Be one of the cool kids. Buy into FOMO.
Consumer Reports reported some unexpectedly high–and variable–braking distances in the Model 3.
Unclear what the problem is at this point, and Musk acknowledged the potential issue:
Hopefully it is just a firmware tweak; the variability suggests that this might be the case. If not, perhaps there is a bad batch of brake pads in the mix. I have a hard time believing it’s something more fundamental, but I guess we’ll see.
Even the worst distances don’t seem to really reach unsafe levels (dry asphalt isn’t really where you’re worried about braking distances), but obviously this needs to be fixed unless it really was a fluke of some kind.
For the record, my brakes seem fine, but I’ve never come close to testing the limits (and don’t really plan on finding out the limit). From 20+ years of driving ABS-enabled cars, I’ve only ever had it kick in twice.
Ahh, missed this tweet:
Pretty neat. I wonder if it’s something they knew about and had planned on fixing, or if they quickly got a data log from the CR car to determine the issue, or something else.
I’ll keep you guys posted if I get an OTA update in the next week…
maybe I’m just old but that iPad like control system seems way too much work compared to knobs and buttons
Sounds more like brake pad glazing to me.
It’s going to be $5-600 to fix the leak, which isn’t enough to justify throwing the car away. I guess I’m going to keep waiting. (It’s a plastic cover on the engine and the attached hose to the heater, or something like that.)
No Tesla for me this week.
In other news, the Denver Tesla show room at Cherry Creek finally got a Model 3 this month. We’ll do a family outing to go down and check it out sometime next week. Maybe we’ll hate it, and then I’ll start a thread about what’s the best sports sedan (are those even still a thing?) to buy off lease, with some warranty left.
That seems pretty likely. More specifically, it sounds like their ABS tuning algorithm didn’t account for a sudden change in the amount of glazing. It should be able to lock the brakes either way, but if it was assuming non-glazed brakes when they were glazed, it may have put less pressure than necessary (or perhaps too-low a duty cycle for the ABS pulse). It does sound like the first stop in everyone’s testing was the best. I’ll bet they’d have repeatable results if they did a reasonable amount of normal driving in between panic stop tests.
It’s really not. Within 5 minutes of driving the car, I was at a “ok, I can get used to this” point with regards to the touchscreen. Now, several weeks in, I’m at “this is a genuinely superior system and I wouldn’t want to go back”.
Let’s be clear–95% of the controls that you need are already physical and at hand on the wheel. Drive selector, turn signal, lights, windshield washer, volume, track selection, cruise control, and following distance are all on the wheel and easy to use. Volume in particular is a big improvement over my previous car–the steering wheel control is a wheel instead of buttons, so it’s easy to crank the volume on a track I like (I know Tesla isn’t the only one to do this, but my BMW just had buttons).
Much of the rest is handled easily by voice command. Choosing stations (either FM radio or the various streaming options) works great, as does the voice navigation (which uses Google Maps as its engine).
Windows have controls on the door.
So really, I almost never use the touchscreen. I’ll glance over at the map if I don’t know an area, and the display is so big and responsive that it’s very pleasant to use. Of course, the speed and range are displayed there as well. The speed is in a large font and far easier to see than the usual instrument cluster. My eyes take noticeably less time to focus on them than on the relatively tiny numbers on a normal dashboard. The range gauge is an easy-to-see phone-like meter.
The only buried options are ones that you really don’t need on the road, like for mirror adjustments and various options like auto-brights.
The climate control seems fine, though to be honest I never touch it–the auto mode works far better than any other car I’ve been in, so I set it to 70 and leave it there. But I live in California so the mild weather may be biasing my opinion here.
All in all, I hope more carmakers move in this direction. It’s obvious to me now that huge swaths of physical buttons in most cars are utterly unnecessary, and are themselves a distraction. But then, I’m a fan of minimalism in general and dislike visual clutter. I find it very refreshing for my forward view to have almost nothing in the way.
I love it. If any other manufacturer had explained away a poor review by saying “Oh yeah, the cars we were selling to customers at the beginning of the year had all sorts of problems, but we’ve fixed them in current production, mostly!”, they’d be raked over the coals and probably hit by a class-action lawsuit. But not Tesla (yet!)
“Don’t buy the first model year of a new car” has been a thing since basically forever.
Most of the issues have been fixed with software or (free) hardware changes. Not saying that Tesla doesn’t have stuff to fix, but this idea that early-production weaknesses are somehow a Tesla exclusive is ridiculous.
For the record, I haven’t experienced any of the problems that CR reported. Once, the display didn’t come on when I opened the door–closing the door and reopening it fixed it. Only saw it that one time. The nav system on my BMW was less reliable, usually rebooting a few times per month.
Discovered a relatively minor (and not Tesla exclusive) design issue today.
When I first got the car, I was surprised to see the latches for the folding rear seats on the inside of the car. My BMW had them inside the trunk, so even if you got into the car you couldn’t get to the trunk. Made keeping items in the trunk just a tad safer feeling.
Well, my coworker with a Model 3 had her car broken into yesterday. They broke the rear quarter glass to get in. And indeed they folded down the rear seats to get into the trunk (nothing there, so at least that’s something).
I asked some friends if in-car latches were common and they said it was normal (some image searches also confirm this), so maybe it’s BMW that’s unusual. It seems like the better design to me. Of course, this is only something that is an issue on a sedan; hatches and SUVs have free access to cargo by design.
I guess I’ll be using the frunk if I need to leave my laptop or something in the car. I don’t believe it’s possible to unlock it unless the car is in an unlocked state (except via the phone app).
On the upside, apparently Tesla service considers a broken window to be an immediate safety issue and said she could take it into a service center immediately for replacement. The cost was $190, which doesn’t sound too bad to me. Sucks to happen on a brand-new car, but at least the damage wasn’t too bad.
I have to say that Musk’s (and Tesla’s) fast and constructive response to the CR criticism about the brakes was impressive!
My only comment is about this:
Really, Elon, you could have chosen your words better! 
Yeah, I’m glad to see Elon not railing against CR the way he has other journalists. CR is a reputable organization that found a real issue and Elon took them seriously.
Obviously it would have been better not to hit this in the first place, but other manufacturers have at times had similar recall-level events with their ABS firmware. Tesla isn’t unique in this regard. They are unique in that they can push out a fix to everyone in a matter of days, and not have weeks/months/years of buggy software in the field.
And yes, proof again that Musk could stand to choose his words a bit better :).
That’s because many people think Musk walks on water. He’s basically Steve Jobs version 2 in the eyes of a lot of his fans.
Hopefully he won’t go as far as Jobs thinking he does not need a Dr. when he has a cancer. That idea did not work out well for Jobs.
Musk is clever enough to deliberately make that joke, even (if taken literally) it sounds bad. He knows better, after all, and that’s what matters. And the issue is fixable with a OTA firmware patch, so I bet that as far as he’s concerned it’s already solved.
Seems like a big heap of assumptions piled up in that one sentence.
Certainly. It’s a rather large extrapolation based on every “visionary leader” I’ve been privileged to work with.
Whoa – Edmunds just trashed the Model 3’s reliability, while also saying they still like the car.
The touchscreen issues were a definite problem with some of the early ones. I’ve never observed any phantom touching and haven’t heard any recent reports of problems.
Complaining about the door handles is super-weird, to be honest. I’ve had lots of people in my car, from millennials to 85+ year old great-grandmas, and none have had any serious issues with the handles. The only person to have even a minor issue (a Tesla owner, ironically) used the emergency handle instead of the button to get out from the front passenger seat (the car doesn’t like it if you use the handle and warns you).
It does feel like an extra step the first few times you use the handle (press to extend handle then pull), but like everything else, it feels completely natural in a short time, and easy to use with either hand or when carrying a bag of groceries. Even if it did take longer, I still would prefer the flush handles so as to maintain the clean lines and aerodynamics. Normal handles look kinda gross to me now.
But why those handles? The X and the S both have non protruding handles that don’t require two motions. The handles seem like a solution in search of a problem.
The auto-extending handles on the S were finicky, and had lots of issues early on. They were also an expense that they didn’t want to pay for on the 3. The “handles” on the X are just buttons, and depend on the auto-present function (i.e., motorized opening)–also expensive. The handles on the 3 are almost completely passive, with the only electromechanical bit being a lockout until the window cracks open (since it’s a frameless window). The lockout itself is probably semi-passive, with some kind of mechanical interlock that doesn’t allow it to open if the window is all the way up.
In short, they’re cheaper and more reliable than on the S and X. It’s really the latter two that seem like a solution in search of a problem. The value of the flush handles in general is clear–they’re worth a percent or two of aero drag. A low-complexity mechanical system seems like the right choice for this price point.