First impressions. Short Road Trip

[EVEV1]

Hello everyone,

I received my 2022 Model 3 LR on Sept 6. On Thursday I had my first short road trip for business reason. What better way to test Ultron than a 500 miles round trip. My car is now at about 1500 miles. My impressions during the trip:
Range: It did excellent both way. Climate set at 72F (auto) the entire time. Outside temp mid 90 during the day, and low 80 at night. Tire pressure 42psi. No passengers. Speed 65 - 75 most of the way with few towns in the 35-45 mph range.
- I left my house with 90% and arrived at my destination supercharger at 25% (210 miles). Tesla maps had me going to my final destination without having to charge but I topped off few miles from the hotel so I could have enough charge for the driving around town while moving boxes from one office to another. Moving offices is never a fun thing LOL.

Daytime driving: Amazing, fun, exciting. No issues whatsoever. Enjoyed the glass room and open feel. I don't have tints yet so I did feel some of the heat from the windows. Fix coming soon!

Nighttime: Here is where the car had some issues. Most of the driving back was on one lane dark road and heavy rain for at least 40 minutes of the 200+ miles drive back
- Cameras: At night on dark road I kept getting "left pillar camera blocked or blinded" error message; then Right pillar; then multiple cameras blocked or blinded. These alerts would stay one for 20-30 seconds, go away and come back 10 seconds later. All 3.5 hours of the trip at night. It was very annoying.
- Tires in the rain: Absolute garbage. I haven't been white knuckle driving at night in the rain on any of my previous cars as much as I was on this one. But once tires are done for and I replace them for better ones, I am sure things will be different. In SFL we need good all weather tires with all the rain we get constantly. Unfortunately they are too new yet to replace them.

AP and Lane Keeping: Awesome! No issues at all while using it. Most of the trip was on AP and on about 40% of the trip I used lane keeping or whatever the feature is called and it worked like a charm.

Phantom braking: zero, nada. Even at night with blocked cameras errors. This surprised after reading so many complaints about it.

Passing speed: Wow. So much fun to pass cars when they cut you off, slow down to like 10 below the speed limit and you have to wait to pass because you are on a one lane street. But rewarding once you pass them and they disappear in the rearview mirror.

Hope I don't have any reliability issues with it because I do put about 20k miles a year and some times 25k. I do drive a lot for work.

 

[rpiotro]

The heavy rain may have been why the pillar cameras were momentarily blocked.

In my 55 years of car ownership, I have never owned a car where the OEM tires were any good. Many were just trash. Lowest bidder you know. And the make and model of tire on your car may not be exactly the same as the make and model that you buy retail.

If you are so disappointed with those tires just bite the bullet and replace them. What good are tires that last 50K miles but you hate every minute? I have about 8K miles on mine and I am not impressed either. I will probably get something better before winter.

 

[EVEV1]

The heavy rain may have been why the pillar cameras were momentarily blocked.

In my 55 years of car ownership, I have never owned a car where the OEM tires were any good. Many were just trash. Lowest bidder you know. And the make and model of tire on your car may not be exactly the same as the make and model that you buy retail.

If you are so disappointed with those tires just bite the bullet and replace them. What good are tires that last 50K miles but you hate every minute? I have about 8K miles on mine and I am not impressed either. I will probably get something better before winter.

Agree. I might replace them earlier. Probably will go with the pilot sports from Michelin. The rain was about 40 minutes off the drive. The errors was nearly the entire drive. I think it’s because the cameras aren’t that good at night and there were no lights on the road other than car lights. The resolution of these cameras are poor at night. That’s just an inherent issue. I don’t think there is any way to fix that unless Tesla comes up with a higher resolution/ night performing cameras. Other than that the car was great. Better range than expected too.

 

[Tinkerin]

Hello everyone,

I received my 2022 Model 3 LR on Sept 6. On Thursday I had my first short road trip for business reason. What better way to test Ultron than a 500 miles round trip. My car is now at about 1500 miles. My impressions during the trip:
Range: It did excellent both way. Climate set at 72F (auto) the entire time. Outside temp mid 90 during the day, and low 80 at night. Tire pressure 42psi. No passengers. Speed 65 - 75 most of the way with few towns in the 35-45 mph range.
- I left my house with 90% and arrived at my destination supercharger at 25% (210 miles). Tesla maps had me going to my final destination without having to charge but I topped off few miles from the hotel so I could have enough charge for the driving around town while moving boxes from one office to another. Moving offices is never a fun thing LOL.

Daytime driving: Amazing, fun, exciting. No issues whatsoever. Enjoyed the glass room and open feel. I don't have tints yet so I did feel some of the heat from the windows. Fix coming soon!

Nighttime: Here is where the car had some issues. Most of the driving back was on one lane dark road and heavy rain for at least 40 minutes of the 200+ miles drive back
- Cameras: At night on dark road I kept getting "left pillar camera blocked or blinded" error message; then Right pillar; then multiple cameras blocked or blinded. These alerts would stay one for 20-30 seconds, go away and come back 10 seconds later. All 3.5 hours of the trip at night. It was very annoying.
- Tires in the rain: Absolute garbage. I haven't been white knuckle driving at night in the rain on any of my previous cars as much as I was on this one. But once tires are done for and I replace them for better ones, I am sure things will be different. In SFL we need good all weather tires with all the rain we get constantly. Unfortunately they are too new yet to replace them.

AP and Lane Keeping: Awesome! No issues at all while using it. Most of the trip was on AP and on about 40% of the trip I used lane keeping or whatever the feature is called and it worked like a charm.

Phantom braking: zero, nada. Even at night with blocked cameras errors. This surprised after reading so many complaints about it.

Passing speed: Wow. So much fun to pass cars when they cut you off, slow down to like 10 below the speed limit and you have to wait to pass because you are on a one lane street. But rewarding once you pass them and they disappear in the rearview mirror.

Hope I don't have any reliability issues with it because I do put about 20k miles a year and some times 25k. I do drive a lot for work.

I just completed a 7500 mile trip over 5 weeks - car delivered in June.

Regarding the pillar cameras: same issue as you report. However, I discovered when washing the car during the trip that both pillars had a plastic film similar to the screen protector film applied to the car operating screen. It had started to separate on its own and I removed all of it (probably missed by Tesla during their prep for delivery). Once removed, no more pillar camera faults during nighttime driving - waiting for an evening drive in the rain to confirm. Auto park seems to be available more often now too. Navigate on autopilot lane changes when passing works better as well.

Autopilot phantom braking happened quite a bit except when following other vehicles. As reported in other posts, mirages seemed to produce these a lot some times with no vehicles on the horizon. Difficult for me to determine what autopilot was ’seeing’ that results in phantom braking.

One particular condition produced a strange autopilot behavior: Driving into Reno NV from the north on I80 when wildfire smoke had reduced visibility to about a mile (clear skies above) with the sun directly ahead and low enough in the sky, autopilot reduced speed to 50 MPH and displayed the poor visibility fault intermittently. And for a stretch the autopilot display showed a near never ending stream of yellow traffic signals - one after the other. I had to disable autopilot. Did the smoke change the color of the sun enough to cause this? - I have driven with the sun in a similar position before and never experienced this issue. Visability while reduced did not present any reason for me to slow down - I could still see far enough in front of me to continue at highway speeds - but autopilot insisted on being much too conservative.

 

[EVEV1]

I just completed a 7500 mile trip over 5 weeks - car delivered in June.

Regarding the pillar cameras: same issue as you report. However, I discovered when washing the car during the trip that both pillars had a plastic film similar to the screen protector film applied to the car operating screen. It had started to separate on its own and I removed all of it (probably missed by Tesla during their prep for delivery). Once removed, no more pillar camera faults during nighttime driving - waiting for an evening drive in the rain to confirm. Auto park seems to be available more often now too. Navigate on autopilot lane changes when passing works better as well.

Autopilot phantom braking happened quite a bit except when following other vehicles. As reported in other posts, mirages seemed to produce these a lot some times with no vehicles on the horizon. Difficult for me to determine what autopilot was ’seeing’ that results in phantom braking.

One particular condition produced a strange autopilot behavior: Driving into Reno NV from the north on I80 when wildfire smoke had reduced visibility to about a mile (clear skies above) with the sun directly ahead and low enough in the sky, autopilot reduced speed to 50 MPH and displayed the poor visibility fault intermittently. And for a stretch the autopilot display showed a near never ending stream of yellow traffic signals - one after the other. I had to disable autopilot. Did the smoke change the color of the sun enough to cause this? - I have driven with the sun in a similar position before and never experienced this issue. Visability while reduced did not present any reason for me to slow down - I could still see far enough in front of me to continue at highway speeds - but autopilot insisted on being much too conservative.

Oh wow. Thanks for the info. I’ll check to see if mine has that plastic film. But yeah low visibility is the Achilles' heel on these cameras.

 

[Rocky_H]

- Tires in the rain: Absolute garbage. I haven't been white knuckle driving at night in the rain on any of my previous cars as much as I was on this one. But once tires are done for and I replace them for better ones, I am sure things will be different. In SFL we need good all weather tires with all the rain we get constantly.

In my 55 years of car ownership, I have never owned a car where the OEM tires were any good. Many were just trash. Lowest bidder you know.

Well, default things are default. They aren't meant to be really good at any one particular thing, but to be moderately OK at all things. And people have different needs.

@EVEV1 You need heavy rain tires, like Aquatreads or somesuch. But rain tires wouldn't be good in the snow. And winter tires wouldn't be good in heavy rain. And neither of those would be good for long tread life in dry pavement driving. And long tread life tires aren't good for sticky summer sports performance driving. Every condition is a bit of a unique thing if you want something to really excel at that particular ability.

My 2014 S85 came with a pretty decent all around all season tire, the Michelin Primacy MXM4. They're not very good in Winter, and people who were sports car people complained that they weren't a hard core sticky high performance cornering tire. But I'm a boring driver, and we live in a desert, so have dry conditions almost year round, so I love them for being a normal decent quiet tire with great tread life of about 45K every time, so I keep getting them as replacements. That happens to be suited to my conditions here.

 

[Brian-MS90D]

The camera visibility is just a nuisance message that you can completely ignore. It's never prevented me from engaging and using Autopilot. I don't even know why Tesla reports it to the user. Appears to be a hold over relic that they are too busy to address. All of their effort is in working on FSD Beta.