Fellow Cheapskates: How's your SR (no Plus) doing?

[bo3bdar]

Fellow cheapskate here. Just finishing up a very long vacaction through the US West, mostly in CO. Driving out from CA through NV and Utah.

Still on board with SR, the 200 mile range was only problematic once, where it wouldn't route me down the scenic highway 12 near Capitol Reef, because it only routes to superchargers, and it was -3% to arrive. I could have done the trip anyway with a stop at an L2 charger in Bryce for lunch, but time was not in my favor and my passenger wanted to get back faster. Some small risk of out of order chargers, but 14-50 plugs are all over down there for RVs. Got free destination charging in two spots.


I did however pay for Autopilot today, to try it on the way back. I'd rather keep the bare bones car, but figured it was worth trying. Anyone else upgrade to add Autopilot, but stay SR?

Overall the Autopilot seems OK, and the lane minding is pretty helpful. The phantom braking pretty much sucks though, so I currently plan to refund it. A big semi truck with lots of lights was misidentified as an emergency vehicle. And a truck with an under bumper lighting array made it flip out and hit the brakes. Lots of letting off the accelerator phantom brakes, as cars would go by.


No way am I buying a new 3 without stalks. Putting capacitive buttons on the wheel, is yet another point of distraction, and the car is already far too dangerous to drive because of horrible driving UI choices they've made. So I'm staying with SR. Will not buy another Tesla until they pull their head out.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

oes anyone know how many kWhs the SR battery had on delivery? My 2019 seems to have about 43.9 kWh left so I am wondering how much degradation that represents.

I think it was 52.5kWh * 220/240 = 48.1kWh. If the SR was not 220 miles max display then adjust the equation accordingly.

This was a top-locked 52.5kWh pack as I recall, so you should have regen at 100%.

Any capacity loss is just dealt with proportionally. You don't get no/less loss just because the pack COULD still provide you 48kWh (that's approximately the non-locked capacity of your pack).

My 3yo SR is showing 218 miles of range at 100%, which I think is great,

Sounds like you have an SR+ with a pack with 47.7kWh of capacity.

It's very unlikely that an SR starting at 48.1kWh would only have dropped to 47.7kWh. Unless you keep it in a refrigerated trailer.

 

[jparr]

Fellow cheapskate here. Just finishing up a very long vacaction through the US West, mostly in CO. Driving out from CA through NV and Utah.

Still on board with SR, the 200 mile range was only problematic once, where it wouldn't route me down the scenic highway 12 near Capitol Reef, because it only routes to superchargers, and it was -3% to arrive. I could have done the trip anyway with a stop at an L2 charger in Bryce for lunch, but time was not in my favor and my passenger wanted to get back faster. Some small risk of out of order chargers, but 14-50 plugs are all over down there for RVs. Got free destination charging in two spots.


I did however pay for Autopilot today, to try it on the way back. I'd rather keep the bare bones car, but figured it was worth trying. Anyone else upgrade to add Autopilot, but stay SR?

Overall the Autopilot seems OK, and the lane minding is pretty helpful. The phantom braking pretty much sucks though, so I currently plan to refund it. A big semi truck with lots of lights was misidentified as an emergency vehicle. And a truck with an under bumper lighting array made it flip out and hit the brakes. Lots of letting off the accelerator phantom brakes, as cars would go by.


No way am I buying a new 3 without stalks. Putting capacitive buttons on the wheel, is yet another point of distraction, and the car is already far too dangerous to drive because of horrible driving UI choices they've made. So I'm staying with SR. Will not buy another Tesla until they pull their head out.

Agree about this comment about the stalks in the Highland model. One of the reason's we're looking going to replace a our SR with a late model 23' with stalks. That and I'm guessing the QC on a end of production model year 23' is going to be a lot better than some of the newer Highland Model 3 (whenever they start hitting the road in the US)

 

[bo3bdar]

Agree about this comment about the stalks in the Highland model. One of the reason's we're looking going to replace a our SR with a late model 23' with stalks. That and I'm guessing the QC on a end of production model year 23' is going to be a lot better than some of the newer Highland Model 3 (whenever they start hitting the road in the US)

Pretty much agree with that approach. That late model 2023 is going to be last best Model 3 for a while.


I went ahead and refunded the Autopilot purchase on my SR, so I'm back to unicorn status. I was not opposed to keeping it if it performed well, but my short summary is that Tesla software is just generally always terrible. Unfinished, buggy code that everyone is just expected to put up with. I used it for two solid days of driving across interstates and two lane roads, and it's just not that great.

The TrafficAwareCruiseControl was something I used on a Turo-rented Model 3 about 3 years ago, and honestly I'm pretty shocked that the current version is actually inferior to that version. Somehow they've broken the software so that it performs worse now. My car has, or had, the radar that the original TACC used, but I don't know if they turned that off or not. It does a remarkably poor job of anticipating a slower car in front of me now, abruptly slowing down only after it gets close. It's got an abrupt and clumsy approach for managing speeds, zooming up and down all the time, instead of smoothly adjusting. The entire point of TACC is to provide a smoother experience, and they are blowing it here.

Let's talk phantom braking. I just got an up to date experience, with only prior experience from 3 years ago. It worked far better then, and I don't recall a single instance of phantom braking then. I did not ever hear of that until recently. Current version is just sad, braking at weird times, and at different levels. There are the slowing events where it takes off the accelerator and engages regen when it's confused. These happened all the time, at least once an hour. Then there are the full braking, when it 'sees' something funny. I went past a semi-truck with a giant array of christmas lights all over it, and got a full braking event, because TACC decided that was an emergency vehicle. Even though nothing was flashing. Got another full brake event for a macho-man truck with bright blinding LED under grill lights. Not in my lane, not a risk. Overall, this experience is just not relaxing, and I can do a far superior job with dumb cruise control flicking the max speed up and down with scroll wheel.


Lastly, I tried lane-minding, 'beta auto-steer'. I've noticed that Tesla uses the 'beta' term for software they've abandoned as half-finished. Get the prototype working, then no more work on it. Auto-Steer is an interesting tech-trick, but as an actual driver assistance it's sorely lacking. It makes driving much more stressful, because it freaks out in weird ways that did not seem really predictable. They claim it's not designed for 2 lane roads, although my experience there was actually superior to freeway driving.

It does weird/bad driving like always hitting the middle of a lane gap, which makes it veer around suddenly when gaps appear, or merge lanes come in. This is bad and stupid, no driver tries to always hit the straight middle in all cases. It's too sudden at turning, and too late to recognize curves. It works sort of OK, but again, this is supposed to improve my driving experience, not stress me out. I'm not expecting it to drive like I like, but I am expecting it to be smooth.

The use of torque on the wheel to determine attention is pathetic, ridiculous, and absolutely works poorly. No wonder people use weights to fake it out, it's so poorly implemented that just driving normally it brings up alerts. When doing long distance driving I specifically do not want to hold my arms up all the time. In low risk scenarios, I drop my hands to one hand on the lower wheel. You are nearly certain to get nags this way, and I can literally steer my car myself with less effort than having to nanny the 'auto-steer'.

There are constant driver distractions when using it, with things popping up in the info section. I'm not sure why they think putting text there is appropriate, but this is not at all different than texting and driving, and is absolutely taking my attention from the road. The screen is already problematic, and the level of distraction here adds unnecessary risk.


Overall conclusion- Not even remotely worth $3000. No wonder they bundle it in all SR+, because my car is actually quite a lot better and more relaxing with dumb cruise control. Strangely, people forced into current TACC actually have an inferior driving experience because of phantom breaking.

For anyone who immediately feels compelled to write back and say I'm a Luddite or too old to change, or some other nonsense, please save us all the tedium and skip it. It's not being a Luddite to insist that things actually improve, and assist, not just change. My counter argument is that people appear willing to put up with absolutely abysmal software when they have sunk costs. We should all press Tesla to do better, not simply accept whatever they push out.