Tesla Model Y: My 6 months impressions
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1) Updates are very frequent. The recent 360 modelling is quite good.
2) The experience of purchasing and after-sales service is very good. Although the delivery check is very careless but they offer free service all the time.
3) Battery life and charging are great, whether at home or on the road. The app preheating and the comfort of opening the rear cover are nice. Sentry mode is also good.
4) Autopilot works well on roads with decent visibility. However, it's very unsafe in some areas like snowy and foggy, and I've identified a pattern. I think Tesla should refuse to engage it in those situations.
5) The alert sounds are disastrous. Every alert is popping and clicking. This is due to a lack of envelope fade-in or fade-out during startup and shutdown. This is something that any sound engineer should understand in college Audio 101 course. Even a $1 plastic toy wouldn't have this issue. This can be fixed by firmware I think but this is a very amateur mistake.
It's not perfect, but at this price range it's hard to find a better alternative.
1) Clicking and popping of alerts and navigation speech (sounds should just overlap, i.e. like a sample based synthesizer)
2) Ensure proper ducking of music from this 'alert channel', music will now double duck when alerts are played in quick succession
3) Mix bluetooth audio (i.e. iPhone notifications) as an additional channel, right now these sounds are silently lost, unless you manually switch to Bluetooth playback. Very confusing.
Oh, and add a subtle alert sound for upcoming traffic camera's ;)
In the end it's a quite simple audio tree with a few parameters, that could be implemented with some very straightforward C++ code.
But I have no idea what the media layer looks like, I can imagine there are a few quite smart optimizations to make for example all the streaming cameras work quickly (e.g. virtual mirrors). So perhaps it's a bit less trivial than I think.
Kia offers the EV6 which is arguably a better vehicle according to most industry experts (also starts 2k $ cheaper).
That said, it is a great car.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...
The EV6 looks horrible and "dumpy" from the rear compared to any Tesla
EV6 is slower than the Model Y.
EV6 has only 490L of storage vs. the Model Y's 854L. https://www.whichcar.com.au/reviews/comparisons/2022-tesla-m...
But the point is whether there is a comparable or even better product than the Model Y in that price range, not whether it is better in every single field.
It has overall better scores from owners than Model Y.
E.g. Edmunds has a 4.3 rating for the EV6 users review and a 3.8 for the 2023 Model Y.
Thanks for pointing this out.
did you enable "Joe mode"? That should tone down the sounds by quite a bit...
I think it's more "performance" oriented than comfort
> Does it rattle and creak when you go over bumps?
I can feel all the subtle feedback, and the modern filter filters it better. But I didn’t feel like the car was going to fall apart.
> Does it hold its speed indefinitely at 100mph like an ICE car?
Why not?
>> Does it hold its speed indefinitely at 100mph like an ICE car? > Why not?
Does it? My ICE car is probably going to get replaced, and on the occasion that I'm driving through Germany, I'm doing 100+mph on the autobahns, and I can't recall seeing many EVs keeping pace with me. I wondered whether electric motors have some sort of limiter to preserve battery life or something.
If you want to drive really far, really fast, then EVs are not for you. At 100+ mph you're stopping to recharge at least every 1.5-2 hours.
But the Mercedes was more comfortable during a drive. The range was worst than the Tesla. I'll probably going to update my card in a few years once other brands have cars with better ranges.
In fact one of Jeremy Clarkson's (Top Gear, BBC era) running jokes was to ask MB's voice control to do things for him and it never, ever got it right (subject to editing of course). It's still true today.
The #1 thing you should be doing in a car is looking at the road. Yet the MB computer and screen demand your attention. And mine doesn't have a touch screen so you're forced to use their controls.
In a Mercedes there's at least 3 ways of controlling the central screen, a big dial in centre console, a touch pad in the centre console, and a touch-joystick on the steering wheel.
If you're using your phone to navigate and switch to the car radio (there's a physical button for that) or something native to the car, to go back you have to then press the home button (physical), fiddle with the dial or joystick and go 'up' to select Apple Car Play, then spin the wheel or fiddle with the touch pad to re-select the app or display layout, and you absolutely have to look at the screen whilst doing it to get back to Waze or Google Maps.
Going from MB 'native' back to 'Your Music App' on your phone is even worse.
It's a complete UI disaster. My wife's Ford is half the price, and twice as good as far as the computer and UI are concerned.
Frankly I'm astonished that there aren't more car accidents now by people being distracted by their in-car computers and complete lack of good old fashioned manual push-buttons on the dashboard.
Many of the brands have cars with comparable range when it's honestly measured.
DOJ threatened Tesla because of how badly they were over-estimating which is why their website has finally been updated:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/5/24026367/tesla-lowers-rang...
Although the suspension is indeed very stiff, the Ioniq 5 is so smooth in comparison.
At the same price point the difference in range isn't nearly as large as once assumed.
Range is one of the most important factors on the other hand, I agree. There are now competitors on that front such as Lucid Air.
No, you could use a home for that. Unless you live in your car you shouldn't have the ability to play movies in a vehicle.
And coming from a Toyota Avensis, the suspension in the Y is way way better.
There's several camps around tech in cars: those that just want a 1950's style simple cars and then there's those that love the integrated/connected systems and people in between that just want a latch for the glove box.
But surely no one wants a car that's as unreliable/flaky as modern apps and operating systems (I mean in general not just a model Y or a Tesla)?
As a software developer if I see bugs and errors in the ancillary systems, I'm going to start worrying about the break management system.
That said, Teslas come with keycards designed to slot into a wallet, there's no smartphone requirement at all. It's actually less smartphone dependent than other car manufacturers, who lean on Carplay/Android Auto for rich features.
That’s news to me. When did you last see an advert for Tesla (paid for by Tesla) on TV, movies, print media or a website?
The most reasonable default view is that they're not doing this.
E.g.: I drive an Opel Corsa-e, and I usually have cruise control at around 100 km/h in the winter, 110km/h in the summer, and I stop every 150-200km to charge up to ~90%. I fully expect a Tesla to be faster, but I'm curious by how much.
I don't bother slowing down, I drive as fast as I can get away with (and safety). Except once I wanted to one-shot a long distance and put the car on autopilot behind big trucks. This way my range about doubled. In fact it's often better for range to follow the fastest biggest car, than to drive slower but with no one in front of you. Think "150kmh behind a pickup truck gives more range than 110kmh pushing air alone".
It usually charges from 5~20% to 40~70%. If you're optimizing to minimize total charge time, you should aim to charge from 10% to 60%.
With "quickest arrival" setting, ABRP does 4 stops with a total charging time of 1h25min (and 8h29 driving). The stops are 28, 18, 18 and 22 minutes respectively.
You can do it with 3 stops, and perhaps even in 2 stops during the summer and limiting speed, but then you spend more total time charging.
I like the 20 minute stops every ~2 hours. We travel with kids so the bio-break and leg stretching is appreciated. We leave in the wee morning hours so we arrive at the destination in the afternoon and avoid some of the traffic.
You can of course also empty the battery from 93% to 8% (drove that yesterday) after 212 km when driving at max speed of 188 km/h (3C avg. temp)
You know what's better? Simply projecting your phone to the car screens, able to choose your own navi software.
Yes, everything is in the tablet, but it's super-responsive (even on the Atom CPUs from pre-2021 models), essential buttons are well placed, and the car does a good job of adjusting AC (air temp/flow/outlets) and lights automatically. Once you get to know the car, it really does a good job of staying out of your way most of the time.
Compared to my father's ID.4 or my mother's Peugeot e-208, Tesla's software already had a 10y advantage in 2019, and it still has at least that much after 5y. Their car is laggy, menus are too deep to navigate during drive, lots of useless options placed alongside common ones.
I do agree with jnsaff2 that I probably wouldn't like the Highland refresh with no stalks and no USS, I also feel these two things were better kept as they were.
That said, I kinda think that I would hate the new design that has done away with the stalks.
Is this badly worded, or is he saying electricity is 8x more expensive than gas?
I would much prefer "electricity cost 1/8 the price" or "gas was 8x more expensive".
From subtext I read into the article that they might have another car that uses gas so that might explain "gas cost are 7/8x less."
As gas and electricity costs are very location dependent for me it doesn't matter much what exactly his meaning is.
Well that swiftly killed any whimsies I had about getting one.
Really odd decision; hard to imagine it saves more than cents off the build cost.
For me by far the best development in cars in past few decades, technology as it is just consistently helps with informational overload for the driver, works 100% in all possible conditions.
This is not exclusively a Tesla problem so. As long as the speed limit is only displayed, I am fine with it. What I am not ok with, is the car enforcing it.
Edit: If Tesla isn't reading signs, well, that's a problem. Either because map data is outdated, or because speed limits are variable like on German highways (as in one minute no speed limit, 120 kmh the next, reduced to 80 10 mintes later only to be unrestricted 5 hours later again).
Either way so, it still is the drivers responsibility to drive the car in a safe and legal manner.
It's one of those things that the entire industry seems to have solved 10-15 years ago that Tesla just can't get right. That and automatic or even functioning windscreen wipers.
I'm sure because it makes mistakes only sign detection software would make. It doesn't know speed limits end at an intersection and makes this mistake all the time. Also sometimes it detects max 10 ton as max 10kmph. I don't think it's real time because it doesn't detect road works speed limits reliably. (But I think there was an update recently saying it's real time now, so maybe it changed)
Whereas my Ioniq 5 in Korea has perfect knowledge of the speed limits, all speed camera locations, all exceptions, etc, and presents it in the windshield under the wheels of the car in front of me. Night and day.
In general Tesla relies too much on AI and not enough on boring factual/external data sources/information.
Every time I'm behind a bus in my Tesla, it reads the sign on the bus, displays it on the scren as the current limit, and sometimes (arbitrarily it seems) if I have autopilot on it reduces the maximum allowed speed to 40.
I can't speak for the logic run elsewhere, but AU Teslas for sure use it.
(Not sure about major road repair but that is understandable.)
Yes, but that's by selection:
If you believe that an information display directly in front of the driver is vital (and I do believe that), then you're not in the market for a Tesla model 3, or the new Volvo EX30. If you chose one of these cars, then you most likely don't believe that.
That said, I agree with you from a pure marketing perspective. The idea that you need the heads-up display is a recurring one. In online forums new owners are often looking for solutions, only to come back after a couple of weeks to say that they didn't feel the need anymore. It would be interesting to know how many people just write it off without even trying it out.
My anecdotal experience: My parents went from a Volvo XC60 to a Tesla Model Y. Both were a little skeptical about the lack of heads-up display. They stopped looking for aftermarket solutions after a week.