Living with a car from the future: Tesla Model 3

That seems to be a common opinion from anyone I've spoken to. The reason I like the idea of hub motors is that it makes the drivetrain as simple as possible. Fewer mechanical elements, just the purity of wheels driving themselves. And the demands for liquid cooling would be lower if we also had real airflow around the motors.

But the need for friction brakes really torpedoes the whole concept unless someone is willing to take a radical rethinking of how everything works - and even then it wouldn't be easy. I guess I'll keep watching the motorcycle world, which has always been more open to real weirdness. 

Fun thought (getting further and further away from the usefulness of this thread) - if you could come up with a hub motor that was the size/shape of a drum brake, it would make it really easy to retrofit to older cars. Hmm, I have that old Cadillac...

In reply to Keith Tanner :

That is a fun thought...

I think of the motorcycle world as being even more conservative than the four-wheeled world. They're still sticking their front wheels on the ends of slidey tubes loaded in bending. Motor vehicles are chock full of ultra-refined versions of archaic systems, but that's gotta be way up there...

Two words: oval pistons.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

That was just Honda, not the entire motorcycle world

Ransom said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

That is a fun thought...

I think of the motorcycle world as being even more conservative than the four-wheeled world. They're still sticking their front wheels on the ends of slidey tubes loaded in bending. Motor vehicles are chock full of ultra-refined versions of archaic systems, but that's gotta be way up there...

It's not like other front suspension designs haven't been tried.  But nothing seems to equal the same performance to weight/maintenance ratio as the simple sliding tube fork.  Same with bicycles.

Keith Tanner said:

Fun thought (getting further and further away from the usefulness of this thread) - if you could come up with a hub motor that was the size/shape of a drum brake, it would make it really easy to retrofit to older cars. Hmm, I have that old Cadillac...

Here's a company that has made a few. I also know of another person who claims to own a prototype OEM car hub motor whos trying to adapt into an electric motorcycle of theirs.

This old link claims that they were getting 100 horse and 700+ Torque (?!?!!) out of each wheel motor at peak. They've since been bought by the Swedes.

this company had an awd converted Civic Type R at sema in 2018 using electric hub motors https://orbisdriven.com/our-technology/

I let a coworker drive the car today - don’t tell Janel. He was impressed at how good a car it is once you get past the EV alien feel. Ride quality, steering, noise, general feeling of cosseting. We both agree that it feels a lot lighter than it is. Man, I can see how you would accidentally punish the tires really badly and why these things are doing so well at autox.

Also, that glass roof kept the interior at 80F all day until the sun went down. It was 48F inside when I left work. Preheated seats FTW! It did seem to use a bit more energy going home at night in the cold - I didn’t check for sure, but somewhere around 23 miles of indicated range for the 18 mile trip. Not an exact measurement obviously, but with that big battery it’s not critical. It would be more important if I were pushing the range limits on my commute. 

In reply to Ian F :

A fascinating topic, and I'll stop my imminent threadjack here, but perhaps you'll join me over in Sprockets (or whatever the new name is) if I get around to a "funny front end" thread...

Snow snow snow! Woo!

Yesterday I put right around 50 miles on the car.  Here's what went on. If you don't want to read one of my novels, skip to the notes :)

It was cold for this time of year, somewhere in the 20s. So seat heaters and climate control on the way to work. Then I pre-warmed the car to leave and go pick Janel and her mom up at the airport where it was snowing. Big fluffly flakes, which meant that they were a bit delayed. I sat in the car with the heat on and the seat heater warming my butt while I watched Men In Black on Netflix. 5 minutes before they showed up, I put their seat heaters on so it would be toasty. I also had the rear defroster on to melt the snow that was accumulating. I picked them up, drove to Mom's place to drop her off and chat for a while (turned the seat heaters on again to pre-warm), drove to dinner (again with the seat heaters) and back home. I also had to use the defroster a fair bit to keep the windshield free of ice because the squirters froze up.

So, heavy battery abuse, really. Limited regen (see next post). 50 miles of driving, a bunch of sitting and waiting, lots of heater use and the car used an indicated 100 miles of range. If it were a single 50 mile trip, I think it would have been a lot less "thirsty" but this is a good example of a winter day around town. 

Notes:
- the hot air heating system is subtle. The interior temp does not seem to respond as fast to the heater as the AC when you're trying to change the interior temp by 25F or more. This may help explain the glass roof to help warm the car, but it may also be physics of gases vs resistive heating. The interior temp certainly does get up to your desired temp, but if you're used to an ICE blowing very hot air on your footsies (once the engine is warm)  you will miss that. It was a bit like the difference between a good furnace in your house and a roaring fireplace. Even if the temp is the same, the fireplace makes you feel warmer. That's what's missing. You're not physically cold but psychologically you're not as warm.

- The seat heaters are rock stars, though - immediate and very effective. 

- the front defroster is very strong and thawed out the streaky ice buildup with no trouble. So the car can obviously make lots of hot air if it wants to. If you want to feel hot air blowing, that's the trick. Rear defroster is a standard wire type with a very cool pattern and it'll melt an inch of fluffy snow without a problem.

- the car did warn me about cameras that were covered in snow, so I was on my own for blind spot monitoring. I used the windows instead.

- the windows drop slightly when you open the door, fairly normal on modern cars. But with a buildup of ice on the seals, it sounded crunchy every time and made me wince a little. I suspect an ND Miata would feel the same.

- traction control seems quite effective. I did a little, umm, low-speed dynamic evaluation and the car will put down the power very effectively on a slippery surface with good stability. You can feel the car pulling itself straight even if you've got a bit of slip angle going. Slalom maneuvers are also well controlled, with the front end working hard to turn the car as you hack away on a downhill snowy road. A little bit of slip but you would have to try very hard to get into trouble. Overall, the car felt like a lighter car on snow tires instead of a heavy one on all-seasons. So the DSC is very good as expected. The ABS feels like ABS.

I think it'll make a pretty good winter car.

Regen: when I left work, the car warned me that limited regen was available due to low battery temps. Which exposed some interesting behavior and tells us something about the regen braking ability.

Above 25-30 mph, there was little regen braking. It felt more like cutting the throttle on an automatic.

Between 30 and 8, there was strong regen available. It felt normal. Now it feels like my manual Cummins with the exhaust brake engaged, but stronger.

Below 8 mph, there is never very much regen available. The wheels have to be moving a certain speed. This is one reason we can't get rid of friction brakes on EVs, alas.

This makes sense. If the battery can only take, say, 500 W of charging, that may be 100% of the regen generated at 20 mph. But it could be just 33% of what the car could generate at 60. I don't know if it's that linear, but let's pretend it is. So you'll only get 33% of your usual deceleration at 60 mph but 100% of it at 20. It still felt like there was a rapid increase in the amount of available regen at a certain speed, though.

Still, it's interesting to feel the car go a little non-linear just because it's cold outside, and you have to adapt your driving. Having to use the friction brakes so much more often takes away a lot of the smoothness of driving the car, I hadn't realized how much the "one pedal" driving flavored the experience. It felt a lot more conventional and less otherworldly.

Janel discovered the lack of regen yesterday when she went to leave work. She had the same reaction I did, that it took a real mental readjustment to go back to defaulting to friction brakes. She was a little more worried than I was about it, because she hadn't read the entire 300 page owner's manual before we took delivery  Her take was that it was a Californian car that wasn't happy in the cold weather and wanted to return to the land of sunshine and beaches.

She also agrees that the heat does not respond as quickly as the AC does - I think that's just physics. She's also a lot more sensitive to cold than heat, and keeps trying to override the auto HVAC without really knowing what she's doing. I'll have to ride with her and get it sorted.

The two of us left the house at the same time this morning when it was about 10F. Her in the Tesla with the seat heater on full blast, me in the XJ with a clogged heater core. One of us was much warmer than the other.

Reading this thread has really had me wanting a Tesla.  Last weekend my wife and I stopped by the dealer and test drove a new model S, and all I can say is wow.  One of the first cars I've ever driven that truly lived up to all the hype.  So we're trying to budget for a used model s or model 3 in about a year, if everything goes well.  

We were out doing stuff on the weekend, and a grey Model 3 came screeching to a stop and the driver leapt out to chase Janel down as she got into our Tesla parked at the side of the road. That's only a slight exaggeration - I was watching in the rear view mirror of the CRX and there was a lot of enthusiasm on display. Turns out this lady was an EV en-thooo-siast and she wanted Janel to join the local EV club. I looked them up on FB.

I was a member of a Lotus club in the pre-Elise days. The flood of new Lotuses changed that club, because they went from cars you had to work to own to ones that you could buy new with a warranty. We also saw the same thing when the factory turbo Miata hit the market, the owner mix was very different. I see the same thing happening to this EV club. It used to be that you had to be a real enthusiast to own an EV, or you had to be willing to pony up for a "big" Tesla. But with all the Model 3s popping up, EVs are becoming mainstream and just..cars. That's what ours is to us, really. A really interesting car, but I'm more interested in how it works than proselytizing. 

There is one member who seems to be on a quest to visit as many Superchargers as possible with his Model X. Gets him to visit some unusual places, I guess! He's at 60. AZ, CO, UT, NV, WY and CA - he published his spreadsheet :) Another club member is at 57. We're at 5 and are not expecting that to change anytime soon.

My father-in-law is a hypermiler and gets legitimately excited by squeezing out extra mpg in his diesel cars. Different strokes for different folks.

This again! I went to register the car today. Ouch. New cars hurt. But I did see that there's a special $50 "Plug-in Electric Vehicle Fee" - I'm assuming that's to recover a small portion of the lost gas tax that's used for infrastructure maintenance. As the husband of someone who is in the heavy highway construction industry, I am very aware of how that tax is used and how it's been eroding for years. So I'm okay with that. I have questions about a few of the other fees (both my 1966 Cadillac and my 2019 Tesla have "age of vehicle" surcharges) but so it goes. The clerk who took my money (apologetically) actually had a bunch of questions about the car - range, what it's like to drive, etc. Her father in law had driven one and found it really jerky to drive. If you're used to going foot to the floor at every light and you haven't accustomed yourself to high regen, that's very likely.

I also got this special sticker. It's basically a parking permit for EV-only spots, probably primarily for ones that are beside chargers. Fair enough. I imagine enforcement can spot a Tesla easily enough, but with things like electric Konas running around looking just like ICE Konas, it's a reasonable thing. I was also charged a 25 cent "materials fee" for the sticker 

When I went to install the plates, I took my first look at the front plate mount. It sticks on with 3M double-sided tape. I have one that attaches to the tow hook location (for Miatas, test unit that didn't make it into the catalog). Let's see if it fits. That chrome plate surround is really nicely made, it has anti-rattle rubber on the back and the plate fits so tightly I thought I'd scrape the paint off sliding it in. Very nicely organized too.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Is that plain old double-sticky tape, or is that structural automotive adhesive in peel-and-stick-to-apply form? Trying to make this okay in my head...

In reply to Ransom :

Looks like VHB. Its going nowhere if its VHB. 

Now your latest "car of the future" update. At SEMA, there were very few Teslas on display other than in the wheel manufacturers. But in at least one booth, a Model 3 shared floor space with a McLaren. That has to make someone in the Tesla branding department very happy.

Okay, real "car of the future" stuff. While I was away, Janel spent most of her time hanging with her little neice and nephews since their parents were also out of town. This meant the Model 3 spent 3 nights away from home and the charger. Janel used up about 130 miles of range running around and running Sentinel and heating the interior to 78F on cold mornings. She was starting to get a leetle bit of range anxiety but she was probably never more than 8 miles from home :) Still, she's getting more comfortable using it like a real car.

She did have one problem, though (other than me repeatedly flashing the lights on the car when she was unloading a 3 year old). She turned off the Bluetooth on her phone to save battery at one point, and she didn't have her key card on her. The car didn't recognize her. She opened the app and told the car to unlock, but then she couldn't make it go. The car was asking her to swipe her key card to turn on the, umm, ignition. There's a button for "start" on the app as well but she didn't realize that. The car did remind her to turn on Bluetooth so she got it going that way without having to call me for assistance. It's funny now but it wasn't very funny at the time, I am told.

Slippery said:

In reply to Ransom :

Looks like VHB. Its going nowhere if its VHB. 

Yeah, it's the good stuff. Most Tesla owners are worried that it'll take the paint off :) There are a number of alternative front plates on the market but as far as I can tell they all use the plastic louvers as a mounting spot, which is a problem if someone parks in front of you by Braille. I'll try my (very solid) tow hook mounted option and if that doesn't look good, I'll stick this one on. It'll probably hide the fishy face a little bit, actually.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Re: Fishy face; I have moments where I reexperience the first weirdness of the "face with no mouth" thing when I first saw them. I keep wondering now why they put in an area that looks so much like it's missing a grille. Was there no way to handle that which took advantage of not needing one? I do think they're generally very good looking cars.

They're good looking from some angles and derpy from others. That's a big greenhouse and a low nose, and once in a while the proportions look weird. I don't get the missing grille look either, that's one of the reasons we got a black one.

In reply to Ransom :

Pedestrian impact regulations, possibly?