Just completed my first mega roadtrip in my Model Y. Started in DFW, drove to Raleigh, then to Chicago, before returning home.
Just over 3500 total miles. $406 in total super charging. Significantly cheaper than what it would have cost in any of my other cars.
First off – I love this car as a road trip car. It does so many things right.
However, the amount of stupid minor and often avoidable frustrations is simply way too high. In many respects I felt like a beta tester, which would have been fine, except this should now be a much more fine tuned system.
Hardware Concerns -
Maintaining speed on the highway is more difficult than an ICE. I would look at speed and be 7-8 over speed limit (target) then look over again and be 15 over and then look over again and be 5 under. This could all happen in a span of just a few minutes and it happened the entire trip. I have never had anywhere near this issue with ICE cars maintaining speed. This issue was magnified due to something I will outline in the Safety Concern section which disabled both FSD and cruise.
Supercharger offramps – Every city has that one offramp that is a nightmare, especially if you are from out of town. Somehow Tesla managed to identify and place superchargers at these locations with alarming frequency. At some point, it just became a joke for us, as if they sought out the most convoluted locations possible. Gas stations chose easy on/easy off exits for a reason. Tesla gave little to no thought or care at all to where chargers were placed from a users perspective, they just were filing in a map, it was obvious the person making these decisions never saw the location in person and ease of reaching the destination was not at all a factor.
Supercharger amenities – This may end up being the dealbreaker for me. Perhaps half of the locations had no ready access to restroom facilities. Worse, the vehicle gives you no indication at all of what is nearby. There are effectively ZERO gas stations in this country without restroom facilities. How did Tesla overlook this? Outlet malls don’t have open bathrooms 24 hours a day, neither do applebees or grocery stores. Twice we were told bathrooms were not available to “Tesla people.” So at the exact moment where I have 20 minutes of downtime, I don’t have a bathroom?. To be fair, Sheetz in NC and Kum & Go in IA/MO hosted a number of superchargers and earned my business multiple times as a result, but these were more exceptions than the rule.
Supercharger Costs – A major concern for me before finally buying was, am I captive to Tesla’s need to make a profit for refueling. A salesperson showed me an Elon Musk quote saying that supercharging will never be a profit center. Prices have increased by roughly 40% in the last 6 months since I got my vehicle, almost exactly the increase in gas prices, but oddly not in wholesale electricity prices. Still cheaper than gas, but then again even the most horrible gas station includes access to a bathroom and a snickers bar.
Software Concerns:
Supercharger routing – almost by definition when supercharging away from home, I am in an unfamiliar location. Routing would tell me I had arrived and switch to the next location 2 hours down the road before I reached the charger, too often that meant we were stuck playing “find the supercharger” at a crowded shopping center. This was especially bad at some locations where we would lose the routing as soon as we got off the highway. A number of times it would tell me the charger was on one side of the road and it would be across the street. Or it would literally be around the back of the building and we would just wander around until we found it. This is such a minor thing but was a pebble in our shoe the entire trip.
Supercharger pre-conditioning – This was all over the map. About half the time it worked as I would expect, warming the car up from say 5-10 minutes before arrival. But I also saw all kinds of other results as well. At one point it was pre-conditioned for more than 30 miles from the next supercharger. Maybe 25% of the time it would not pre-condition until I was literally at the exit ramp. Another say 20% of the time, it would not precondition at all despite navigating explicitly to a supercharger.
Mapping and routing…
This is a terrible UI. Worse, I cant even get it to act uniformly.
My route plan typically consisted of 3 locations. 1) where I plan to spend the night 2) where I next plan to eat 3) where I next plan to charge.
When I would add a location from my phone with the send to Tesla from Google maps or when I added from the onboard screen, I literally got 4 different possible outcomes.
1) The one I want – locations in order by distance from where I am – using the above it would be next charger, food, hotel.
2) The dumbest possible one – go to the furthest location, then come back to the closest one. Hotel, food, charger.
3) it would delete the rest of the trip and just add the most recent entry. So no more expected arrival time for lunch or at the hotel, just the next charger.
4) it would add the next location to the computer, but all routing would now be empty. When I open recent locations, it is at the top of the list, but there is no trip plan created and whatever was there has been deleted.
I got each of the above multiple times on the trip. If it was just counterintuitive programming but did the same thing every time I could adjust, but literally it did something different pretty much every time I made any sort of update.
Time Zones – Apparently Tesla does not recognize or account for time zone changes. No car or routing software I have ever used did not account for this. I am in Central time, headed to a location in Eastern time, but am only 30 minutes away from the destination. Talking on phone with person we are meeting and say we will be there around 12:30 because that is what the car tells me. Very confusing to the person on the phone because it is already past 12:30 for them. Did this each time destination was in a different time zone. Again, stupid basic and a solved problem that simply should not be an issue.
Next charger – Because of the mapping and routing bugs we found ourselves sitting at a charger, adding the next charger we want to target, then having to rebuild the route plan, but the charger suggestions just totally changed. 45 seconds ago we were stopping at one charger, now we are being routed to a totally different charger. Frequently it would not realize we were currently charging so route me to a different charger just 10 minutes down the road. Once that happened, no matter how much I charged or how many times I would reset the route plan, that "bonus: charger somehow would override routing and always be included until I drove past it.
Safety Concerns:
Estimated Range – This is a big one. Why in the world would you estimate range and be OVER by 20 miles consistently? I don’t mind if I have 20 extra miles upon arrival, but being even 1 mile short at a destination is a major issue.
Consistently the delta between how far we were from the next stop and the estimated range would narrow as we travelled. So leaving a charger we would be 120 travel miles to next and we might have 180 miles in range (a delta of 60 miles cushion), yet by 50 miles out we might only have 90 miles in range (delta of 40 miles) and we would consistently arrive with 25-30 miles remaining range.
When you have a vehicle that already has some level of range anxiety and a charging network that does not allow for “get off at the next exit” type of driving, you better be very good at estimating how far you can go. If you are bad at it, you should be bad on the conservative side.
I have told the computer where I am going. The computer should very easily be able to take into account things like recent efficiency (accounts for weight, tire pressure etc), current power usage (phones plugged in, Air conditioning etc), driving type and estimated speed, elevation change, and wind/weather to tell me if I can make it there or not.
On one leg we hit a huge rainstorm and our 20% range cushion quickly fell to just 5% and we were 50 miles from where we were going and it ticked as low as 2% at destination. The problem was by the time this was apparent, we were now further from where we last charged than where we needed to be. We either were going to make it or not make it…
Everything got unplugged, AC got turned off, even wipers got set at lower speed… We made it, but it also was a stressful 60 minutes worrying about if we would.
Tesla had all the information necessary to tell us before we unhooked from the last charger that we would be going uphill, into a rainstorm where the wind was blowing into us and should have accounted for those things before telling us to unhook and continue the trip.
Tesla also knows consumers have range anxiety and the cost to them of a customer “running out of gas” is far higher than in a normal car. You run out of gas in a normal car, you are an idiot and tell not a soul – it is your fault!. You run out of gas in a Tesla and you tell everyone you know the car did not estimate its range correctly. Right now, it is the cars fault much more than the consumers based on the huge variance in estimated range and actual range coupled with the limited number of places to charge if an estimate is wrong.
Hardware Failure leading to safety issues:
On day 3 of our trip, 1200 miles from home and 2000+ miles from the end of the trip, we accessed the Frunk.
Immediately, even before it was closed there was an error saying we had a bad frunk sensor. This was maybe the 10th time the frunk was ever opened on the vehicle.
We spent a few minutes opening and closing trying to get the sensor to show as closed. Eventually a google search showed us this was a known and not uncommon issue.
Finally satisfied it was a bad sensor and that the frunk was securely closed, we decided it was safe to proceed.
Every single time we went into drive for the rest of the trip, we would have to click a button acknowledging that the sensor was faulty. I get warning messages, but this one just kept reminding me of a manufacturing issue literally 100 times over the next week.
Downstream Safety Issue #1:
The frunk latch sensor was a minor irritant until we arrived at our hotel for the evening and got to our room only to be told the alarm was going off on the car. Went out to check on it, all was well, 30 minutes later same message. Rinse and repeat until we had the idea that the frunk was probably showing as open and that was the alarm.
Car is full of stuff we don’t want to unload every night, yet to keep the alarm from going off we are forced to deactivate both sentry and alarm system.
Downstream Safety Issue #2:
Next morning, we are on the road and I try to put the car on FSD only to learn that because the Frunk is open (literally the car icon shows us driving down the road with the hood up) that both cruise control and FSD are disabled.
I can certainly understand if the cameras were actually obscured but that was not the case at all.
My primary reason for buying FSD was for road trips. Every trip hits that point where you are exhausted or distracted or for whatever reason your focus is not as great as it should be.
I view FSD as a great safety feature, disabling it dues to a faulty latch sensor that impacted nothing else on the car is a real headscratcher.
Downstream Safety Issue #3:
This is the one that makes no sense at all to me….
We drive into a huge rainstorm. I wait for auto windshield wipers to engage. They don’t.
So I manually activate them only to get a pop-up warning asking me to accept the risk of turning on the wipers, before I can actually turn them on.
An issue that might be obscuring the windshield (but is not) prevents something that is absolutely obscuring the windshield and for which I must manually override the system and it is stated that this is for my safety.
So a malfunction of a non-essential item (hood latch sensor) causes the override and disabling of normal function totally unrelated to the malfunction.
When I purchased the car, my primary concern was what if Tesla does what Apple does and more or less bricks the car requiring an upgrade. This experience lets me know it is 100% possible. One minor issue led to 3 much more significant reductions in basic functionality.
I love my Tesla, it does so many things right. It also does so much wrong.
The company has had plenty of time to gather the above data and make fixes to these obvious and glaring issues and has failed to do so. That tells me they don’t think they are important.
No other car I have ever had has had such an extensive list of poor user experiences.
