Strictly speaking, this isn't a first-drive review. But I'm posting here because this was my first long road trip in the Model 3. I don't take many road trips. I don't really like to drive. I fly whenever possible. But every summer I come up here to British Columbia for hiking, and there's no air service where I go. And I go to several different places so I need a car. In the past I drove the Prius. Wanting to get the long drive over with I drive fast. Not fast enough to get a ticket, but fast enough that I pass more cars than pass me. With stops it's probably a 7-hour drive by the most direct route.
This time, thanks to the Model 3 and the supercharger at Kelowna, I was able to drive electric.
It was flipping awesome! I posted about the ridiculously fast supercharger in another thread. I had enough charge to finish my trip before I'd finished eating my sandwich. And I still had to hit the rest room. But this post is about the driving experience.
I don't like to drive. It's very tiring. But TACC and AP made this trip almost a joy. The one negative was that there's no comfortable place for my right foot while using TACC. By the 5-hour point it was bothering me, and by the time I got to Revelstoke it was bothering a lot. But other than that, it was great. It is far less tiring when I'm simply monitoring the car's behavior rather than doing all the steering myself. And TACC is every bit as nice as I expected it to be when I first ordered the car. AP is not perfect. Tesla says it's a beta feature, and that's the truth. On hard curves it slides to the outsIde of the curve, and the sharper the turn or the higher the speed, the worse it is. On very windy roads I took over the steering. There were other situations as well when I was not comfortable with what the car was doing, and I took over the steering. In stop-and-go traffic in towns, TACC does not respond as smoothly as I'd like when the car ahead starts to move, and I either gave it some pedal to get it going, or I disenged TACC. But on the highway, other than very windy roads, it worked really nicely overall.
I ended up just setting it for the speed limit or 2 mph over and letting the faster cars pass me. I passed maybe 4 real slow-pokes, one car and 3 trucks, and otherwise I was the one being passed. (Note: in heavy traffic I went with the flow of traffic, because I think that's safer than slowing down to the speed limit.) I was relaxed enough I didn't feel any need to speed.
The combined two legs totaled 362 miles. I used 204 Wh/mile. The trip took me 8 hours total, including my stop for a sandwich and a pit stop at the supercharger. The long leg, from home to Kelowna, was 242 miles. I started with 313 miles of range on the screen, and got there with 105 miles remaining. I might have been able to make the shorter direct drive to Revelstoke in one shot, but that's 305 miles and I didn't think I could make it, especially if anything went wrong. And the mountains are bigger on that route. This was the longest driving day of this trip. All the other days will be shorter, because by the time I get out from the last of my hiking lodges, it will be too late in the day for me to drive home. So on the way back I'll spend the night in Kelowna, at the hotel that has the supercharger.
There are a few things I dislike about the car and I've talked about them in other threads. But as a road trip car, it's the best I've ever had. Comfortable, relaxing (with AP), and more efficient than the S. (I test-drove an S once. Nice car but way too big for me.)
One nit: it has less room for cargo than the much smaller 2004 Prius. A lift-back is a much more practical arrangement than a sedan. And while the back seats fold down, the back center piece does not.
