Simpler doesn't mean what Tesla thinks it means
Reflections on an informative test drive
Over the Christmas holidays we needed to rent a car from JFK to go see my parents in upstate NY. Hertz has Teslas at JFK now, so we rented a Model Y. We want to support rental car companies in making EV rentals more available, and we also thought it’d be a good real-world Tesla test to confirm or challenge our prior belief that we probably didn’t want a Tesla. We drove it about 300 miles over four days and charged it up at a Supercharger station near my parents’ house.
In brief, we confirmed our prior: we don’t want to buy a Tesla, despite its considerable advantages. Hopefully the below list of pros and cons can help others in the EV market. These are all about the car itself; I won’t touch the culture-war issue of what to think about Elon Musk or how your opinion of him should affect a buying decision.
Much to be fair about
I’ll put the pros first to be fair, and so you can see how much I care about the dealbreakers below. Here are some great things about the Model Y:
It is very fast and responsive to drive, like most electric cars. The handling feels solid and the throttle response is excellent.
The Model Y is super spacious, especially for a vehicle its size; the rear cargo area swallowed all our copious holiday luggage with room to spare and the legroom is great. And to my eye, it looks cool, even now that it’s become a cliche.
Supercharging works great. Tesla’s until-recently-proprietary connector really is nicer than a CCS connector and the plug-and-charge capability worked perfectly. The Supercharger network was reasonably convenient even in rural upstate NY and the car helpfully preconditioned the battery when we navigated to a charger.
Build quality seems perfectly OK, contrary to some bad reports. It doesn’t feel as luxe as other makes in the price range like Audi or Volvo, and road noise was louder than I expected, but it’s totally fine.
Cold weather performance was fine too, if a bit quirky. Range was only slightly less than nominal; the car did lose charge overnight when parked out in the cold, but only 1-2% per night. The flush mount door handles froze, but a little Googling quickly showed me how to work them loose, and the heat worked well. The quirkiest thing was that one of the rear doors refused to close fully for awhile because the door close action apparently requires the window to go down a bit and then up again, and the window motor had also frozen.
Speaking of those door handles, they were easier to get used to than I feared and felt “real” from the outside despite being flush mount. The indoor buttons in place of mechanical door handles were more worrisome long term— it’s hard to trust that the software won’t fail and trap you inside— but fine to use short term.
OK, those last two aren’t so great overall now that I reread them, and indeed they make a good segue to the dealbreakers: they are examples of “clever” minimalism making things less usable and less safe, which is the fatal Tesla design disease.
Trying too hard to do less
With apologies to the Haggadah: why is this car different from all other cars?
In all other cars, the windshield wipers are controlled from the stalk to the right of the steering wheel. In a Tesla, that stalk is the gearshift, and manual wiper control requires navigating a touchscreen menu. This is supposedly because the auto-sensing wiper system will Do The Right Thing by default, but in our experience, it did not do so, especially in “wintry mix” driving conditions. So I had to hunt for the tiny wiper icon at the BOTTOM of the touchscreen aka the MOST DANGEROUS PLACE to look because it’s the furthest away from where you should be looking when driving.
In all other cars, there is a speedometer right in front of the steering wheel. In a Tesla, you again have to glance rightward at the touchscreen. At least it’s the top left corner this time, but still.
In all other cars, the buttons on the steering wheel are for common actions like setting the cruise control and changing the radio volume, and are clearly labelled as such. In a Tesla, there are two unlabelled scrollwheel thingies which… do something? I am sure I could have found this out with some Googling, but why should I, a clueless newbie rental car driver, have to do that when literally no other rental car ever has made me do that?
In all other cars, the navigation system lets you hook up your phone to use Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, which behaves the same as the phone maps app you know and love, only on the car touchscreen. In a Tesla, you can’t do this. You have to use their proprietary nav system, which I am sure was way ahead of the game when it first came out before Android Auto or Apple CarPlay even existed. But it is now seriously inferior, both substantively (it recommended worse routes to us) and interface-ally (it was not nearly as good as Android at explaining clearly in advance what you should soon do next, which is a core function of a nav system for people who don’t know the area where they are driving).
There’s more quirks, but those should illustrate the point. My wife put it well when she said: “Tesla does not know the difference between UI and UX”. They have clearly put tremendous design effort into consolidating all control actions into the absolute minimum number of control surfaces possible, and making those surfaces look slick and minimalist. This sounds cool but is in fact much worse than HAVING SOME DAMN BUTTONS AND SWITCHES AND GAUGES IN THE SAME PLACE EVERYONE ELSE PUTS THEM SO DRIVERS CAN REACH FOR THEM USING MUSCLE MEMORY.
Sorry about the all-caps, but nothing else will adequately convey how annoying I found this overthought stupidity. If it weren’t a potential safety issue, or if it didn’t demand so many separate little workarounds, it might be worth it for the “good bones” of the car, especially its space efficiency and range efficiency. But as is, I just can’t see owning one until they fix the UX, and I suspect they won’t fix it because they are too full of themselves design-philosophically to realize when they’ve gone wrong. Which… I did say I wasn’t going to talk about Elon Musk, so I’ll stop there.