Picked up my 85D at the factory yesterday. Great experience! They said this was the first 85D that they had delivered there (I guess all the prior production went into the delivery pipeline). The car is fantastic! It has the "yacht floor" and heated steering wheel (neither of which were on the original order). They went over everything in detail and were very helpful. The car had 23 miles on it and I was told that they are testing these first 85Ds carefully on the track out back to ensure quality. (The factory tour guide said he thought the best job was as a test driver where you get to turn everything up to 11 and roar around the track.)
The car is fast and handles incredibly well. As good as I remember from my test drive. I just feels like it is on rails. Most fun so far is accelerating onto the freeway. A few times I found myself going 100+ mph in the short distance available to catch up to the traffic. (I'll have to watch that.) It's fast (not insane, just crazy fast).
I stopped at the Supercharger in Roseville which charged at 300+mph in spite of me sharing a connection (B). My wife had time for a quick run-through at Nordstroms where, fortunately, they didn't have much new stock due to the port strike so this charge was really "free".
I wasn't really paying attention or trying to save energy. I was mostly interested in driving the car. The initial power consumption averaged about 340 Wh/mi for the trip which included a net 6500 feet elevation gain from sea level to my house and Donner summit.
The TACC works very well. You can easily adjust the following distance with the stalk and it adjusts to traffic nicely. I even had the collision warning trigger once when a bozo pulled in front of me and I was able to slow down quickly. One great feature is that if you use the turn signal, it will start to accelerate immediately as you move into the clear lane.
The lane departure warning is very nice. At first I thought that Caltrans had magically added texture to all of the lane markings since I kept feeling a subtile vibration in the steering wheel when I went over a line but I eventually figured out that it was the lane departure system vibrating the steering. Great implementation.
Didn't look at the software version and just got a notice that a new software update is available so I'm installing that now.
The factory is amazing. Highly recommend you take the tour if you are in the area. They basically take in aluminum sheets and ingots plus bins of plastic at one end and spit cars out the other end. The stamp presses take sheets of aluminum through a series of dies to cut and form them. Robots quickly move the pieces from one press to another... it's quite a ballet. They run about 400 pieces at a time before changing the dies to a different part. The assembly line is mostly robots. Workers place the stamped pieces in a jig and robots position, weld and rivet them together then attach them to the car. The robots change heads from riveters to welders to grasping jaws as needed. Supposedly the robots are accurate to 0.2mm! The body then goes off to the paint shop for a few days. When it returns, they remove the doors to make it easier to finish assembly and reattach them at the end of the line.
No sign of the Model X and I was told that they are all down in Hawthorne. They are building a second assembly line and the plan it to move all production to it then rebuild the first assembly line to produce all three cars. The factory history is interesting. GM built the factory in the 60s and it was notorious for having the worst quality and most labor problems (drugs, murder, etc.) of any plant. All of this changed 180 degrees when they started the joint NUMI venture with Toyota which used the same workers to produce the best quality cars... goes to show the value of good management.
The factory floor has islands of break/food areas and the guide noted that they had recently upgraded the coffee to Peet's brand which caused at least a 5% increase in productivity. There are also scattered cube farms on the floor where 50 to 100 people are monitoring the factory in each area.
All things considered, very brilliant car and company.
