When I was considering buying an electric car, it was extremely difficult to find concrete facts that weren’t politically influenced. It seemed like every site had an agenda, a lot of opinion, and very few facts. Most questions people as are related to charging, and it has it’s own page on this site.
Read on to find out more about abandoning gasoline, dealing with Tesla as a company, and the joy you experience the first time your car gets a software update and new features, all while parked outside your house.
Charging
vs
Gas
Every morning, when you get out to your Tesla, it will be fully charged and ready to go. This is great if you hardly ever drive more than that. Your car is always ready for what you throw at it. But there are some things they don’t tell you, and I will.
The car has a theoretical capacity that is advertised. My M3 has an advertised 310 mile range. But in reality, Tesla, the car itself, the phone app, and every employee at the company strongly warns you not to charge it that full. You tell it how full it should make itself in a number of easy and convenient ways, but 275 miles is where my car likes to be. Is that a huge deal? Not really, but it can be the difference between a commute not needing a destination charge and needing one. If you know you have a long drive the next day, you just tell it to charge to as much as it can (314 miles for me) and it will do that.
There is a such thing as “parasitic drain” where the on board computer eats battery power. It’s not huge, a few miles a day, but if you park at the airport and come back a few weeks later, you will have 10-20 less miles of range in the car (this is worse in cold weather). If you are a fanatic and keep checking it from your mobile app (or have a spouse that likes to), you will lose battery faster. If you trust the car is parked and asleep and don’t ever check, it will drain much slower. I have never found parasitic draining to matter, but it can be a surprise if you are used to gas cars.
When you have a gas car on a long road trip, you drive it until it needs gas, stop, fill it, and go again. You don’t care what gas station you stop at, and you don’t care how quickly the pump dispenses. But that all matters with Teslas. A lot. When you go on a road trip, the on board navigation computer will tell you where to stop to Supercharge and how long to charge for. When you get there, if there are a number of open stalls, it won’t tell you which one to take (yet), but you need to pick carefully so you get full charge power (this isn’t too difficult as they are clearly numbered). Charging may take 15 minutes, maybe 45. Fortunately, chargers are located a places with things to do (usually food), so it’s not a major inconvenience. I personally wouldn’t suggest taking a Tesla cross-country, although a 500-600 mile trip is very pleasant (especially if you have AutoPilot).
Never Get In A Cold Car Again
This is so hard to appreciate, but being able to open the app on your phone and turn on the seat heaters, car heater, and begin defrosting windows without stepping outside is amazing.
I tend to make my car warmer than my apartment, so I actually look forward to getting into it in the morning. If you do this while it’s plugged in, the battery doesn’t drain, the car heats up, and when you go out and unplug it, it’s warmed up and ready to go.
The screenshot shows individual control of defroster, temperature, and each seat heater. It’s neat to know that the heated seats are the most efficient way to make cabin heat and Tesla suggests using them on low to keep the cabin comfortable.
The Company
Tesla is great to work with when you are buying a car. They no longer pressure you and they will be honest about whether an EV is for you or not. They tend to push Model S/X vehicles on people who really should be buying a Model 3 by using lines such as “Well, this is our more luxurious vehicle.” This is true, but doesn’t tell the whole story. The Model 3 excels as it is the more reliable vehicle with fewer parts to wear and age, and that is important.
After a pretty rough period, Tesla has successfully adapted. Service is now easy to schedule in the mobile app. They will often text you for more information ahead of time, look through your vehicle logs, and pre-order parts that they may need. They give uber credits while your vehicle is in for service and will sometimes provide loaner vehicles. Service advisors are extremely kind, but even more overworked than before. Good luck getting the service centers on the phone, but they are quite responsive to text messages and they do return voice mails left for them. Unfortunately, it’s still true that if you have an intermittent problem, there is very little chance it will get fixed until it “breaks good” - then they will fix it. This is a drastic departure from most automakers who will “throw parts” at a problem until it’s fixed. They do have a unique “mobile ranger service” where a technician shows up at your house or work and fixes the car there, but some things just need to go up on a lift at the service center. You will be contacted a few days prior to service if Mobile Service can fix your problem, and they will come to you.
Software Updates
This is the most unbelievable part. This doesn’t usually affect the economy of the vehicle (although updates have increased range in Model 3 vehicles), and this is usually more emotional than anything. The company regularly sends software updates to your vehicle, which can be initiated from your mobile phone. Think of it like iPhone updates, but unlike iPhone updates, these make the car work better and fix old bugs. Where Apple used to be the king of amazing software, Tesla now is. Their cars get smarter and smarter. Users with AutoPilot find drastic improvements with every single update. There is no other car out there that can do this.
Safety
There probably isn’t a safer car on the road than a Tesla (this is an opinion!). This infuriates other car manufacturers who love to talk about Teslas crashing and catching fire (happens less often statistically than gas cars). The numbers are tough to nail down and it depends on who you believe. But at the minimum, Teslas are 40% less likely to have a collision, and I suspect more along the lines of 4x less likely to have a collision.
Some statistics - 52% of accidents are caused by the vehicle driver, and 20% of accidents are caused by the passenger (distraction). A staggeringly high percentage of accidents occur on Saturdays (as opposed to during the week). This is likely because traffic is different every Saturday. During the week, things are par for the course, but on Saturday, variables come into play and are harder to predict, yet the average driver can’t pay any more attention than they do during the week.
Teslas have this neat feature (also found on other cars, but not quite deployed in the same way) called the collision warning alert. This system watches the car(s) in front of you and “watches” your own foot on the gas pedal and immediately alerts you if the car in front of you is stopping and you haven’t reacted. I have found this system has a 100% accuracy rating. It has never once activated while I was looking at the car in front of me that was stopping. I have no doubt that I would have seen each car eventually, but this system completely prevents last minute “slamming on the brakes” that often happens in stop and go traffic. It’s worth noting, I’m not looking at my phone or a passenger, but maybe reading a street sign or trying to check another lane’s traffic - these are things that happen during momentary glances outside your lane. The cars now have “lane departure warning” and “lane keep assist” where they will warn you if you are departing the lane and in some cases put you back in it. This is, again, extremely helpful in more situations than you would believe.
Most people will tell you that they are above average driving skill (better than average drivers). But that can’t be, can it? That’s not how averages work. I admit that in almost 2 million miles of driving, I am probably a below average driver, and I’m glad to have some technology watching over my shoulder. And behind it. And next to it.