We bought a Tesla Model Y a little less than one year ago. Since then, we’ve been driving the sh*t out of it. In its short life, the Y has already visited 16 states. I know adult humans who aren’t nearly as well traveled.
Life with the Y has been good. It has exceeded my expectations. Mindy is not as enthralled.
The Y and Mindy have had a complicated and often tense relationship. Mindy HATES pumping gas, so that’s good. However, she also hates FSD, Tesla’s autonomous driving software. I use FSD whenever I can*. Mindy likes to be in control and does not trust the car, so FSD drives often result in a stream of expletives and threats to dissolve or marriage. More on FSD in a moment.
*One of the main reasons I bought the car was to keep track of Tesla’s FSD efforts. It’s the most important part of the company and since I own a lot of Tesla shares, I wanted to pay close attention to autonomous efforts.
The Good
Road tripping is unexpectedly good in the Tesla. You tell the car the destination and it tells you where to stop. At highway speeds, you need to stop about every 200 miles to charge. This is more frequent than you’d stop in a gas burner, but it also makes road trips more relaxing. So I just do my potty duties while the the car is getting a charge. If you plan well, it doesn’t take much longer to travel in a Tesla. And some of the Tesla chargers are at interesting spots that I wouldn’t haves stopped at otherwise:
Other notes on road-tripping:
- Some of the hotels we stayed at had free charging. When we knew the hotel had this, we’d pull in on fumes (minimal electrons?) and wake up to a full charge.
- We have a mobile charger, so at Airbnbs, we just plug the car into a random outlet. This also works in some hotel parking lots.
The Tesla is quiet. My previous daily driver was a 2010 Mazda 5. It was a great car; 200,000 miles with minimal issues. But it was loud. Our 2003 Honda Element is way louder. The Tesla is really quiet. It’s nice to have a conversation at highway speeds without shouting.
No gas stations! Going to gas stations sucks. The fumes. The people trying to sell you car care products. The waiting (hello Costco!). Yech!
Tesla Superchargers: This is another reason I bought a Tesla instead of a different EV. There are Superchargers everywhere. All you do it pull up and plug it in. No screwing around with an app or credit card. You literally just plug the thing in.
Great build quality: It’s no secret that some Teslas have poor quality. Inconsistent body gaps and rattles are common, especially in models built early in their cycle. However, mine has been perfect No issues, shakes, rattles, or anything to complain about.
FSD: Elon Musk has bet the company on FSD. He realized that Tesla can’t compete with Chinese OEMs for the cheaper segment, so Tesla has abandoned cheaper cars. Using FSD used to be an experience for only the brave. When I first bought the car, it pulled all kinds of shenanigans including darting towards pedestrians, going the wrong way down one-way streets, and pulling out in front of quickly approaching vehicles. FSD still has a LOOOOONG way to go before it will be ready for autonomous operation, but it’s progress in the year I’ve had my car has been surprising. I rarely have to intervene now.
Thoughtful Design:
- The Tesla App is great. We also have a Chevy Bolt and the app for that is awful and unusable.
- You walk up the car, it unlocks. You walk away, it locks. No silly keys to lose.
- There is no Power button. You sit down, put it in Drive and take off. I love the minimalism. (All input is error!)
- I’ve never been a “I need to warm my car up in winter” type of person. This behavior in fellow humans drives me nuts: You can’t sit in a cold car for 5 minutes? With an EV, battery performance suffers in the cold. However, with a Tesla, it doesn’t have to. You can use the app to tell the car what time you’re leaving. Then the car warms the batteries up ahead of time. It also warms the cabin. So now in an indirect way, I am now one of the “I need to warm my car up in winter” type of people. The great thing is that you can do this in your garage without gassing yourself or your family.
- When it’s cold, the HVAC system doesn’t blast you with cold air. Instead, it waits until the air is warm before turning on the fan.
The iPhone changed consumer devices forever with its smart and intuitive design. The Tesla matches the design elegance of the iPhone.
The Bad
The glass roof is cool, but not in the summer. If you don’t find a parknig spot in the shade, it will allow copious amounts of sun inside of the car, turning it into an oven. I solved this with an aftermarket sunshade.
Broken windshields: I think I just have bad luck here, but I have broken the windshield three times in the first 10 months. I was able to repair the first two, but the third spread before I was able to fix it. Pro-tip for any motorist: Carry this in your car and repair damage from rock strike immediately.
Flat tires: Between 2010 and 2024, I experienced one flat tire. I hit road debris with our Mazda 5 and one of the tires blew up. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve had three flats with the Tesla! All of them came from nails.
AWD is overrated: Most don’t understand that AWD doesn’t really do much to help in winter driving. It does nothing to increase traction; only helping you get started from a stop. It doesn’t help you maintain grip when turning or help you stop any faster. For this you need snow tires. My AWD Y likes to slide around a bit in the snow. This season, I’m putting on winter tires.
The Misinformed
Electric vehicles are polarizing. And I’m not talking about the batteries. If you listen to the “news,” you’ll hear all sorts of silly crap. I don’t pay attention but unfortunately I have friends and family who do. Even more unfortunate, they believe all of the nonsense they hear including EV misinformation. They then relay all of it to me. Here are some of my greatest hits:
Your EV won’t work in the cold. You may get stranded and freeze to death.
It will catch fire and you’ll burn to death.
EVs are a Chinese conspiracy.
They’re worse for the environment!
I once had a high-school kid accost me at Sam’s Club. He was nice at first, but then let me know that he wrote a research paper and came to the determination that ‘EVs are bad.’ Thanks for that kid. I hoper upi received an F. He should have read this.
The Best Car Is…
I love my Y. If something happened to it, I’d replace it with another Y. However, car ownership sucks:
- Cars aren’t cheap to buy.
- Cars aren’t cheap to insure.
- I devote valuable garage space to cars.
- The Y is a big, expensive thing that sits around most of the time.
- Meh.
In my ideal life, I’d live in a place with a great public transportation system and bicycle friendly roads. If I had to get in a car, it would be a robotaxi. This pretty picture isn’t as far off as it seems. In Phoenix, I witnessed driverless Waymos everywhere. I’d bet that by the end of the decade, robotaxis will be available to most who live in places where it doesn’t snow. It will be much cheaper to rely on them for transportation than owning a car.
The best car is no car.
But if you must own one, a Tesla isn’t a bad way to go. Save $1,000 on a new Tesla with my referral code.
One More Thought
I couldn’t end this post without discussing FSD just a little bit more. I think about FSD daily because Musk has bet the company on it. He even stated that if you don’t believe Tesla will solve FSD, you should sell the stock. Because I got very lucky and bought Tesla shares in 2012, a supersized part of my portfolio is made up of Tesla:
So the big question is this:
Will Tesla solve FSD?
I have no clue.
As I mentioned earlier in the post, FSD is much, much, better than it was 11 months ago. I can often go multiple days of driving without having to intervene. However, 1 intervention in 200 miles isn’t nearly good enough. An intervention should be a rare event. Let’s get to one intervention every 10,000 miles and then we can start talking about a robotaxi.
Sometimes the car does amazing things. Just yesterday on a drive in Boulder, the car came to stop in the middle of a residential street for no reason. Or so I thought. I went to hit the accelerator pedal when I noticed a human darting across the road. The car saw the wayward human before I did. But then the car makes mistakes a 16 year-old driver on their 3rd drive wouldn’t make. The car:
- ignores No Right Turn On Red signs.
- comes to a stop in merge lanes. Very dangerous!
- has no clue how to handle complex situations like road detours. It has tried to go down closed roads.
- stops for traffic lights that aren’t operating.
Musk usually gets it done, but not on time. How late will he be this time?
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I love my Tesla Model Y…but, same here with the FSD… my husband LOVES it…and keeps experimenting with it. So our drives are NOT anywhere near as fun as they could be. We know when we go to the park, the FSD does not handle the exit well. But EACH TIME, even if there has been no update in between time, my husband TRIES to let FSD make the exit. AARRGGHH !!!
I like FSD….but I like just easily turning it off when I know it doesn’t handle something well…
Haha, the struggle is real! Hopefully one day Tesla figures it out. I’m growing more jaded though.
Hey, more from the the traffic engineer on AVs. I’m glad your Tesla is working out for you. I think you are still a little optimistic on robotaxis. Waymo is awesome, but has monitoring, maintenance, limited use areas, and LIDAR, which is a game changer, plus cost more than hiring a driver would. I would say one intervention every 10,000 miles still isn’t good enough. That is one crash or high risk near-crash per year. It would be unlikely a Tesla would make it to 100,000 miles. And given the chaotic nature of these crashes, we likely aren’t talking about the most-common rear-end crashes that maximize the use of both car’s crumple zones, but more likely hitting people outside of cars, head ons, running signs/signals, running into obstacles, etc. I know Autopilot isn’t the same thing as FSD, but it has a very hard time with vehicles making avoidance maneuvers in front of them for debris and lane closures. A case could be made that safe autonomous driving in congested high-speed conditions (where forward visibility is limited) would require widespread connected vehicle technology too. Then there is the regulatory, insurance, liability, sensor calibration, etc that each state has to sort out on its own, plus more mapping and road maintenance demands. I do a lot of safety work and know the bar to be better than human drivers for attention and reaction isn’t all that high, but humans are pretty great compared to computers at anticipating and deciphering unusual conditions, at least within our human limits. Tesla may get there or get close enough the crash cost would be a tolerable improvement from today (are people going to be okay with being injured by a computer with programmed ethics??), but the smart money is that it will take longer for wide adoption by passing all of these technical, fleet, and regulatory barriers than Elon and fanboys will tell you (as has been proven time and time again). Think a decade plus.
Waymo: Yeah, those cars most cost well over $100,000 to build. I’ll bet they come down in price though as Waymo reached economies of scale. I just saw this today: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-talks-with-hyundai-motor-produce-self-driving-taxis-media-report-says-2024-09-19/
And yeah, their solution is fragile (dependent on high-definition maps), but I’ll bet they find ways to automate their processes including mapping. I have heard that at some point, the cars will be remapping their environments constantly.
I see that Waymo is expanding into Atlanta and Austin next year. I’m curious to see how many cities they’re in by end of decade.
“but humans are pretty great compared to computers at anticipating and deciphering unusual conditions, at least within our human limits…”
Yep. I have no clue how this is solved without AGI. A backup human in a data center isn’t going to be able to react fast enough to some issues.
Tesla: I wonder if there is some kind of happy middle place for FSD? My car drives most of the time now and I rarely intervene. Last night, I took a round-trip to Denver and the car did everything except park. It’s a pleasant experience. So, I would pay for this technology (I’m currently on a subscription), but it isn’t worth $8,000 to me, especially since it stays with the car. If FSD was tied to the driver instead of the car, I’d consider it.
In any case, all of this is fun to watch.
That is just the thing…there is no happy middle ground. Either the person drives and the car has a few fail safe backups (SAE Level 1) or the car drives itself always or in clearly defined situations (SAE Level 4 and 5). The middle ground in between is the danger zone where both car and driver are at their worst. The car has to identify situations it needs help and the human has to be vigilant while doing nothing. Throw in lack of training, driver overconfidence in the system due to names like Autopilot, and no regulation and you have a recipe for repeated disasters. How many trips after rarely intervening do you start paying a little less attention, when the risk of a certain moment’s inattention can mean death without exaggerating? Jason Torchinsky of the Autopian has written about this a lot: https://www.theautopian.com/level-3-autonomy-is-confusing-garbage/.
Tesla has done a great thing with pushing the EV market forward and may solve autonomous driving, which would probably be a good thing (see treatment of pedestrians, driving miles increasing, empty cars driving around, etc). However, their marketing, overpromises, and approach to their public beta test has been reckless.
I do want to second your desire for an ICE and personal car free world. The path to better cities is all about walkable land use, bikeable streets, and great transit (EV and autonomous or otherwise). We are getting by as a family of 5 with just a 2007 Odyssey with 206,000 miles.
At least now, the car is ultra-vigilant at all times. If I even look at the screen to change the music for 2 seconds, it gets angry. So, I’m actually much more attentive with FSD.
I do agree that if this monitoring were to go away, people would be very stupid and get in trouble. Like the videos you used to see of people supposedly asleep while FSD drove.
I am a little more optimistic on the state of autonomy than you though, although not necessarily with Tesla’s approach. I hope that it doesn’t take another decade.
I just want to disagree briefly on the desirability of a car free world. I personally enjoy car free spaces; however, they are a real challenge for disabled people.
I have a disabled spouse and parent. My spouse is an ambulatory wheelchair user. My parent does not use a wheelchair; however, due to arthritic feet and knee and hip replacements, she cannot traverse distances greater than about 4 blocks without rest unless she’s willing to trade significant pain. Car free cities are really difficult for them both. My husband can be okay in a car free city so long as it has curb cutouts, he brings his wheelchair, and we plan to walk most places versus taking public transit; however, my mom really struggles if I cannot drop her off near a restaurant or store. Prior to getting his wheelchair, my husband used a rollator walker, and he was in so much pain when walking around Florence and Rome last year that we decided that the wheelchair was necessary for travel. Car free utopias are a real challenge for disabled people.
In our experience, public transit in many car free cities leave a lot to be desired for disabled people with elevators frequently out of service or non-existent, buses not having sufficient room for wheelchairs when you board, and buses not pulling close enough to the curb to allow wheelchair users to board. For example, Paris is a real challenge for most wheelchair users. Washington DC should be great, but half the elevators are broken in the Metro. Being able to drive our own car is just so much easier.
Yes, this is an underappreciated perspective and I believe you that old cities, suburbia, and well, America is hard to get around with limited mobility. Car-free doesn’t have to mean vehicle-free. Better transit can include better stations and wider range of services. Car-free areas can be “unauthorized car free” with deliveries and disabled people getting access. Probably the best solution I have seen is The Netherlands use of electric mini-cars for those that need them that can drive them on bike paths and park on the sidewalk. The issue with cars is when millions of people expect to be able to use them to go door to door through cities at high speed without delay all at the same time.
I remember you and MMM getting Tesla’s around the same time. The blog responses when you both were debating getting them were overwhelmingly in favor of the purchase. To my eyes it was a lot of “you deserve” “you should” “you owe it to yourself” “YOLO” responses. Seemed like marketing speak directed to these people was redirected at you.
Glad you like the car and use it, but wouldn’t it have been easier, less expensive, take up less room, etc… to have just rented one for the road trips? Depreciation on a new car with 20K miles has got to be steep.
I’ve been car free for a decade, and agree with your best car idea. There are buses, planes, shuttles, cabs, ride share, rentals, bicycles, and your own two feet. Overall, really convenient and way less stressful. Money savings are definitely secondary.
Unfortunately, our daily lives involve a lot of driving. Like I mentioned in the post, I’d prefer to live in such a way that I have 1 or 0 cars. With kids and their school/activities, we can’t do it.
I understand the depreciation, but I don’t care much either as we tend to keep our cars forever.
**Looking at you 2003 Honda Element in the driveway with 206,000 miles.**
Post-kids, I’d love to live in such a way that I often go a week without getting into a car. Or if I do, it’s a robotaxi.