 3rd-party accessories and hacks.
  • The software is actually pretty great. Particularly the way navigation works.
  • For some reason I can't really put my finger on, driving fatigue is so much less with this car compared to anything I've driven before. I really wonder why. I suspect it's how quiet it is, actually.
  • I don't miss physical buttons as much as I thought I would. Is it ideal, especially considering the lack of competent voice command? No. But I'm surprised how little I care about this issue now that I'm used to it. I'd still love buttons, though. Even little hidden ones under the screen would be nice.

Tired:

  • The suspension is bad. And this is the improved version! This is where the car really falls short of feeling truly luxury. It's not a very smooth ride on sub-optimal road quality. This is understandable given the weight of the car and Tesla's desire to have this be performant in a track racing context, though I would have happily sacrificed some performance to get a smoother feel. And I still may: lots of people fit aftermarket parts to fix this.
  • The voice control is non-existent. It's really, really bad. Basically unusable. This is all the more painful in an era when Siri et al are actually getting good.
  • Integration with your regular tech, an easy thing with CarPlay, is very sparse. iPhones, for example, can't communicate via Bluetooth that a text is coming in a group message, so that's not context Tesla will read out to you when it reads an incoming message while you're driving. I really think this would be fixed if Tesla allowed companies to build their own apps and if Tesla exposed more of the car's smarts via an SDK.
  • Lots of stupid stuff built-in. It really makes you wonder what useful things were cut from the roadmap to make these.
  • Elon's entire personality and daily actions becoming seemingly something people think you endorse or approve of.

Wanted:

  • Driver attention monitoring
  • Tesla app store
  • Provide alternate route comparisons in live navigation ala Google and Apple Maps in CarPlay
  • Voice control, please
  • Ventilated seats (this is coming)
  • Mood lighting (this is coming)

This story's cover image comes from one of my favorite mockup stores, Mockup Directory

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