This thread seems as good a place to drop this as anywhere else.
From one of the BMW i groups I was on, there's a guy doing merch, and some of them include the slogan:
"Unplug and Play"
This thread seems as good a place to drop this as anywhere else.
From one of the BMW i groups I was on, there's a guy doing merch, and some of them include the slogan:
"Unplug and Play"
My mother in law is sheltering with us so there's a Model 3 Performance in my driveway. If you guys have any questions, I'd be happy to answer what I can while we have it here.
At this point in the stay at home situtation, all of my cars might as well be electrics as I move the battery charger around from one to the other :)
Anyhow, I had to run in to the office to pick up some equipment so I grabbed the Tesla. And just for fun, I decided to check out the latest Autosteer. Since my commute is on two-lane streets with a couple of short stretches of four-lane surface streets (ie, no interstates), that's what I tested on. It's not a great environment for autosteer. I should note that our car does not have the Full Self Driving option, so this is basically an advanced lane keeping device.
It's better than it was, much better at keeping station in a lane. The car drifts left and right less than it used to and it dealt with a couple of turn lanes fairly well. But it still had a couple of freakouts. I can see it being useful if you're about to do something you know is a bit distracted and the way ahead is clear, you could let the car assist you in staying in the lane. Things like "oh crap, I dropped my sunglasses and they're under the seat". But I don't think it could go five minutes in this sort of environment without human intervention. So, improvement but it's not there yet.
I did discover that there's an option for "FSD visualization", which adds various traffic lights and street signs to the display on the main screen. It normally just has other cars, lane markings and traffic cones. The car doesn't take action on them, but it's interesting to see what it can detect and recognize. Geek interest only.
The new "wood" interior looks great. Dunno why it's not like that from the factory, honestly.
I have my own problems with the voice commands. My problems are again based with Janel. The car thinks her name is spelled Janelle, and it cannot find a Janelle in my contact list. I also have her in there as "Nall" (which is what the four year old members of the family call her) and that works on my Dodge, but the Tesla is too smart to fall for that. I think the Dodge checks my contact list against what it heard - and it's hard of hearing, thus my use of the nickname - while the Tesla checks a dictionary. A dumb modern problem.
I also found myself at a light beside a true rarity - a decrepit air-cooled VW Beetle. You don't see them in rough shape just being used by cars anymore, they're mostly cherished. He turned off near the ACVW restoration shop, so maybe this will change...
Keith:
Thanks for this thread. Someone in Tesla marketing should be highlighting this!
Rog
Glad you're enjoying it!
As you can imagine, the black car isn't getting a lot of use right now with both of us working from home. The car did get a software update that added a dash cam viewer. That's something Janel's wanted for a while and it's a really logical thing. Get back to the car and instead of it saying "There was a Sentry event" that makes you wonder so you go home and pull the SD card and plug it into a computer and go to the right directory and find the most recent cluster of files and open them...now it says "There was a Sentry event - wanna see?" Then it plays the video for all four cameras synchronized. One is center screen while the others are thumbnails in the corners and you can tap on any one to make that the primary. Easy and simple to use. Janel is very happy.
The voice control does seem improved. It picked out "barchetta" in a song request which impressed me. Haven't tested it with Janel yet, though.
I'm usually a cranky old man when it comes to self-evolving interfaces. I don't like discovering that a familiar device now has to be accessed differently. It's a big worry with cars that have virtual controls and OTA updates like the Tesla does. So far, the interface hasn't changed. It's grown new features, but anything that worked when we got it still works the same way. Let's hope this continues. At some point, an automaker is going to roll out a new OS and totally revamp the interface and we'll see a generational divide in the reactions.
There was one change to the interface, unfortunately. The icon for the Sentry mode used to be HAL 9000. That included a full screen version when you triggered it. Unfortunately, it's now changed to a much less interesting generic icon because MGM (probably) filed a copyright claim. That's a shame, as I really liked it and it was easy to understand what it meant.
Hot weather update! Remember the glass roof and my concerns about solar gain? Now's the test. We've been seeing 100F temps and our high altitude sun is strong. I picked up a clip-in roof sunshade to cut down on the heat and it's helped a lot. We don't clip it in and out regularly, it's basically acting like a removable tint. We also put a shade in the windshield when the car's parked, that's standard around here. I had to get a Model 3-specific one because that windshield is HUGE. You don't realize how much of a rake it has.
The AC is definitely more powerful than the heater, so I suspect the glass roof is as much to help the heater out as it is style. The car will turn on the AC if the interior temp gets above 105F. This is nice, but it's also there to protect that big touchscreen. I've found that the ND Miata in my driveway has been giving "my screen is too hot so I'm going to turn it off" warnings pretty much every time I drive it these days, and of course that would be a real problem in the Tesla. This means the car makes all sorts of weird noises when it's parked and left alone, which can freak out passers-by. When you tell it to bring the interior temp down to 75F, it sounds like it's preparing to hover or something.
I did almost get run over in a parking lot the other day - an old work truck pickup decided to leave his parking space as I was just finishing a similar maneuver, and I had no option for evasive action due to another car that was behind. The horn works and prevented a trailer hitch/Tesla interaction :) The car is supposed to save a video file of the full 360* camera array when you hit the horn, but that particular video won't play back on the screen. I might pull the SD card and see if the computer can read it. Had it been an actual collision, it could have been useful for insurance purposes. Since Janel works in construction, she honks the horn every time she goes into reverse so we know this feature usually works because we have many video files of her backing up. Was the fact that the Tesla is silent a factor in this? If I'd been in the V8 Miata going whomp whomp whomp whomp, would he have heard me and not started to back out? Dunno.
I can hear a light rattle in the vicinity of the passenger's door. I'm going to have to go hunting for it. Probably wouldn't be audible in any of our other vehicles but this is a downside of the quiet EV.
Average efficiency for the last 30 miles is 256 Wh/mi. That's quite a bit better than we saw in the winter. No surprise there, and I suspect a big portion of that is the change from heat to AC. It would be interesting to know how much more efficient the Model Y is at heating with the heat pump. Not that we're going to trade in, I'm very happy with a non-SUV.
With the FSD preview turned on, the car's display shows all sorts of extra info - I mentioned that earlier. There are a few things that amuse me about it. First, it is VERY aware of traffic cones, so if I ever autocross this thing I'm going to have a GoPro aimed at the screen. Also, it cannot figure out the Vanagon. As far as it's concerned, vans look like Ford Econolines with a short hood. The Tesla can't figure out what end of the VW is the front, so the "van" on the display keeps flipping back and forth. Also, it identified my XJ as a garbage can which seems like a fairly rude editorial comment on the part of the fancy car.
Have you seen the clear uv blocker tint? It's legal for all the glass including windshield. My buddy put it on his 993 in florida and loves it.
The solar gain is useful for this car in the winter. I also have real concerns about tint longevity - I plan on keeping this car for a couple of decades. So we'll probably just stick with the fold up window covers. But it's an interesting idea.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Acquired a customer with a single motor Model 3 after no other indie wanted to work on it. Four tires and alignment, after 25k the rear tires were done. (Side effect of heavy regen braking I assume)
To do an alignment, you have to trick the car into thinking you are in it so that it will stay in Neutral. What is interesting is that there appears to be a seat sensor (it will shift into Park when you get out of the car, not just when you open the door) but it ignores that if you leave the seat belt buckled. Or maybe this was a built in way to trick the car into staying in Neutral. Anyway. Car was "on" for a half hour while I fought the alignment, when it was 95 degrees in the building.
Yes, the air conditioning is phenomenal!!
It felt like the driver seat was cooled too, which is pretty smart. The interesting thing to me was that the car's range only went down by 4 miles, from 266 to 262 miles remaining. So it would seem to be pretty energy efficient too.
Update! I posted a thread on a friend who went cross-country in a Model Y. You can read it here.
There have been a couple of interesting things here, though. The funny one is Janel - she took her 2000 Grand Cherokee out to a trailhead a couple of days ago and it was low on gas. So she had to stop at a gas station for the first time since May 1st. The time before that was in January, I think. She still doesn't like gas stations and she also asked if the Jeep always felt so squishy.
More along the lines of "living with an EV" - she took the car on a run to Eagle last week. That's about 125 miles down the interstate. The car has enough range to get there and back but there's a supercharger in Glenwood Springs . She realized on the way that she was running early so she stopped off at the Glenwood Supercharger to hang out for a few minutes anyhow. On the way home, though, she got pulled off the highway at the Glenwood Springs exit. There was a fire that had shut down the interstate. In our neck of the woods, there aren't a lot of alternative routes.
Normally it would be a 95 mile trip home. Her detour added an extra 50 miles and about 90 minutes to the trip as now she had to go up and over. For some reason at the time we thought it was longer, but there you go. Had she been running with the expectation of a non-charge trip, that could have made things interesting as she would have been bumping up against her max range. As it was, she had lots of range in the battery thanks to that previous stop and she was in a town with a Supercharger. So no drama, but it was the first situation where running an EV could have potentially been a problem. There was a public Tesla "destination charger" at a small town en route so there was that to fall back on. That would have been about 25 miles of range for every hour of charging so it would have got her home with a bit of an extended stop. There was also a Supercharger in Aspen that would have added another 50 miles to the trip via an out-and-back trip to get there.
This is a bit of an extreme situation - a car that could have been expecting to use the upper limits of its range and a surprise detour on the return leg that is significant and through a very remote area. But it's the first time we could have theoretically been caught out. As it was, the availability of Superchargers kept it from being nothing more than annoying.
The fun continues. Colorado is on fire. I-70 is closed through Glenwood Canyon for the forseeable future as it burns. The easiest detour is over Independence Pass, which is a squirrely little thing with a bunch of hairpins and a max length limit. A semi decided that wasn't real, got stuck and CDOT has closed the pass because people are idiots and can't be trusted.
So what's usually a straightforward blast up the interstate is now a lot more complicated. The shortest route is about 6 hours, up from roughly 4. So I decided to see what that meant for the Tesla.
According to the trip planner, a normal trip to Denver takes 4 hours plus two 5 minute charging stops. I'd probably charge for 10 minutes at one, but hey.
With the 2 hour detour through Salida, the planner suggests a 25 minute charging stop at a Supercharger on the way. I didn't know there was one in Poncha Springs. Probably because I've never heard of Poncha Springs, although looking at the map I've driven through it. So that's not too bad. There are very few gas stations on that route as well, so ICE vehicles would want to check the gauge before heading over the passes.
There's an alternate route that goes north instead of south, although it takes a bit longer to traverse in an ICE. It's a lot less EV friendly, to the point where Tesla suggests you actually backtrack up the Interstate to the Glenwood superchargers. That would cost you the majority of an hour of driving time if I'm working the maps right. This is the first time I've come across a route that really punished the Tesla. Now, if we had a 517-mile Lucid Air... ;)
If it wasn't for the idiot trucker closing down Independence Pass, it would be an easy (and gorgeous) run through Aspen with a single 15 minute charge. Still 6 hours of total time - Independence is not the interstate - but that's the third option.
So, three options for getting to Denver when the canyon is on fire (or has a rock smash through the interstate, which happens every couple of years). One is quite workable. One could be if the road was open (which it would not be in the winter, as that's a seasonal pass). One which would be possible but a real pain.
Turns out it wasn't a truck that shut down Independence Pass, that was the Colorado DOT saying "we know what you idiots are going to do, so the road is closed".
The semi that got stuck - actually laid it on its side because he couldn't keep off the shoulder - was on Cottonwood Pass. I don't know how he thought that was a good idea, I think they only paved it this year. This is not a good time to try to get through Colorado.
Not really Tesla relevant, but hey. It certainly currently affects how you decide to take a road trip right now, and that's pretty relevant.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
The current situation in Colorado reiterates : no matter the time of year KNOW the conditions, and be prepared for the unexpected. Both being non-condional on travel by EV, ICE, bicycle, horse or foot.
Another update. The car has grown some new capabilities or I've just learned about them.
I mentioned some time ago that having the car lock itself when you walk away bugs Janel at home, because she doesn't want her car locked when it's in the garage. Well, one of the recent updates now lets you tell the car not to lock when it's at home. Thank you for that Tesla, because I was always the one who received the direct feedback about how annoying this is ;) I also found that I can tell the car to fold in the mirrors when it's parked at certain locations and not locked, specifically our garage. So it's perfect - the car locks and folds the mirrors when it's away from home. At home, it does not lock but still folds the mirrors. The unfolding is GPS based so it doesn't do that until it leaves the driveway.
Which brings up another change. You can now display the rear-facing side cameras as well as the rear camera when backing up. The mirrors - if unfolded - rotate down so you can see by the wheels. This gives great visibility and you don't need the side mirrors when backing out of the garage. Good thing, because as noted they don't unfold immediately.
I also discovered that you also get the rear side camera view if you activate the rear camera while driving (there's an icon just below the little picture of the car). This eliminates blind spots pretty nicely. You have the radar display but it's easier to glance over at the moving full color images. You can see in the radar display where that white...Civic?...sits relative to the Tesla. And yes, every other car on the road is a Tesla to a Tesla :) This is a tease about what it might be like to deal with camera-based rear views sometime down the road. It's kinda convenient to glance in one place and see all three views. Is it better than swiveling your head all over the place? It might be, but you'd definitely need enough screen real estate. I wonder if the new Cadillac Lyriq with the widescreen dash screen will show rear cameras at the edges of the screen?
I may end up using this on the highway for better situational awareness. To switch back to the full screen reverse cam, you just swipe down and it remembers. That's ash on the screen from the massive wildfires just a few miles away, looks like it's time to give it a wipe.
I kicked the Tesla out of the garage for the day while I was doing some wood finishing. So the car spent about 24h sitting in the hot, high-altitude August sun. As noted earlier, it won't let the interior temp get above 100F or so and it was 101F in the shade. The car was running the HVAC most of the day. It used almost exactly 20 miles worth of range to do this. That's an interesting data point about how much energy the AC uses.
Guess that's when the solar roof would come in handy
I was talking to a friend about charging infrastructure and what it might mean to Electrify America if the Mach-E is a hit. If the network can't handle it, it may put EVs back in public perception. Of course, it may also show more people that most of your charging is done at home. Regardless, somehow I got the idea that it would be interesting to see zones of coverage laid out on a map.
I grabbed a screenshot of the Supercharger stations in Colorado and drew a circle with a 210 mile diameter centered around each one - the idea being that if you drive to the edge of the circle, you have enough range with a 210 mile EV to get back. 210 miles was chosen because it's 75% of 280 miles, and Colorado is 280 miles from north to south so it's easy to scale.
If two circles touch, you can get from one to another. Of course it's not ideal because maybe you want to run laps at High Plains Raceway or roads don't go straight or whatever, but this is a 30,000 foot view. The edges of the map may be serviced by stations that are not visible on my screenshot - Dodge City has at least two in range, for example. I didn't put circles on the grey icons, those are planned stations that aren't up and running yet so this is how it looks today. I don't think they'd make any difference to coverage in this case, just density.
I was surprised, honestly. Heck, I didn't even bother pegging all the chargers in the Denver area because it was getting a little dense. I may do the same thing for the EA network. The reason I used the Tesla network was because I know all of those Superchargers are fast chargers, you can't filter EA quite so easily on their own site and I didn't spend the time digging through the user-submitted sites like PlugShare to see if I could filter. Maybe this weekend.
This doesn't mean they're all convenient. I think a trip to Durango for us would involve a little out-and-back to Farmington if we weren't staying overnight. It's more a test of what's theoretically possible.
Agent98 said:Respectfully disagreeing...(this is a cool thread from a car geek standpoint) random thoughts:
Electrics are not there yet. The operating cost savings and insurance penalties don't allow for a reasonable payback vs a $16,000 Ford fiesta or Toyota corolla.
Powerpacks are non sustainable from a scarcity of rare earth elements standpoint, power/weight ratio still sucks
Electrics will soon lose their operating cost advantage as soon as government sees a dip in road tax revenue
Tesla had a $1B operating income loss last year, won't be solvent in five years. Gravity still works, cannot sustain losses indefinitely. The actual product Musk sells is hype, not cars...so that's why it hasn't hit the fan yet.
I'm not too thrilled about comping some millionaire $7000 tax credit so he can purchase a $50,000 golf cart then drive in the HOV lane and sneer at me in my ICE car...
How can this vehicle ever be mainstream with a sky high price tag and charger requirements? Waiting to see the first older apartment building in an urban area with row after row of charging stations. How many landlords will allow tenants to install chargers at rental properties...
Say what you will about GM, but they cannot make an EV that sells more than a handful of cars. They ARE fulfilling a niche market though...at 1.18% of total US demand. Interested to see how the largest car maker on earth VW will be able to thrive in the EV market with the next gen models coming out, If Ford GM VW cannot make it work, what hope is there for Tesla, Fisker, all these stock market pumpers.
I wonder about the safety of very high voltage systems bouncing over the road, catching fire in garages, being involved in MVA's and as they age.
There's much that can be done for ICE ---consolidate 24 grades of gasoline to two- summer blend and winter blend for the entire US. Roll back so called safety standards to 2000 levels - I can buy a new Harley without 15 air bags, back up cameras, lane warnings -why not a new car?
The Tesla isn't competing for cheap car. It's. Competing against High end Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar's As an American you should be glad of its success in those areas. If you want cheap transportation buy a used Volt. That's an American success story, at least it's quality and reliability is even if the American buying public can't recognize the value it offered.
As far as it's stock price, that's based not on profit but potential. Sort of like Buying Microsoft in the early days. Those who could recognize its value did very well while those who went by past performance bought Kodak.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Here's a question I'd hoped someone else had already asked. I'm old. Getting pretty stiff. To the point of having a hard time getting in and out of my Jaguar XJS it's almost easier to sit on the pavement pull my legs out, get them underneath me and then stand up. ( almost! )
How is the Teasla to get in and out of?
About average for a car. Not noticeably different than a typical sedan, although it's quite probably a little roomier and taller than how I remember the XJS. It's got a very high roofline which may make your life a lot easier. I don't notice it being much different than the E39 BMW, but now I'll have to pay attention.
And there's always the Y, which is the SUV variant that sits taller, has seats on risers (maybe those could be retrofitted, as the 3 and Y have a lot in common) and probably has a taller roof as well.
Your best bet may be to drop by your local Tesla "store" and plop your butt into one to see.
at what point will the Mach E have to sell to be a real problem at the Highway charging stations ?
is there a general percentage Tesla/ ford etc use as far as home charging vs charging point ?
And I wonder how China will do it since they are really pushing EVs , yet so many live in Apartment blocks . Maybe they can make the light poles into mini charging stations !
Actually, I believe that exact thing is being done in LA.
So I was wrong - I thought the Mach-E was primarily supported by the Electrify America network. But that's just part of the "FordPass charging network". Which is good, because the EA network still has some growing to do. The user experience will be really important. Difficulty in authenticating or activating chargers, wide ranges in costs, inoperative chargers, lines - these are all things that will turn off owners. The last will be the one that will get the headlines because everyone loves to see a gas line and it's easy to illustrate with a picture, but I suspect overall hassle will be more of a problem if it's there. I want it to work, because I think the Mach-E has the real potential to be a mass-market EV and if it goes sour, it'll hurt the whole market.
They still have some work to do on their website - if you put in a couple of end points and tell it you only want to see FordPass fast chargers, it'll show where they are but not where you should stop. Makes it tough to do trip planning but I assume the car will be smarter.
https://www.ford.com/buy-site-wide-content/overlays/try-the-tech/
I'd love to see stats on how frequently existing EV owners charge at home vs on the road. I suspect it's at home a very high percentage of the time, but that's not when you're going to be thinking about it!
Keith Tanner said:I'd love to see stats on how frequently existing EV owners charge at home vs on the road. I suspect it's at home a very high percentage of the time, but that's not when you're going to be thinking about it!
I am sure that Tesla knows ALL :)
Not sure they will let out the info , but its probably pretty high for home , and 2nd would be work ,
I dunno about work in the case of Teslas. They're all long range enough that getting home every day is not a problem. But I agree that they have that database!
If I ever get an EV, it'll be almost always charged at home. Unless I go back to working at the office and they install charging stations.
Thanks for this thread. We've been considering an EV and getting feedback from true car folks is greatly appreciated.
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