So my Plaid S has been in the shop for a week after the left rear motor failed as I was leaving a parking garage. Service center says it’s the inverter, part arrived and I should have it back in the next day or so, I hope. November build, failed at ~5,000 miles.
I’ve had a Model 3 Performance as a loaner for a few days and thought I would offer my feedback. It has FSD (license, not Beta), no premium connectivity, 2020 model with 28k miles.
1) The turn signals are really finicky - they’re located on a stalk that comes out of the left side of the steering column. Pushing to the soft-detent is hit or miss - a lot of times it doesn’t register. And, what’s completely bizarre is that if I’m in Autopilot, pushing it to the soft detent just makes the blinkers go 3 times but doesn’t actually change lanes. You have to push to the hard detent for it to make a lane change. Why don’t the lane changes work consistently like my haptic buttons? The stalk seems to be a strange design choice considering it has two different modes of operation and isn’t very consistent. If I’m driving manually and click down to the hard detent, the turn signals also don’t turn off automatically when I’ve completed a lane change. Very strange - I have to fiddle with it to make it stop blinking at that point.
2) The steering wheel is small, but is completely round. There are no edges to grab to either rest my hand on when cruising in Autopilot on a long highway ride, or to quickly grab. I found myself frequently being nagged to apply steering force, even though I was resting my hand on the spoke as I was used to. Maybe the wheel is just too small for that to be sufficient torque? It seems like if they had made the wheel asymmetrical in some way, I would have more surface area to grab for small or large wheel movements… It was nice that it wasn’t blocking my instrument cluster at least.
3) There was no instrument cluster.
4) The drive selector was very confusing. I had to pull it down past the hard detent to put it in drive. But despite the counter-intuitive graphic on the stalk, pulling it down a half click actually engages the cruise control. You have to pull it down two times rapidly, but not all the way down, to engage auto steer. I wonder why they chose to overload this physical control to manage the Autopilot function instead of just clicking the wheel that otherwise controls the feature. Very strange. I suspect people frequently put their car in neutral and get confused because of this. It also feels very foreign to push the drive stalk toward Reverse, but not all the way, to disengage the ADAS.
In short, the wheel and stalks were an interesting design choice, but I’m really looking forward to getting my car back with controls that make more sense. I don’t know if they’ll be successful selling cars with such strange controls - it seems like a safety issue to make basic things so counter-intuitive.
(Only slightly sarcastic here - it’s been very eye opening realizing how natural my car feels compared to this loaner)
(Featured Image Courtesy of Tesla, Inc)
I’ve had a Model 3 Performance as a loaner for a few days and thought I would offer my feedback. It has FSD (license, not Beta), no premium connectivity, 2020 model with 28k miles.
1) The turn signals are really finicky - they’re located on a stalk that comes out of the left side of the steering column. Pushing to the soft-detent is hit or miss - a lot of times it doesn’t register. And, what’s completely bizarre is that if I’m in Autopilot, pushing it to the soft detent just makes the blinkers go 3 times but doesn’t actually change lanes. You have to push to the hard detent for it to make a lane change. Why don’t the lane changes work consistently like my haptic buttons? The stalk seems to be a strange design choice considering it has two different modes of operation and isn’t very consistent. If I’m driving manually and click down to the hard detent, the turn signals also don’t turn off automatically when I’ve completed a lane change. Very strange - I have to fiddle with it to make it stop blinking at that point.
2) The steering wheel is small, but is completely round. There are no edges to grab to either rest my hand on when cruising in Autopilot on a long highway ride, or to quickly grab. I found myself frequently being nagged to apply steering force, even though I was resting my hand on the spoke as I was used to. Maybe the wheel is just too small for that to be sufficient torque? It seems like if they had made the wheel asymmetrical in some way, I would have more surface area to grab for small or large wheel movements… It was nice that it wasn’t blocking my instrument cluster at least.
3) There was no instrument cluster.
4) The drive selector was very confusing. I had to pull it down past the hard detent to put it in drive. But despite the counter-intuitive graphic on the stalk, pulling it down a half click actually engages the cruise control. You have to pull it down two times rapidly, but not all the way down, to engage auto steer. I wonder why they chose to overload this physical control to manage the Autopilot function instead of just clicking the wheel that otherwise controls the feature. Very strange. I suspect people frequently put their car in neutral and get confused because of this. It also feels very foreign to push the drive stalk toward Reverse, but not all the way, to disengage the ADAS.
In short, the wheel and stalks were an interesting design choice, but I’m really looking forward to getting my car back with controls that make more sense. I don’t know if they’ll be successful selling cars with such strange controls - it seems like a safety issue to make basic things so counter-intuitive.
(Only slightly sarcastic here - it’s been very eye opening realizing how natural my car feels compared to this loaner)
(Featured Image Courtesy of Tesla, Inc)
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