In the first week of April, I bought a Model 3 in white, rear wheel drive with 18 inch wheels, Partial Premium interior, standard range plus (240 miles EPA rated range), and Autopilot.
I want to share some experiences as I am living them in our first ever one way trip to Reno, NV from Pittsburgh, PA (about 2400 miles). I’ll update this post daily (if I make it of course). My wife and I are the chauffeurs, and the two year old Beagle is, well, curled up in the rear seat in his bed. We have planned to do this drive in four days.
We have a spreadsheet with routes, superchargers, estimated arrival %, minimum departure %, etc. created using PlugShare, ABetterRoutePlanner websites.
Day 1: Left PA at 9 am ended our day in Peru, IL at 9 pm. Hit massive rains and an unseasonable mild snow storm in Indiana.
Lessons learned:
1. Having a plan certainly helps but mainly because it tells you where superchargers and destination chargers are not around, or are placed wide apart. But that’s about it. You’ll end up stopping more frequently than you had estimated. This is especially true if you have a Standard Range Plus battery.
2. The in-car navigation system, when suggesting supercharging stops along the route, is overly ambitious. Please do not rely on it. If you are on a road trip and you see a supercharger, recharge. I just don’t feel comfortable when I can barely see the road ahead of me in a storm and the system is comfortable in saying that my arrival charge will be 5%. Just not worth the risk.
3. Everything works against you. The rain, wipers, music, air conditioning, heating, headwinds, and cold weather significantly affect the battery life. To be brutally honest, if you have a car that’s 240 miles rated, it is actually no more than 170 miles with all things considered, to play absolutely safe. If you have a 310 mile car, I think it’ll be about 240 miles. That said, the good part is that Tesla supercharging network has been quite accurate and reliable. At least on our first day we didn’t witness any gasoline vehicles blocking superchargers. But our fingers are crossed.
4. Dog mode is great.
5. Almost always I was never the only Tesla at the supercharging stations. Not a bad thing at all but just an indication that if Tesla proliferation continues, we will soon have a pretty big problem on our hands. I sincerely hope more and more supercharging stations show up off and along the major highways in USA.
6. I’m one of those people who have the true legacy “Enhanced Autopilot” that somehow I managed to get for $3000 basic “AutoPilot” package when I ordered the car in late March 2019. Enhanced AutoPilot does everything that today’s basic AutoPilot does (traffic aware cruise control, automatic steering with lane change execution when you initiate a turn signal while driving in the Autopilot mode) and adds three more things - Navigate on Autopilot which enables speed and traffic based fully automatic lane change (with or without driver’s consent), entering and existing highway ramps (often jerky and with phantom braking), and lateral summon (which will be enhanced later this year).
Anyway, just using the traffic aware cruise control and basic Autopilot on highways reduces driving fatigue significantly. But the hands on wheel and apply light force nagging is very annoying and I really wish if it appeared less frequently. It is absolutely important to check that the driver isn’t asleep or distracted but 60 seconds would be a lot more pleasurable instead of 20-30 seconds it does today. I mean, do not fall asleep behind the wheel! Rest. It’s not that hard.
7. The car design does have wind noise. Get used to it. The car doors also produce a little rattle when pass over a pothole but overall, the car drover very stable in wet and dry conditions being a rear wheel drive on stock tires, albeit they’re brand new.
8. The rear view mirror could be a bit wider; the shape of the car makes it kind of hard to see tailgating vehicles at night if your rear windshield is tinted. Don’t tint your rear windshield.
9. The side mirrors aren’t anything to write home about either. They are a bit too small but they are sufficiently functional, except the lack of bind spot vehicle detector light. While the car is rated all stars for safety, I just think that lack of some basic safety features is simply inexcusable (rear cross traffic alert and side mirror blind spot vehicle alert) for a $40k or $50k car.
I’ll let you guys know how our Day 2 goes.
