domhnall

My yeti and Octavia were both light years ahead of the tesla on all these automation things. Cruise control is just danegerous on the tesla.

the free ones, the expensive ones aren't allowed to operate in the UK anyway so , meh

tesla make clear that the cruise and autopilot are only to be used on motorway or dual carriageway so no way it should be in use on the roads Bjorn video shows :-) Mine did it again on the M6 last week, I was driving in lane 2 at 70mph and then bam, I was at 40 mph and a Mercedes Sprinter van had to swerve to avoid me. He was obviously a Tesla fan though as he was waving in a very excited manner as he went past me.

it's easily the most powerful and efficient EV on the market, but the rest of the tech is way behind most other cars. The cruise apparently doesn't use radar like every other car, instead it uses cameras and the camera tries to interpret what it is seeing - it's just not as good yet

So an update on the Tesla Model 3 Standard Range plus experience. Several software updates later they have fixed some niggles, broken a few things along the way and then fixed the things they broke. The fix they applied was (among lots of minor things) to finally make spotify sort music in alphabetical order so you can find it and they added playlist functionality, standard stuff on your phone but not in a Tesla until now. Unfortunately the update also disabled all audio output, radio, USB music, streaming you name it none of them worked. That lasted a week until they rushed out another patch. This is the joy of over the air updates. The other thing to report is my first proper long distance trip, Edinburgh to Northampton and back, around 700 miles. And this was easily done. The car is very efficient, much more so than my Nissan Leaf ever was. I set off around 3pm, stopped 2 hours later for some food at Tebay. The car was around 35% charged when I arrived. I plugged in and headed in to the services for food and by the time I had garbbed a delicious lasagna the car was back to 80% and I headed off. By the time I got to Birmingham I was desperate for the loo so again I stopped at a service area with a tesla charger and while I emptied my tank the car refilled itself. I spent 10 minutes watching some netflix wjile it finished and then headed to Northampton. There was a charger at my hotel in Northampton so I refuelled back to around 70% before hitting the sack. The next day there was a charger at our Northampton office so the car refuelled to 90% while I was at work. That afternoon I headed North again. After a couple of hours I had to stop for the loo at Charnock Richard so I put some juice into the car while I was at the loo and picking up a coffee. Then it was back to Tebay, this time for steak pie and chips while the car refuelled just enough to get me back home. So refuelling wise and range wise it was dead easy. In both directions the driver had to stop before the car had to. Bladder range / fatigue range is shorter (in my case at least) than this shortest range tesla. But what about the famed Tesla auto pilot? It has been very erratic in use, I've had quite a few cases where it tries to auto steer "for safety" and veer into the outside lane so for thsi trip I ojnly used adaptive cruise. Tesla owners often report a phenomenon known as phantom braking, typically this is described as the car hesitating as it overtakes trucks, or gets spoked by bridge shadows. I experienced nothing worse than a gentle slowing down as I passed trucks, easily overriden by pressing the accelarator. Bu then it got dark. Once night fell the car freaked out for no obvious reason - on 6 separate occasions it jammed the brakes on, a full on emergency stop would have happened if I'd not stamped on the power. Not a very comfortable driving experience so I switched off cruise and just drove manually. I raised this as a fault with tesla but after they scanned the car they said thwere was nothing wrong and this behaviour is a "feature" of the current software and they say it will get better as they develop it over time. So much as with my previous report, it's a bafflimg mix of the brilliant (range, power and efficiency) and the downright lousy (auto headlights and wipers seem to have a mind of their own and the cruise control is quite possibly possessed). One of these days they will have it up to the standard of my old 2015 Octavia in terms of the tech, but as before there is still no way I would go back to a fossil fuelled car.

wipers etc have feck all impact, heaters are fine if you have a heat pump, tesla doesn't but is about to get one for MY2021. I personaly can't drive 300+ miles non stop. I recently drove Edinburgh to Northampton, I stopped twice. I could have done it with one stop but I was getting tired and on both stops I was birsting for a pee. The key determinant is your bladder range and how long you can go without having to stop to have a leg stretch and take a break. There's no point paying for and then hauling around a bigger battery if you are only doing a big trip like that occasionally. The stops I make on long trips from Scotland to England are pretty much the same whether I am driving diesel or electric.

not yet, coming next year

Back in March when I got the Tesla I was asked if I would do a post about how it was going. Obviously events have meant I have yet to get much driving done, though we did manage to fit in a trip over to Belfast so I do have somethign on which to report. First up, having driven a Leaf for the last two years I am used to the instant torque and crazy accelaration, though the model 3 takes this to a level where I have yet to have the nerve to fully floor it. It is that powerful, mine is the base version so it only has 245 bhp. Handover was in the first week of lockdown, so it was totally touchless. I had to wait outside at a distance, they brought the car out, and then went back inside before I could approach the car and drive away (having paid the night before). Firstly, you'll have heard of issues with build quality. Right now it seems that Tesla haven't a clue about quality control and it is a lottery whether you get one that's perfect or a nightmare. In fairness most of the issues are related to the bodywork and the cars are driveable. It's not like a mechanical failure on an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. Mine had:- 1) a scratch across the boot 2) a mis aligned bonnet (frunk) 3) the nose of the car hadn't had dirt removed before they painted it so it needed a new front end 4) driver's door misaligned 5) driver's door window wouldn'tclose properly 6) a rear quarter panel mis aligned 7) and it later emerged there was insufficient coolant in the battery cooling system (more of which below) These were all reported at handover - something you do via the app, and then attach photos. Tesla then allocate a repair appointment. The repair process is actually very slick though it was not great to have so much chance to witness it. Having had 10 Skodas starting with an Estelle and finishing with a 2015 Octavia I have never been accustomed to this level of defects. It was also filthy inside, covered in dust and grime from transit. I put this down to the fact that they were trying to minimise exposure to covid. The first appointment available due to COVID was 2 months later. 8 weeks passed and at the end of May they took the car in (touchless again) . They fixed the door and the window but the rest would have to await parts. More weeks, and then months, passed and since the defects were by now just cosmetic I didn't chase them. Last week, at the end of August, the car started whining and buzzing really loudly. It sounded like there were fans running and there was a lot of liquid gurgling sounds. I asked on a Tesla forum and was told off by Tesla fanboys - "all normal", "stop moaning". Basically don't question the sacred Tesla, if there's a fault I was told, the car will tell you via the screen. Except it didn't and there really was a fault. I logged it with a video. Within 12 hours an engineer phoned, they had connected to the car, run tests and established that the coolant level was very low. Seriously impressive. So a service appointment was booked, and I asked about all the other faults. "Faults? We've got no record of any faults?" Turns out they had forgotten totally. The merits of dealing with a new company that is selling cars as fast as it can make them. They then fixed everything within a week. So this week I have had my car fully repaired, everything looks like it should and they have filled the coolant to the level it shoud have had when it left the factory. So what to make of it? Well it is phenomenally efficient. EVs measure economy in miles per kWh (Tesla use Wh per mile but they just have to be different it seems). My leaf was pretty good and in the Summer would get around 4.5 miles per kWh, in the winter 3.8 was normal. So far since March I have been getting around 7 miles per kWh in the tesla. The equivalent in MPG terms is somewhere in excess of 200 MPG - Impressive. I can't comment on the supercharger network as they are few and far between in Scotand and I have been using the standrad Scottish Government chargers instead. Not all of them though because again Tesla haven't complied 100% with standards because quite a few of the older chargers simpoly do not detect that the car is connected. Driving it is different from any other car I have driven due to the large central screen, but you quickly get used to it. It's not though as good in many respects as Android Auto which I had in the leaf and the Octavia. Yiou ahve to pay £120 extra per year for data connectivity to use spotify or Tune in, no other apps are available. I used to use waze and pocket casts but those are not available to me. Elon says there's no need. Spotify is available but it si not as good as normal spotify, your music is in an entirely random order, nothing as boring as being in alphabetical order. You can of course use voice commands exceot they don't work anything like as reliably as google's version.One example, today I said "play Radio Scotland" to get the radio retuned. It played something called Hooked on a Feeling by a Swedish folk band. Don't even try asking it to navigate "command not understood". I aksed it to navigate to Drumnadrochit (ok that's a tough one but google can do it) - it thought I was trying to say something about a drunken doorkit and said it didn't understand. The excuse given to justify the 15 inch screen instead of buttons is that yuou'r esupposed to use voice commands, but in my experience they work only around 20% of the time. I can turn the heating up and down but pretty much nothing else works. ANother issue is that the sat nav is, well, pretty random. Not all the time but a heck of a lot of it. I asked it for a route from my house to my parents, around 12 miles. It suggested a 70 mile detour to the other side of Scotland. Like I say, random. When we went to Northern Ireland, the obviosu route is via the M77 and A77 - not for Tesla, It suggested a variety of B roads. Often re planning the route produces a more sensibke route but the point is if it is doing this on routes I do know how can I trust it when I am in strange territory? Answer is I can't. So i have gone back to mounting my phone in a cradle and using that as my sat nav. speaking of phones, like many people I have 2, one for work and a personal phone. In Skoda and Nissan I could connect both to bluetooth at the same time. WHichever one rang it was OK I could answer hands free. In the tech marvel that is the Tesla?? Sorry, only one connection at a time. Baffling. Speaking of Northern Ireland, that was somethign of a nightmare. We have done the trip in a leaf without issue, but the leaf uses the much older chademo charge port, rather then the eurpen standard CCS which is in the tesla. For unknown reasons Northern Ireland has only 14 rapid chargers, that's bad, but only half of them have CCS, the other half afre CCS and chademo. To make matters worse many of them are in shop car parks and these are locked shut when the shops close. In a SUnday you can only charge from 1pm to 5pm. More of a criticism of NI than Tesla but coming from Scotland where we have a very pro EV governmen and charging hubs springing up around the country it was a shock to the system. So how would I sum it up? It is an amazing car, probably the most advanced car I have ever owned, and yet lacking in every day tech like a sat nav that works or smart phone integration. Telsa want you to use their system and pay £120 per year extra for it. It is also badly let down by the abysmal quality control. Quite how they can send cars out of the factory with dirt underneath the paintwor is beyond me. Taking 5 months to fix it? Well it was cosmetic so didn't stop me using the car but it is hardly ideal. I had been due to buy a VW ID3 but they messed me around no end and couldn't guarantee I would get a car so I jumped ship. Now that the ID3 is arriving I am feelign a touch of regret. The model 3 is bigger than I really need and the VW would probably be a better fit with my needs. And yet 0-60 in 5 seconds is fun when you have a BMW M3 trying to ride your back bumper. Bottom line though is that with the SKoda Enyaq coming in December and more models likely in 2021 they are going to face a lot more competition. Even now cars like the e niro have a 7 year warranty and on a 50 kW charger it wil actually charge faster than the Tesla (don't tell the fanboys but this is true I have seen it with my own eyes).. Actually that last part may change on my car now that Tesla have actually filled it with the collant fluid it should have had from day 1, as I understand it that is used to both warm and cool the battery to keep it at the optimum charnign temperature. SO it's a mixed bag, it is impressive, and frustrating. I'm in a £40k+ car where I have to use my phone to navigate and a bluetooth headset to ensure I can answer both phones. I had to wait 5 months to get the car in a state which it would have been had there been a proper PDI carried out. But the way you can ghet a diagnosis remotely from a Tesla engineer is very impressive. But competition is growing and Tesla won't have it all their own way for long. Polestar 2 is starting to arrive in numbers and VW will be delivering at scale by the end of 2020. Would I buy another one? On balance, probably not. PS I forgot to add, not only does Spotify cost you an extra £120 a year, the car comes with no spare wheel, no tyre repair kit and you're advised to take out separate recovery as Tesla recovery will only recover you within 50 miles of a Tesla service centre (there's none on Norhtern Ireland and only one in Scotland (ie 33% of the UK land mass)