If you're a computer nerd, buy the Tesla model 3

The new blue Tesla Model 3 on delivery

As I posted earlier I purchased a Tesla Model 3, the mid-range version with one motor and autopilot.

There are many reviews of this car out there, so I will go quickly over the common issues to get to areas I can give a special perspective on.

The Tesla (all of them) is unlike other cars. It's a car designed by silicon valley computer nerds, to some extent for silicon valley computer nerds. Since that's me, it was an obvious car choice for me. If that's you, I suspect this is the obvious choice for you as well. But it's also good for many other people.

As many have said, this car is half computer and half car, and in the 3 weeks I've owned it there have already been two software updates, and many more are to come. This was another key factor in buying it -- if the car is doing something wrong, the odds are excellent that it will get fixed later if it can be fixed in software. As such I am more forgiving of some of the issues I will outline here.

The driving, acceleration and handling are delicious. The low center of gravity and the powerful electric motor provide a driving experience unmatched in this cost range. This and other advantages of electric cars are quite large, and why they will take over from ICE cars fairly quickly

  • The lack of smells, oils and drips. The only fluid you can add is wiper fluid. (BTW, mine came empty, the only problem as delivered.)
  • The low cost of energy -- about 4 cents/mile with 13 cent/kwh electricity.
  • The lack of pollution (my power company at home uses exclusively wind and solar for generation.)
  • That amazing handling and acceleration. (And I got the mid-range model. The higher end models have even more power.)
  • Regenerative braking which vastly lowers the energy cost of going over hills.
  • The amazing performance driving up the hill; you never feel the motor "working," it just goes.
  • The "do what I am thinking" that comes from having good power even at highway speed. You see a space you want to be ahead, and you enter it.
  • The extra storage up front (though not very large in the Model 3, and you're cheated because even if you don't buy the front motor, it does not give you extra frunk space.)
  • You're not sending any money to oil companies or OPEC countries.

Then there are the Tesla touches

  • The mobile app, and even fancier apps using its API, which give you a great deal of external control on the car, from controlling charging, monitoring, unlocking and locking things and warming or cooling the car. (You can't see out the cameras, that would be nice.)
  • The automatic locks which mean you don't even have a key. Your phone is the key -- though this is not perfect (see below.)
  • The personalization of seat, wheel and mirror positions, including "easy entry" position for getting in and out.
  • The fancy climate controls (touchscreen)
  • The other central touchscreen features, such as (sucky) web browser, energy monitoring, driving environment, decent quality Nav (but still not as good as Waze) and more.
  • The fairly nice audio system, with streaming and podcasts
  • Supercharging network. You get 1000 miles free if you use my referral code when you buy one.
  • The non-dealer buying system, including delivery right to my driveway. (A guy drove it from the factory and caught a Lyft back. He could have been a bit better at showing me the car, though.)
  • Autopilot, which we'll talk about in detail, but also the other ADAS like adaptive cruise control which is very nice.
  • AI wipers which come on automatically when there is rain.
  • Smart headlights which also come on automatically, including auto high-beam which is still not perfect unfortunately.
  • The 3 Teslas have the highest safety ratings of any cars ever sold. The model 3 is the safest production car ever made.

All these things are fantastic, and explain why Tesla owners love their cars, and even put up with an above average amount of problems that have been present as production on this car ramped up. It's clear that this is not a car with the reliability of the Mazda/Honda/Acura cars I have previously owned. I have yet to get a significant mechanical problem, but friends have. I have had problems I expect to be fixed in software.

Break-in (UPDATE)

As an update to display a negative and something Tesla is doing very wrong, I sadly had a thief break the small window on the right side, in order to get an arm in and pull down the rear seat to scope out the trunk. Didn't steal anything, but here's where Tesla has screwed up -- there are no replacement windows to be had. So many break-ins that they told me it will be over a month to get one. That's not acceptable.

What they should do is quickly design some sort of plexi replacement, and fit them in (doesn't matter if they damage the frame to do this, does it?) for now. At their expense, frankly. Plus work to speed up production at whoever makes this window for them.

I eventually found one, but it's clear that Tesla is immature here, and their supply chain on parts is flawed.

Should you get one?

Probably. You can check if any of the problems that I or others list are deal-breakers. Here in California there are a lot of benefits which make the cost of the vehicle much more competitive. You can really compare a $50,000 Tesla with a $35,000 gasoline car, and I think it does very well in that case.

  • There was a $7,500 tax credit. Now it's $3,750 but they cut $2,000 from the price of the cars Jan 1 to make up for that.
  • In some states, like California, there is a $2,500 credit if your income is under $150K.
  • With high California gas prices, if you drive the average amount, you'll save around $700 per year in gasoline over a typical car. Less over a Prius.
  • You will have costs to install charging. Can be as low as free, or a lot more if you have to re-do your house panel. There are ways around that for most, like switching to a gas dryer.
  • You get to go solo in the carpool lanes and pay less on bridges. (If you cross the bridge regularly you save $3 per trip, a huge win if you commute.)
  • Maintenance should be much lower. You will never need to smog it. Repairs are an unknown.
  • Insurance on the Model 3 is lower than other cars in spite of the cost.

If your math works out, and you enjoy a fun car with massive acceleration, it's hard to say no to this car. At 260 miles and above, range anxiety is pretty minimal, thanks to the supercharger network. (Once you start paying for the supercharger you are not saving as much on energy, though.) It doesn't go away entirely, and this is not the best car for a "wander the wilderness" road trip. (You can take great road trips in the Tesla, but it is a constrained subset of what you could do in a gasoline car.) While you do get 4WD in the higher end versions, if you truly need an SUV's high ride, cargo space and off-road ability, you might want to go for that -- or rent one of those when you need it. If you have more than 2 kids, this may not be your family car, certainly not if you think you need a minivan.

While my readers have probably turned it off, go to Google location history and quickly skip through the months or days of your recent life. You will see all your driving. How many days did you drive more than 200 miles? In my 25 years in California, my personal car has never left the state except for the tiny bit of Nevada at Lake Tahoe. My long road trips have been in rental cars.

You may also care about pollution, global warming, and the likes of the oil companies and OPEC governments. You may find value in not contributing to these.

You will enjoy the responsiveness and handling of this car. If that matters to you, along with all these other factors, and there are no deal-breakers below, get it using my code for free supercharging.

What about the next one?

The main reason I can see not to get one is that they are improving much faster than gasoline cars. So there will be a sweeter one in a couple of years, probably a lot sweeter. In spite of this, Teslas seem to have held their value, while cars like the Leaf have not. Be ready for that -- or lease if you like that sort of thing.

Battery life has turned out to be much better than expected with older technology, which is good news. Batteries will get cheaper, though.

There does not seem to be a car to compete with the Model 3 in 2019. The cheaper Bolt is a good choice if you need to cut the budget a bit. The Model S will face competition from some cars in 2019 and 2020, with offerings from Audi and Jaguar.

The offerings in the next couple of years will include some high-end vehicles from startups, and some vehicles from regular car companies. The car companies will have more experience at doing cars in general, but less than Tesla on electric issues. They will probably include regular dashboards.

Issues

I will now describe a number of issues, but I want readers to keep these in the context of the huge positives listed above. In many cases, what I write below is about how they could design things better, sometimes on features not even found in other cars.

Visibility

My main problem with the car, which won't be easily fixed in software, is that the visibility is a great deal less than I am used to. So much so that I almost decided not to keep the car -- it's that bad. But I kept it. This consists of both a very restricted rear view -- you sometimes can't see a low-slung car that is right behind you or things to the left and right -- and quite small side-view mirrors. These mirrors are small to reduce drag. Outside the USA, vendors are now getting to use cameras for side-view mirrors to seriously reduce drag and get a better view at the same time. Larger retrofit mirrors are something I would readily purchase. (Sadly camera retrofit seems unlikely because you need to have the screens as well.)

This is compounded by the "feature" of auto-dimming on the side mirrors. At night, when headlights are behind you, they darken. A lot. Way too much. I have been used to a rear-view mirror that darkens, but don't want the side mirrors to darken, because now at night I can barely see things that don't have headlights, such as pedestrians, cyclists and scooters on my right side. Even cars are harder to figure out, as you only see their headlights and not the context around them. Without that context you can't always figure out how far away they are. I am keenly hoping for a software update that will let me turn off or turn down this dimming. Otherwise I will have to go in and cut the wire. I no longer have the sense of the road I like to have and must do a lot more work changing lanes on city streets at night.

This could also be helped if the car had a feature I was very surprised to see missing, namely blind-spot warning. Yes, this car which is able to change lanes on its own in autopilot, lacks a very basic ADAS function found in so many other cars. You can look on the screen to see what it thinks is around you, but you don't want to have to look 5 places at once for a lane change -- rear-view, mirror, over shoulder, forward and screen is too much.

Another software fix would be to let me put up the rear-view camera on the screen in a small box. You can put it up now, but it fills the whole screen, which is not acceptable. A 360 view (some cars already have this) synthesized from the cameras would also be good.

I hope I'll get used to this, or that they make it better and offer replacement mirrors.

Ride and noise

Other reviews have noted that the suspension on this car is firm, and can't be changed. You will feel the road. Some like it, some don't. I would prefer it a bit less bumpy, or adjustable.

The motor is silent, but the tires and wind are not. And the interior is much noisier at speed than similarly priced luxury cars. Of course, in this car the money went into that big battery, and in the other cars it went into sound deadening materials. I think I would have liked the option of spending a bit more to get the silent ride of other $50K cars.

The minimalist all-touchscreen approach

Tesla made a very conscious decision to have a minimalist instrument panel. There is no instrument panel -- only the touchscreen. The only physical buttons are two scroll wheels on the steering wheel (default to audio and autopilot/ACC/speech command control,) the "transmission" stalk and the lights/wipers stalk, plus buttons for dome and hazard lights. That's really it. Everything else is on the screen, including a lot of your wiper control, all your climate control, all your audio and phone control.

It's a bit strange having to look right for your speedometer and everything else that used to be in front of you. On the other hand the wheel never blocks it. An analog speedometer would be nicer than the digital one, but I suspect that might come in future.

The use of touchscreen buttons for everything is problematic for at least two of them -- the defog controls. Sometimes you have to hit that while driving and it is not easy to hit a touchscreen button while driving, nor should you do so. A better choice would have been a small number of physical buttons at the edges of the screen with on-screen labels for what they do.

While the AI wipers and lights are nice, they are not perfect, and having to go into touchscreen for that is poor. The signals/lights/wiper stalk has a quick wipe button on the end, and it is too easy to hit it by accident when doing a turn signal. However, that button is the obvious answer to the wipers not being fast enough. The car should notice if I push the manual wipe button more than once, and take that as a hint to increase the speed, both at the time, and to a lesser degree in future. It could even set the exact speed from the interval between presses.

Another improvement would be to let the customer build a set of "favourite" buttons and have them be on screen all the time, or easily put on the screen with the press of some physical button. I could then pick the things I really do want to access while driving or otherwise access frequently and put those there.

Another issue is the lack of buttons to open the trunk, frunk, glove box(!) and charge port. This is all on the screen, though the trunk and charge port and charging cable have buttons on them. People often go to trunks with things in their hands, and it's nice to pre-open it. Going to a phone app is no option. Reaching into the car when you are outside is not an option either. Tesla offers a $150 key fob as an option. It should be a $10 key-fob.

I don't know if Tesla put a microphone outside. If they did, speech would be a good way to let people pop the trunk and frunk. Or gesture recognition on the cameras.

Many others don't like the minimalist approach, but put up with it to get the great car. Elon Musk says something I have often said in response -- that a self-driving car doesn't need a dashboard -- but of course this is not a self-driving car, nor will it be for some time, and I have to drive it today. Some people respond by mounting a cell phone on the dash and running Waze or other apps on it. One thing I always wished cars would do is put power jacks (or hidden inductive plates) up in the dash, because people are always putting stuff up there that needs power, from phones to dashcams to timelapse cams and many other things.

Interior

The interior is comfortable, minimalist and nice. But it's just nice. $12K of your money went into the battery, so this is not the interior of a $45K offering from a luxury car maker. I am fine with that, it has most of what I want.

Customization and keys

The keyless entry is very cool. It locks the car if you walk more than about 15 feet away. You can set it, as I have, to honk when it locks. But it's easy to miss if it doesn't lock, which it doesn't if you haven't closed one of the doors properly. Which, unfortunately, seems very easy to do -- they need more force than the average car needs. This should cause an alert if the car sees I have walked away with the door open. I should not look in my app and see the car is unlocked outside.

The car lets you set custom driver's seat positions for multiple people, which is good. What it doesn't do is figure out who is in the car (based on which phone or key unlocked it) and use that profile. If both phones arrive (which is common) it should either have a default (ie. the primary driver) or better still, figure out which phone went to the driver's side. (A voice command would also be a suitable solution.)

Charging

Charging is mostly straightforward. There are a few annoyances though:

  • You can't pull out the cable if the car is locked. So when you approach the car, before you disconnect the cable you must push in the door handle to get the car to auto-unlock. Not sure why that's needed if it sees your phone. It's willing to let you open the trunk with a button, why not the charging port?
  • A nice touch would be to notice that I have just parked at home and gotten out and to auto-open the charge port because I am almost always going to plug in. If I don't, just close it 4 minutes later.
  • The charge timing is far too simple. All you can do is tell it when to start charging each day. Around here, that's 11pm when power gets cheap. (7pm on weekends but Tesla does not understand the concept of the weekend.) You really want to also be able to tell it when to stop -- to only charge on manual command during the 2pm to 9pm weekday peak time when power costs 3.5x as much as it does at night. There are 3rd party apps to fix this, which is part of what's good about the Tesla.
  • I've had some bugs with the charge timing that have not resolved, where it stopped charging for no reason and gave no diagnostic.
  • Supercharging is nicely done, but because Tesla is giving most buyers free supercharging for 6 months, the superchargers around here are very frequently full with people trying to save money or no home charging. Here's a way to partly fix that. Tesla has stopped the free supercharging perk, so in time the crowds will thin.

The range estimate is off for people who do lots of highway driving. I find that consistently on highway trips of 90-100 miles it uses up 120 miles of "range." This is expected if you will drive 75mph on the highway, as most people do around here. Drag losses go up with the square of speed. But if you are deciding what size battery to get, keep that in mind. In fact, keep in mind that you usually only charge to about 85% of full, and should not go below 10% very often. So 260 miles of range means about 150-160 miles on the highway, which is no small difference. You can get the more full 210 miles of highway range if you truly need them, with some degradation of your battery. You would not want to do it every day.

Nav system and calendar

The nav system is better than found in most cars, but that still means it is not as good as Waze or Google Maps at traffic prediction. It would be nice if it instead just let me say, "have my phone do the nav but let me interface via the Tesla." Car companies, not even Tesla, don't seem to figure this out. Of course, the Tesla nav does have features Waze won't, like finding charging stations. Like Waze and GMaps, it lets me import my calendar so that it's easy to navigate to my next meeting if I put it in the calendar. But it's buggy, and doesn't understand that the "Location" box in many calendar entries includes things like place names and floor numbers that humans like. I wish there were an easier solution here.

BTW, the calendar import (which also is a bit buggy) would be a handy way for the charging system to learn things. By knowing how far I plan to drive tomorrow, it can adjust the charging strategy.

Again, I am whining about calendar integration when most cars don't have it at all.

Delivery

A few quibbles. There are two things you really should get told when you get the car, because they are different from other cars:

  1. To open the door, use the electronic button, not the mechanical lever like most cars. If you use the lever, you may hurt the rubber seal, it tells you.
  2. To close the frunk, it needs a fair bit of force and you are supposed to press with two hands on two specific spots or you might damage it. Important to know!

Autopilot

I decided to leave my review of Autopilot to a later post. In that time, Tesla came out with very bold predictions that Autopilot would become feature complete full self driving this year. That claim borders on nuts.

My review of Tesla Autopilot from a Robocar perspective

My short review is this: Autopilot is impressive, the best from any car company, but it is a shadow of a real robocar system. Tesla talks like full self driving is around the corner, they just need to improve Autopilot a little. It's not true. The reason people rave about Autopilot is they haven't seen or worked on a real robocar system.

Logging & Privacy

As a cloud connected car, there are a lot of matters of concern. Tesla knows everywhere you go. Tesla can dig in to what your car has been doing without your permission. Tesla can disable your car even though you paid for it. Somebody who breaks into Tesla's computer systems can do all these things, and also update your car's software to spy on you via the internal camera, or program the car to kill you.

These are serious things. I would like to see designs that can prevent this, and that's not easy. At the same time, it is easy to see the seduction of a car always talking to the cloud. Many of the useful features come from that.

With all this data, one thing I was surprised not to see was the ability for me to easily log my trips and classify them as business/personal/charity. You need to do this for tax reasons if you drive for other than personal use. I would like to be able to tag trips and destinations as business, and even be able to do a quick command on the touchscreen or voice interface to declare a business trip or personal one. Or put it in my calendar entry. You don't even get a trip log -- you need to subscribe to paid apps with monthly fees to get that.

For privacy though, it would be good if the log were stored in the car, not the cloud, and I could transfer it to my phone over Bluetooth.

Conclusion

For some people, this is the right car choice. In some ways there is just no comparison to other cars. But it's also far from perfect. The fact that it improves every month is a big deal, though. And that 3rd parties can do basic improvements is interesting too. I think if you buy it, you will be happy. But there will be something even better in 2 years. And 2 years after that, and so on until the robocars take over. The improvement won't be like the improvement in computers or phones, but it will be unlike traditional cars. And you still buy a new computer knowing this.

Comments

This YouTube video shows how to use a third-party app and the Shortcuts app to build a shortcut that you can use to open the trunk with Siri. It's not quite as good as if the car had a microphone, but you could use it pretty effectively from an Apple Watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZc8qMNiONo

One problem is that remote control of the Tesla from your phone usually requires some time -- even 20 seconds sometimes -- to get the Tesla to wake up to external control, which happens over the data network, not bluetooth. So it's not a practical way to open the trunk.

Yeah, what is up with that delay. Its the most frustrating aspect of the App. I want to be able to quickly turn on my climate control before I go out, but it takes longer to wake up then I'm willing to wait. It also seems to power up a lot more of the car than should be needed to check on things. Shouldn't power up until it needs to do something.

I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned your conundrum of different charging times based on day of the week. But you might be able to use Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) to manage your charging based on rules. It has a pretty nice plug and play component for Tesla. I suspect it could be used to create some sophisticated automation for charging.

I'm really liking Home Assistant (Hass.io on a raspberry pi) as the cornerstone of my home automation in general.

But I think the Tesla should have basic understanding of charging times beyond what it has. Also, some people even park (at vacation homes) in places without data!

Some have suggested Tesla get a database of the TOU schedules for different places, and just use GPS to offer you selection of one for a simple UI. That's a bit of work, but I don't think it would be too hard to add start and stop times, and weekday/weekend variants. Or just a stop time.

A fancy smart system would actually set the time based on how much charge is in the car, and how much you will need the next day. ie. if charging will take only 4 hours, possibly charge at less current (it's better for the battery.) Or if charging will take 12 hours but cheap power is only 8 hours, but my calendar says I have a long trip the next day, then use some mid-price power. Or consider charging to 95% instead of 85%. I actually quite like the idea of the calendar being the interface by which I tell it "I have a long trip tomorrow." It does not seem to sync the calendar all the time though, I am not sure why. Sometimes I have to turn on the app when I get to the car so it will have the calendar entry. (Probably faster to use "send to tesla" directly in the calendar then.)

It would be nice for it to just figure it out, though you do have to tell it what power plan and power company you have. Though here in California, if you have a Tesla, you really should be on the electric car plan.

With a fourteen-year-old diesel with almost 400,000 km coming up for inspection next summer, I have been seriously considering an electric car and specifically the Tesla Model 3, mainly because of supercharging. For a long time, the figure of $35,000 was quoted, about EUR 30,000. Sales tax and subsidies will more or less cancel, so I was hoping to spend about EUR 30,000 and get a Tesla.

But now it looks like that this price won't be available, at least not soon in Europe.

Many people would like to buy an electric car, but can't justify spending more than EUR 30,000 (for a diesel or gasoline car, I wouldn't go over 20,000), especially if I am paying for things I don't need, like more power, 4WD, etc. There are small electric cars (especially in Europe), but I need something for 4 or 5 people and luggage. There is probably a huge market for this; why is there no car to match?

It is also a bummer if there is only one motor but no extra luggage space as a result.

Is it also true with the Model 3 that they all have the same battery and if you buy more range it is just a software upgrade? For me, apart from the usual stuff like price of the car and price to travel a certain distance, it is not so much the range as the time needed to charge enough to go a certain distance. If I didn't pay for extra range but have the same battery as those who did, this is extra weight which is an additional bummer.

For a while, it looked like Tesla was poised to really make a difference. But it looks like that might not happen. Musk's vision was an important factor, but he seems to be losing it.

Well, the cost is coming down, it is driven by the battery and they keep working on getting it down. They claim the $35K Tesla will be out in 6 months, we'll see. The tax credits obviously still make a difference.

If "more power" is not something you care about, it may still not be for you. At least for now, electric cars will focus on where they really shine over gas cars which is the acceleration.

I believe with the model 3 all the ranges have a different amount of battery, but that the mid-range and long range use the same pack but with a different number of cells in it.

"My power company at home uses exclusively wind and solar for generation."

No, it doesn't. You can tell this, if your lights, and your charger, work anytime. That means your power company uses nuclear, coal, or natural gas.
That doesn't make the Model 3 less desirable AS A CAR. It just removes the virtue signaling reason for buying.

I source electricity from my rooftop, and from PG&E. PG&E buys from various generators. My lights and furnace run at night and when the wind in Montana is quiet.

I want a dual motor 3 .

I will be writing an article about this but I don't agree. Of course the electrons come from different plants. There are no solar electrons, no coal electrons, there are just electrons. However, the direction of my money only to the solar and wind suppliers creates financial incentives to increase the amount of solar and wind put on the grid, even though they operate only when weather permits. They offset the burning of fossil fuel when they provide power, and I paid for that.

Perversely, the solar panel on the roof does a worse job! If you have a solar roof, and you are grid tied (as you have to be, it is not at all green to be off-grid) then you face a paradox. Every mile you drive causes more dirty grid power to be generated. Every mile you don't drive causes less. This is true even if your panels are so large that you have a net surplus. Every mile I drive causes me to send more money to add wind/solar to the grid. You did a good job at adding solar to the grid when you put in your panels, but it has nothing to do with your car.

Anyway, as I said, this is complex.

The large majority of his power comes from nuclear or natural gas. PG&E just pays lots of money to producers in other states who have wind- or solar-power plants to subsidize their (nonprofitable, low-output when operating, and usually not even operating) businesses. This is called "offsets".

Actually, that's how it may have been in the past, but today the California mix contains large amounts of renewable and carbon neutral sources, with natural gas now down to 34% of California usage and 43% of California generation.

Today, there are non-subsidized new builds of solar farms going in at total costs per kwh of just over 2 cents in the USA, and 1.5 cents in sunny places like Arabia. That's cheaper than anything else. The power of course only comes in the day, but so does most power demand.

Drag losses go up with the square of speed.

No, drag increases as the cube of the speed.

-jcr

Yes, but drag losses, the energy lost per mile, goes up with the square of speed.

"An analog speedometer would be nicer than a digital one"
Ick! You've got to be kidding me. How 20th Century can you get!

I have been following the Model 3 changes very closely for almost a year now and I disagree with most of the opinions here. My M3 was built three weeks ago and I feel like you are misleading people. This article appears informative but is more biased and in some cases just wrong. Not worth the read.

I've owned a LR RWD for a few months now. Your review is spot on.

Is the M3 a perfect car? No. Is there a car at this price point today I would consider buying? Having gone all in on Ev's (M3, Bot and Leaf in our fleet), again, no.

My biggest disappointment is the with the side mirrors. The left mirror cannot be adjust far enough out. The right can. Put your head against the driver window and you should be able to adjust it to only see a sliver of the car. Same with the right when your head is over the center of the car. The Model S loaner I had for a day had the same flaw. I wound up putting a w/a mirror on the driver mirror.

AP with TACC is a gamer changer. The LR RWD M3 at 63 mph is as efficient as my Leaf around town going 25-35. Amazing.

Had the SR+ Tesla existed when we purchased the Bolt we'd probably have 2 Teslas now. But the Bolt has been a solid commuter car after 15k miles.

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