For the past 3 weeks I’ve been driving a Tesla Model Y with full self driving (FSD) enabled. It’s a employer-leased car that’s being passed around our division with the intent of letting us get insight about human-machine interfaces and autonomous driving functionality. It’s was my first time driving an electric vehicle, so I wanted to sketch down a few thoughts on the experience.

Yes, it’s a Tesla

Let’s just get this out of the way up front. Unfortunately, Tesla == Elon Musk. This reason by itself is enough to ensure that I will not purchase a Tesla of my own. But as other electric cars get successful in the market, I could be open to the idea. So anyway, other thoughts…

1. Electrification / Charging

The biggest change in driving an electric vehicle is that it needs recharged. A gas station stop isn’t going to help you here. If I were to buy an EV of my own I would get an electrician to put an appropriate plug in my garage, but for 3 weeks I just had to make do.

Charging gets rated, somewhat confusingly, in “miles per hour” (now there’s a unit that’s not used any other way with regard to autos!) - that is, the number of miles of range added per hour of charging. Just plugged into a standard 110-volt wall plug at my home, the car charges at about 4 miles per hour, which ain’t much. By getting a different adapter and plugging it into a 110-volt plug on a 20-amp circuit with a NEMA 5-20 outlet, I could get up to 6 mph, which, when left overnight, feels like you’re sort of getting somewhere. My employer has subsidized EV chargers at work which charge at 20 mph. I also discovered a city parking ramp downtown that has free 20 mph chargers as long as you pay the 75 cents/hour to park. (I was downtown quite a bit for orchestra performances this past month!)

I did try a Tesla supercharger once - there’s only one in all of Cedar Rapids - and it’s ridiculously fast charging by comparison - probably 600-800 mph charging. You pay for the convenience. If I had my own EV I’d charge it at home and occasionally at work and it would work out just fine. I’d have to think about the feasibility of longer road trips, especially in the Midwest where superchargers are fewer and further between.

2. Range

This is the Model Y Long Range version. For local driving with regular charging, it urges you to only charge the battery to 80% to increase your battery’s lifetime. An 80% charge equates to about 225 miles of estimated range. In practice, at least in the winter here in Iowa, the range ends up being somewhat less because you’re using that precious battery power to run the heater to keep your tootsies warm. I found myself charging a couple times per week just to keep the charge level up where I wasn’t nervous.

3. Automations and Self-Driving

The sensor set in the Tesla is pretty impressive. The main display shows you the current situation as the car’s sensors perceive it, including nearby cars, pedestrians, curbs, traffic signals, street markings, etc. It uses all that info in real time to make decisions about driving you around, including lane changes, when to stop, when to run a yellow light, and right turning on red. On the whole I was pretty happy with full self driving. There was a software upgrade about halfway through my 3 weeks and FSD 13 seemed like a significant improvement over FSD 12.

FSD itself feels pretty amazing. You put your destination into the nav system, it charts the course, and then you pull the lever down to engage FSD, and off it goes. If you stop paying attention to the road, it’ll beep at you and eventually turn off FSD to force you to actively drive. If you want to disengage FSD, you just grab the wheel and start driving. Otherwise, you sit back, keep an eye on the road, and let the car do its thing. For highway and interstate driving this felt like it’d be a very desirable tool. For city driving, I felt like I spent as much or more mental energy monitoring to make sure FSD did the right thing as I would have done just manually driving.

The one thing I would love to have on a regular basis is the self-parking function. Drive slowly through a parking lot and the sensor system will identify open parking spots. Tap one, bring the car to a stop, and hit the Park button and the car will back itself into the parking spot. It’ll also do parallel parking, which came in handy yesterday. I’m a proficient parallel parker, but I’d still take advantage of that automation any time I could.

4. Its actual usefulness as a vehicle

My first thought when driving the car is that it seemed heavy. I looked it up, and turns out I was correct. The Tesla Model Y Long Range weighs about 4300 lbs, which is a full 1000 lbs heavier than my usual 2015 Toyota RAV4, and even a little bit heavier than the family 2008 Toyota Sienna minivan. For all its weight, though, those electric motors provide very nice acceleration when you put your foot down. (If I start thinking about the amount of momentum in the car then I can get a little nervous… but I digress.) The interior is comfortable enough - heated seats both front and back, a decent-sized rear trunk and a front storage “frunk” that is big enough for a couple bags of groceries.

5. Random other thoughts:

  • It seems fairly quiet when you’re inside it driving. (I imagine I’ll be surprised by how loud my RAV4 engine is tomorrow when I start driving it again.)
  • It doesn’t like snow and ice. The silly door handles get frozen up too easily and the door also needs to slightly lower the window to get the door open. Too many surfaces to freeze up if you’re trying to open it without warming it up first.
  • The automated windshield wiper sensor is terrible. Decided it needed to turn on yesterday in bright sunshine and made me jump right out of my skin. Other times when it was lightly raining it wouldn’t turn on and I needed to trigger it manually.
  • Having an app to get the car to pre-heat is pretty awesome.
  • Having an app to let my phone serve as a digital key rather than requiring that I carry a stupid key fob is also pretty awesome.

Conclusions

Driving the Tesla for 3 weeks convinced me that I would be happy with an EV as my daily driver for commuting, around-town errands, and day trips. I think I’d still like the gas-powered option for longer road trips, though. The Tesla FSD automations are impressive. Mostly now I think I’m hoping that my RAV4 holds out until I can buy a Rivian R3.