I give up.
Wife has a Tesla and there is certainly an inverted Bell curve on feature. Some features are exceptional like the acceleration, no oil or fluid changes, etc. The bad features are horrible. Looking for cars when changing lanes is so unintuitive. The cruise control has tried to kill me and sped up to 70 in a 35 mph zone.
I’m sort of with you on everything except this. Lane assist is great! Who hasn’t, in a moment of distraction, started to drift slightly over the lane line? I thought I’d hate this feature in my new Toyota, but I find I really like having it, whether or not I need it.
It’s optional in the Leaf. Press a button, and it beeps every time you go over the line, or the car in the next lane moves a little too close. But you can turn it off.
One thing you can’t turn off it getting kicked sideways if you actually drift toward another car, or one drifts toward you. That’s a little scary the first couple times it happens, but I’ve been sideswiped three times, and that is a LOT worse.
Yeah. I’d never been in one before last Friday. I’ve had a Leaf since Aug 2023, and test drove a few other electric cars before I bought the Leaf, but not a Tesla.
Thankfully, in my car it’s just the slightest, gentle nudge on the steering wheel.
Teslas do that as well. It was quite a surprise the first time.
My beef about that feature is I signal for lane changes only if there are nearby cars in the lane I’m joining. Otherwise I simply move over.
The car fighting to prevent my deliberate lane change unless I ask first for permission with the turn signal pisses me right off. You felt my deliberate steering input; now obey my will!
It wouldn’t fight a deliberate lane change. It can tell the difference between being intentional and drifting over.
Sorry to be unclear. I’m talking about my non-Tesla.
Maybe Teslas are smarter; I have no knowledge on that point.
From what I understand, and what I’ve heard, Electric cars of any kind are really not very good during the winter months, especially in New England and other places where the winters can be awfully cold–and intense.
We have thousands of posts on the topic of cold weather & EVs.
It’s a factor; it’s not a showstopper. ICE cars get shit mileage in blizzard conditions too.
Ignoring the other fifty-one posts, I’ll just say that my wife and sister-in-law were given a Tesla rental for a trip a year or so ago and both came away somewhere between “Eh” and “Bleah” after a week. She was initially sort of excited because “Ooh, Tesla” but I guess that wore off fairly fast and the rest of the week was taken up between charging concerns and just annoyances about the vehicle design. I wasn’t there so I won’t debate it by proxy but you’re not alone in your lack of post-Tesla enthusiasm.
This was before MAGA Musk and well before Nazi Musk so I don’t think that played into it. She likely thought Musk was sort of a twit but, as I said, was actually excited to be told they’d have the Tesla for a week.
This.
I have buttons & knobs in my car; I can change almost everything w/o ever needing to take my eyes off the road because I can feel where I am. Her car has a screen; not only do I need to change to the appropriate screen but then I need to look down again to do make sure I’m lined up for whatever change I want. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve glanced down & lined up my finger to only then hit a bump or pothole which moves my finger just enough that I press the wrong part of the screen. (I can’t control the poor quality of the roads)
Interior lighting destroys night vision; you have a choice of having an oversized ipad making it hard to see the deer on the side of the road or dimming it so much you can’t see the screen easily.
Teslas are horrid from a UI design standpoint.
One of my biggest gripes with my Tesla Model 3 is that it doesn’t integrate with Apple CarPlay. I can’t ask the Tesla to play a song because I use Apple Music, not whatever music service the Tesla has. And the Tesla navigation is poor compared to Waze, so I’m always running two navs: one on the car screen and one on my phone.
My other big gripe is that the cruise control doesn’t actually hold speed. It will unexpectedly change the speed that is set, and also sometimes ignore the speed that is set.
But the Tesla is a good car. Tastes vary, and it might not be the car for any particular person, but millions of people enjoy driving them. It’s silly to suggest they’re not good cars.
As for music it has YouTube Music, Amazon, Spotify, TuneIn as well as Apple Music. Just not car play
Man, I hate talking to my car. Maybe it’s because my current car is really stupid. I trained it to recognize my voice and stuff but it doesn’t work worth shit. This is just for GPS, but I’ve all but given up using it.
If you type in a preset, it might work.
It works ok for say ‘Call Jane’. It gets all the contact info out of my phone.
Sounds like the perfect solution to careful and attentive driving! All you need is a third distraction, like fumbling with a paper map as well! 
My solution in my ancient car, if I don’t know where I’m going? A cheap $50 GPS that I picked out of a discount barrel twenty years ago, stuck to my windshield with a suction cup, that features a navigation map and a Speaking Lady that tells me exactly where to make my turns.
Your second paragraph appears to be a direct contradiction of your first paragraph. A car with a cruise control that’s so “smart” that it doesn’t do what it’s told is a safety hazard, plain and simple.
I see this point has already been made, but I have a friend whose apartment complex just put in a lot of EV charging. I understand that charging is unreasonable for many who live in apartments, but i see at least a little process being made, and i expect that tend to continue.
I recently rented an EV through Avis. I had a lot of EV-related annoyances (things that wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been my car, but that weren’t great on a rental) but needing to return it charged wasn’t one of them. They did not require this.
(At least, they never told me it was a requirement. I actually did charge it, because that happened to be convenient, and it was a huge pita that it was nearly empty when i picked it up, and i decided not to do that to the next driver.)
I despise it on my traditional ICE car. I’m on a totally empty road and I’m overtaking a bicyclist. The damn thing beeps at me when i cross the line to give the bicyclist some room. I’m merging onto the interstate, and the lines are drawn such that i cross one as i do it. I’m driving straight, 100% of cars in my lane are doing exactly the same thing. But my car complains. I finally turned off the feature. My sister’s car is worse, with active lane assist. Whenever she’s in the right lane and a new turn-off lane forms, the car tries to steer her off the road and into the turn-off lane.
I have a lot of friends with Teslas, and they are all over the board as to how they like it. A close college friend is a massive Tesla fanboy, and is constantly telling me how great his car is. (Mostly, he likes the self-driving features.) Another friend bought one when it was the easiest way to get an electric car with good range. It was an upgrade from an EV that was literally a custom-made thing she’s been able to buy. I asked her how she liked it. She said, “well, it’s like driving your PC…” She finds it annoying in many ways. She also had a lot of specific complaints about its GPS being unreliable, etc.
The user interface clearly isn’t for everyone.
Well, one of my dad’s favorite sayings was, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” This discussion is an example of that. The Tesla is a great car if you really like what it is and what it does, and it is an overpriced oddity if you don’t.