We just got back from an LA trip to Disneyland but more excitedly we hired a Model X and drove it around California for a week.
It was really good but the truth is (in my opinion) the Model S is better. (I mean when they invented the Model S, they threw all they had into making the best car - the Model X was an expansion into the SUV market, but it is a reduction from the perfected Model S).
At first I loved the doors, then I hated them, then I loved them, then repeated those emotions, then after everything, you would prefer the Model S doors. But they were fun.
The autopilot was indispensable on the interstate. For the first few days the Model X was not available, and they gave us a Bentley Bentayga instead. A much bigger SUV. I had never driven a left-hand drive vehicle before. It is not intuitive - I found I had major problems with staying in the centre of the lane. There are real drift issues - just ask my wife. That is where autopilot was so wonderful. You just turn it on and all the stress leaves you - you just supervise the driving and make sure you stay in the correct lane according to the navman.
——
The US:
I loved it - we all did.
We stayed at the Disneyland Resort - but we drove on various days to Universal Studios, Rodeo Drive, Beverley Hills, Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach.
The roads are so very different to Australia. Everything is big in the US. The people were friendly and accommodating.
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The Doors:
It’s easy to see how you can love them - when all is functioning as they are supposed to I mean - They are ultra-cool. And the coolest thing of all was upon exiting the vehicle and having all five doors open (including the trunk that is) and then closing the lot by one press on the key. Yes even the two front doors slam themselves shut. I promised myself I would have to get a video of that but of course, I never got around to it.
The trouble with the doors is when there are glitches, unexpected errors, out of the ordinary uses etc… Here were a few I encountered:
1. The front drivers door can be programmed to auto-open when you approach the car. That of course can be pretty cool. Especially since I routinely approached the car from the passenger side (given my Australian training) it was cute to see the other side door open. Well then we went to Venice beach and parked on a narrow one-way street. As I walked passed the car on the sidewalk, the driver’s door swung open and almost collected an on-coming car! If it was a second or so worse, it would either have been hit or the car would have had to back-up in order to shut it. In the end I just got a screwed-up face from the guy as I ran around to shut it.
2. There are sensors on the doors so that they don’t swing out or up to hit things. They work most of the time. But there are times when they don’t. For example, I trusted the front door to not whack the car next to me. It did whack it. I admit I didn’t look too closely for a scratch, it probably didn’t scratch it. But if the owner of that car was around, it would have been terribly embarrassing.
3. Then there was the time when the back door refused to open because it sensed something that wasn’t there. It half opened and then gave an obstacle warning in the centre screen. There is an option to override that, so I hit that. It then thinks about it some more and still decides not to override it. Now it may be well and good to stand there and debug it but when you have four passengers all wanting to get in and out in a hurry a half open half shut door is a major pain in the bum. Especially when you can’t just shove it up or down manually! Solving the problem was not simple. We shut it, and the passengers had to walk around to the road side to get in. But that was after I tried backing away from the curb a bit. Not enough apparently.
4. There is a design flaw also. You shouldn’t shut the back doors and front doors at the same time because at one small point the arcs of both overlap each other - and so they sort of clip each other. If I owned the car, I would have really cringed at that point.
5. Having the back doors up are ultra cool of course and everyone just looks at it. I always did - couldn’t help myself. But then there are the times when you really don’t want that kind of attention. One night we went to downtown Anaheim to get our laundry done. When in the darkened car park, the last thing I wanted to do was sit there with the doors up. So as cool as the car looks when they are up in certain circumstances, in certain other reciprocal circumstances, they just scream ultra dickhead here - come beat me up!
6. I thought I could get into all the strange things about the doors and just accommodate my behaviour to be very accepting - but there will always be one unsolvable problem. The doors do open and close rather quickly, but there are times, many in fact, when the occupants of a car are in a rush and just need to leave in a hurry. That means throwing the door open, bolting out, and throwing the door shut. Well that manoeuvre is just not available from the back seats in the Model X. And it is difficult to live with when that circumstance presents itself because by definition you are in a rush - and when you cannot guarantee that the bloody door will actually open, it is a recipe for disaster.
Of course the above are all the odd exceptions that present themselves now and again. Generally they did work rather fine and you could adapt your behaviour to get the best use out of them. And when they work, they are ultra cool and so it was a love/hate relationship.
The Seats:
The best bit about the seats were the comfort. My family said they were extremely comfortable. The back seats though are cramped and seem sort of an afterthought. When my kids sat all the way back there, they were difficult to talk to from the front seat. And when I decided to sit in the back seat (at the laundromat car park one evening) I found it rather cramped and you have to sacrifice moving the centre seats forward just to get some knee room and that upsets the centre seat passengers. It does not seem practical to have the back full-up with adults.
There were supposed to be seat coolers in the front and I had them on most of the time - but I never really noticed any significant effect. I don’t know the options for that sort of thing, but I found that any expense for such minimal advantage would be wholly unjustified. That part seemed like a gimmick.
The back seat also comes at the expense of reduced trunk space. The model S has stacks of trunk space - not so the model X. And when we needed to load up our luggage to get to the airport, it meant putting the back seats down so that our bags would fit. Of course when we did that, they fitted extremely comfortably - but I would not like to pick up six passengers with luggage from the airport!
It was really good but the truth is (in my opinion) the Model S is better. (I mean when they invented the Model S, they threw all they had into making the best car - the Model X was an expansion into the SUV market, but it is a reduction from the perfected Model S).
At first I loved the doors, then I hated them, then I loved them, then repeated those emotions, then after everything, you would prefer the Model S doors. But they were fun.
The autopilot was indispensable on the interstate. For the first few days the Model X was not available, and they gave us a Bentley Bentayga instead. A much bigger SUV. I had never driven a left-hand drive vehicle before. It is not intuitive - I found I had major problems with staying in the centre of the lane. There are real drift issues - just ask my wife. That is where autopilot was so wonderful. You just turn it on and all the stress leaves you - you just supervise the driving and make sure you stay in the correct lane according to the navman.
——
The US:
I loved it - we all did.
We stayed at the Disneyland Resort - but we drove on various days to Universal Studios, Rodeo Drive, Beverley Hills, Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach.
The roads are so very different to Australia. Everything is big in the US. The people were friendly and accommodating.
---
The Doors:
It’s easy to see how you can love them - when all is functioning as they are supposed to I mean - They are ultra-cool. And the coolest thing of all was upon exiting the vehicle and having all five doors open (including the trunk that is) and then closing the lot by one press on the key. Yes even the two front doors slam themselves shut. I promised myself I would have to get a video of that but of course, I never got around to it.
The trouble with the doors is when there are glitches, unexpected errors, out of the ordinary uses etc… Here were a few I encountered:
1. The front drivers door can be programmed to auto-open when you approach the car. That of course can be pretty cool. Especially since I routinely approached the car from the passenger side (given my Australian training) it was cute to see the other side door open. Well then we went to Venice beach and parked on a narrow one-way street. As I walked passed the car on the sidewalk, the driver’s door swung open and almost collected an on-coming car! If it was a second or so worse, it would either have been hit or the car would have had to back-up in order to shut it. In the end I just got a screwed-up face from the guy as I ran around to shut it.
2. There are sensors on the doors so that they don’t swing out or up to hit things. They work most of the time. But there are times when they don’t. For example, I trusted the front door to not whack the car next to me. It did whack it. I admit I didn’t look too closely for a scratch, it probably didn’t scratch it. But if the owner of that car was around, it would have been terribly embarrassing.
3. Then there was the time when the back door refused to open because it sensed something that wasn’t there. It half opened and then gave an obstacle warning in the centre screen. There is an option to override that, so I hit that. It then thinks about it some more and still decides not to override it. Now it may be well and good to stand there and debug it but when you have four passengers all wanting to get in and out in a hurry a half open half shut door is a major pain in the bum. Especially when you can’t just shove it up or down manually! Solving the problem was not simple. We shut it, and the passengers had to walk around to the road side to get in. But that was after I tried backing away from the curb a bit. Not enough apparently.
4. There is a design flaw also. You shouldn’t shut the back doors and front doors at the same time because at one small point the arcs of both overlap each other - and so they sort of clip each other. If I owned the car, I would have really cringed at that point.
5. Having the back doors up are ultra cool of course and everyone just looks at it. I always did - couldn’t help myself. But then there are the times when you really don’t want that kind of attention. One night we went to downtown Anaheim to get our laundry done. When in the darkened car park, the last thing I wanted to do was sit there with the doors up. So as cool as the car looks when they are up in certain circumstances, in certain other reciprocal circumstances, they just scream ultra dickhead here - come beat me up!
6. I thought I could get into all the strange things about the doors and just accommodate my behaviour to be very accepting - but there will always be one unsolvable problem. The doors do open and close rather quickly, but there are times, many in fact, when the occupants of a car are in a rush and just need to leave in a hurry. That means throwing the door open, bolting out, and throwing the door shut. Well that manoeuvre is just not available from the back seats in the Model X. And it is difficult to live with when that circumstance presents itself because by definition you are in a rush - and when you cannot guarantee that the bloody door will actually open, it is a recipe for disaster.
Of course the above are all the odd exceptions that present themselves now and again. Generally they did work rather fine and you could adapt your behaviour to get the best use out of them. And when they work, they are ultra cool and so it was a love/hate relationship.
The Seats:
The best bit about the seats were the comfort. My family said they were extremely comfortable. The back seats though are cramped and seem sort of an afterthought. When my kids sat all the way back there, they were difficult to talk to from the front seat. And when I decided to sit in the back seat (at the laundromat car park one evening) I found it rather cramped and you have to sacrifice moving the centre seats forward just to get some knee room and that upsets the centre seat passengers. It does not seem practical to have the back full-up with adults.
There were supposed to be seat coolers in the front and I had them on most of the time - but I never really noticed any significant effect. I don’t know the options for that sort of thing, but I found that any expense for such minimal advantage would be wholly unjustified. That part seemed like a gimmick.
The back seat also comes at the expense of reduced trunk space. The model S has stacks of trunk space - not so the model X. And when we needed to load up our luggage to get to the airport, it meant putting the back seats down so that our bags would fit. Of course when we did that, they fitted extremely comfortably - but I would not like to pick up six passengers with luggage from the airport!
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