The only automation I want is that which I directly command on and then cancel with one button push. Simple cruise control, to be used on a clear highway - that’s all I want. I don’t want “active” or “smart” cruise control, I don’t need the car to drive itself, I don’t want lane assist. I want to drive the car. Me, the human driver, controlling the vehicle. (And I’m not including safety systems like anti-lock braking in this rant - I’m talking about direct human control of basic driving).
Having said that… what the f*%k was wrong with basic round instruments? I fail to see how a screen, placed in an offset position is an improvement. And this is before we get to the fact, IMO, that touch screens should not be a part of any moving vehicle.
Someone in another thread described the Tesla philosophy as, “Changing things that work fine for no reason.” That drives me crazy, whether it’s car design, airplane design, computers, phones… anything with a human interface. If it works, leave it alone. Or at least give me the option to leave it alone while others configure it the way they want.
I’m fully onboard with the idea of electric cars. I just hate the way Tesla is designing them, and more broadly I dislike a lot of modern car design.
However, I’m actually looking forward to full automation. Getting humans out of the driving business completely will doubtlessly improve safety, and then the matter of instruments in front or the center won’t matter. But until that happens, humans have to actually drive the car. I’m willing to do that - I wish the makers would allow me to do so without all the pointless “improvements”.
I agree with the overall thrust of your post. Lack of at-home charging is a showstopper for any individual in that condition.
Which was me until a couple years ago. When I moved to an apartment building with many Level II (hi output) chargers.
At least around here, substantially every recently constructed (last 10 years?) condo or apartment development has EV charging. Kinda like a swimming pool, it’s become one of the must-have features everywhere, even if only a small percentage of the buyers or tenants at any given property use it.
Admittedly, it’s not one charger per parking space. But so far what I do see where I live and the places I visit is that all chargers are very rarely occupied, even late at night.
So while I agree 100% that there is not any sort of government effort to force the pace of charger deployment to multi-family dwellings, the market is moving that way. Yes, there is some chicken and egg here. But the process is gaining momentum. Albeit more so in the EV-forward parts of the country and in the higher SESs first. Just like everything else in our capitalist world.
I agree with the OP, with the addition that Tesla are bad rental cars, unless you ready own one.
I rented a Tesla a year or so ago, and found it very frustrating for most of the reasons @RivkahChaya mentioned. There is a steep learning curve because, as Rivka says, so many of the ordinary functions are hidden somewhere in the screen’s menus. Owners have the time to figure out where everything is, but renters can’t rely on their experience of driving in ICE cars whose UI was essentially standardized across most manufacturers.
Another factor that makes any EV, not just Tesla, bad as a rental car is that, for now, charging just isn’t as quick and convenient as filling up with gas. And there’s the fact that the rental agency expects you to return it charged to 70 or 80%, or they’ll hit you with a $35 fee. These facts add downtime to your plans while traveling.
The problem is that the car makers have found that putting all controls on a touch screen instead of using the standard switches and physical controls greatly reduces their costs, so they’re doing that to ICE cars, too.
I just rented an ICE VW Jetta, and I never did find the menu setting for zeroing out the trip meter.
The NIMBYs around here have prevented new multi-unit housing in this town for two decades now. Incorporating it into new structures is fine and I’m glad to hear that is happening… but does nothing for the already built housing stock.
Be careful, Hertz might hit you with a “refill gas tank” fee.
ETA: no preview in Onebox
Despite paying for a no refill/recharge option, the customer was charged $277 to refill the gas tank in a Tesla.
When Lee made his reservation—the receipts for which were seen and confirmed by The Drive—he paid for the “Skip the Pump and Save Time” option, which allows customers to bring their rental cars back without refilling the gas tank. So even if he was driving a car that took gasoline, he shouldn’t have been charged an additional refueling fee. OK—mistakes happen, and perhaps the person working at the counter accidentally checked the wrong box. However, when Lee submitted a billing question, Hertz doubled down on the refuel charge, despite the Tesla Model 3 not having a fuel tank to refill, and Lee having already paid for the “Skip the Pump” option.
Like I’ve said before, it would actually be more convenient than ICE for rentals in which you’re only driving locally if the companies did not require you to bring them back full. In order to do that without a lot of manually moving cars around, they’d have to install chargers in all the parking spots and perhaps instead of fining you if you don’t charge it, make it a requirement that you plug it in when you arrive.
Even given this, I don’t see why their requirements were so onerous, as expensive as not bringing back an ICE vehicle full, since it’s less expensive to recharge them. Plus, they can’t count on customers returning their vehicles full for the turnaround time, since some of them won’t, so if they’re counting on them being full for the next customer, they’ll have to wait sometimes anyway if a lot of people eat the fine.
Maybe if you want to gamify things you could charge people like a buck or two representing the actual electricity cost to charge to full, that way people would have a tiny incentive to charge it, but $35 is ridiculous for paying for electricity.
But that’s just for generic electric vis a vis charging. The UI of Teslas is a whole nother ball of wax.
What I see around here is that there is continuous turnover of renters, even in older housing stock. As more and more fresh renters bring their existing EVs into the rental market for existing housing they will build demand. It will be a very slow process. To the degree old is correlated with cheap, those complexes are the last ones who’ll see any demand by EV-owning newbies.
Those parts of the country which are simply stagnant economically won’t see change for 40-50 years. Not only in EV support, but in any thing else good about the future.
Assuming there is anything good about the USA’s future. Which is an increasingly tenuous assumption.
I think that we can all agree that the Hertz thing was one of the biggest fuckups in history but the result would have been the same if they chose Bolts. We should also all agree that for the majority of use cases, one would need home charging for any EV to be practical and that we aren’t even close to having that infrastructure in a significant part of the US primarily in apartment complexes.
As for Teslas versus other EVs, a third the cost is ridiculous hyperbole unless you are comparing a Bolt to a Cybertruck or something. For an apples to apples comparison, Teslas are very affordable relative to other EVs in the same class.
Everything on the screen? No. Here is a list of things that aren’t on the screen (well both on the screen and not on the screen):
-Windshield wiper controls on the turn signal stalk like every other car
-Volume control, skip song/station and everything else to do with audio except choosing the station which is the same as any car.
-Bluetooth to your phone stuff like making a call and having it read a text.
-Pretty much every function using audio commands like “turn on a/c”, “turn off seat heater”, “play Lady Gaga”, “directions to CVS”, “defrost”, etc
-the two buttons with push, left, right and scroll can be easily programmed to do whatever you want. Obviously most people aren’t going to want to bother with this for a three day loaner but it’s there.
Is there a function that you need that I haven’t covered?
You don’t like the ride? Fair enough. That’s subjective. I came from a long line of Honda econoboxes and I found the Tesla to have a very quick learning curve and I love the way it drives. To be fair I have never tried a different EV nor have I ever driven a super nice ICE so maybe it’s my lack of experience.
I live in an apartment complex. I rent a free-standing garage that has a regular 120 plug. I plug into it and slow-charge every night. I pay $70/month to rent the garage, but I don’t pay for the electricity I use. About once a week, I need a little extra-- usually on Thursday-- and I plug into a station with DC fast-charge, spending about $8.
So, my fuel costs every month are $102, or thereabouts. That’s about 1/3 of what I was paying for my last ICE car, and it was a Chevy Spark.
It’s a perfectly fair consideration. Californians have the right to request a charger be installed in the complex on their dime, but not all states have such laws. This is just a matter of time, though.
I should note that most people don’t need a full powered L2 charger. Even a standard outlet is often enough, since it will add 40-50 miles overnight, and most people don’t drive that much.
Yes, like horses. They aren’t going away completely, but they’ll continue to be a niche for basically forever.
The National Radio Quiet Zone has a fleet of ancient diesel trucks that they maintain. They have no electronics of any kind, even spark plugs, so they have zero radio emissions to interfere with radio astronomy.
I’ve never driven a Tesla, so I can’t say whether they are good cars or not, but the timing of this rant is awfully suspicious in light of Musk’s heel turn from tech genius to chief assistant nazi. I would ask the OP to really honest with themself in considering whether their political feeling have affected their assessment of Tesla cars.
Even so, there are limitations. I’m in CA and my condo complex did install chargers. In a common area. Twenty of them. For 310 units. With a looming 2035 mandate (we’ll see how that plays out). Why? No (essentially - just a few near the elevators) outlets in the garage parking spaces - it would have been cost prohibitive for the HOA to run new lines and install 310 chargers (or so they thought at the time, they were installed before the mandate was announced). Right now they are just inconveniently placed, but underutilized. In ten years though? It might be a real issue.
Given the expected logistics problem AND the CA mandate I’m trying to thread the needle of buying a non-plug-in hybrid before they stop manufacturing/selling them in the US, but as close to the mandate limit of 2035 as I can. With a little luck that may carry me to my senile non-driving days. I’d like to buy an EV, but it will probably never happen.
People have been starting threads about initially disliking Teslas for a long time; in fact a link was posted only 3 above yours. It’s kind of a dick move to accuse the OP of political motives. Not to mention she’s very experienced in vehicles, and I don’t recall ever seeing a political post by her (unless in the Israeli/Gaza threads, which I’ve stayed out of).
that wasn’t my intention and I apologize if it came across as that. I was more thinking that it was possible the OP’s opinion of Musk may have subconsciously affected their opinion of Teslas. I was just wondering if the OP had considered that as a possibility. It is sometimes surprisingly hard to discern when feelings about one thing (or person) can affect feelings about something else.
I wasn’t accusing them. I was asking if they had considered whether their feelings on Teslas were or were not affected by their feelings for Trump. It was a question.
I was going to quote and respond to parts of this excellent post selectively, but dammit, I agree 100% with every word. Well said, and thank you. It’s exactly how I feel.
There’s already too much variation in the basic design of information display in cars and in the design of crucial functional controls. Tesla takes this departure from conventional norms to an extreme with gee-whiz tech that’s nothing more than the childlike fantasies of a madman who keeps promising to single-handedly start a colony on Mars.
In my view, there’s nothing more asinine than having every single information display in a car and virtually all of its control functions concentrated in an oversized center-mounted touchscreen. It’s downright dangerous and shouldn’t even be legal to make a production car without proper instrumentation in front of the driver. Where I live, the laws against distracted driving are so strict that you can be charged for even holding a smartphone in your hand. Tesla’s design philosophy is to make the entire car one giant oversized iPhone.
The central problem with Teslas is that the designs stem from a self-perceived genius who thinks he’s brought us “The Future, today”. But, just like Full Self Driving or colonies on Mars, he hasn’t, and his concept of “the future” has already killed people.
