Living with a car from the future: Tesla Model 3

I like the updates. 

Isnt recommending that new tires go on the rear an industry standard thing because normal drivers can cope with understeer much better than oversteer in a panic situation?

I would suggest they go on the front for steering/braking purposes (and because I like oversteer), but I can see the logic. I might have to check some other owners manuals.

I'll get the alignment checked then make the call on ordering new rubber. It'll be a different set of priorities than usual, noise levels will matter. The OE ones are about $250.  

It's pretty much universally recommended that new tires go on the rear to avoid certain death by oversteer. 

What did you mean in your summary by the 100k and 150k cap on the batteries?  
 

That was a poor description of the warranty. The battery warranty guarantees the battery will have at least 70% of its original capacity remaining at 120k miles for my car. The Model 3 Standard Range, which has a smaller battery pack than my car, carries that guarantee to 100k miles. The Model S and X, which have the biggest packs, carry it to 150k miles. Using both "cap" (for mileage cap) and "capacity" was clumsy of me.

https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty

I suspect this is because it's related to charge/discharge cycles, and of course a smaller battery will not go as far for the same number of cycles. Maybe? This also means the chart I included in that post may be 20% optimistic for my 3 because it is based on the S.

Fun calculation I came up with while driving for an hour today: we're (finally!) putting solar on the house. Our new array will generate 1 mile of Tesla range per minute :) 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

which solar panels are you going with? We had Sunpower panels installed and while we are very happy with the production and warranty, the end-user monitoring is very dumbed-down. 

Keith Tanner said:

Fun calculation I came up with while driving for an hour today: we're (finally!) putting solar on the house. Our new array will generate 1 mile of Tesla range per minute :) 

are you also going to put in a battery "wall"  in the garage ?

Sunpower panels, about 16.5 kW worth. 

No plans to do battery backup at this time, although apparently the Tesla has the hardware to work as one. I have threatened to buy an old Leaf and put on blocks beside the shop to just work as a battery :)

On a 1000 mile road trip right now, it's been good. Currently staying with friends who arrived in their XC40 from 550 miles away. More later. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

16.5 kW - wow, that's quite a system!

I've had a couple of people mention that the array is fairly hefty. I've got room on the shop roof to make it 50% larger, and that's without going to higher power panels :) It should pay off in about 10 years or so, and I'm hoping for a little bit of bonus savings from decreased solar gain on the shop.

Back from a road trip!

This one was different as it was the first one where we expected to charge multiple times during the day. Basically, we headed to Vegas for SEMA. That's 500 miles each way across some fairly empty country - there's a stretch of interstate with a legit 105 miles between gas stations.

The car told us to expect about 70-75 minutes of charging for the 500 mile trip, assuming we started with a full battery. Interestingly, plotting out the same trip in a 405 mile Model S only drops that charging time down to 65 minutes compared to our 315 mile 3. That's because you're going to burn through just as much energy and they don't really charge any faster, so the only advantage is the range of that initial charge. But using a 272 mile "Standard Range" 3 bumps it way up to a full 120 minutes, probably because you're having to charge very close to 100% to make it work and that's considerably slower than charging to 80%. That one even involved a 5 minute top-up in Vegas itself.

However, we didn't stick to the plan. We changed things up a little bit for various reasons such as biological needs or the discovery of a charger-adjacent Dairy Queen. The car adapted and juggled the proposed charging stops and times so the total trip time didn't really change. The car charges fastest in the middle of the battery level, so multiple stops to sip works better than running the battery way down and doing a longer stop - unless you decide to grab dinner at the same time. Charging stops varied from a nice mellow picnic area with no traffic noise to a hotel parking lot surrounded by fast food restaurants to the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel.

Tip: if you want a good business, build a DQ beside an EV high speed charger.

We did find that the car's range estimate was a little bit optimistic. It would estimate that we'd arrive at the next charging stop with (say) 20% battery and the reality would be more like 12%. We weren't running much HVAC and were sitting right about the speed limit, so I'm not sure why. There was one leg where it was wrong the other way by about the same amount. We were driving over multiple passes but the car is aware of those - you can see it actually planning for an increase in battery power on the way down a pass. Most of the time, I wasn't paying much attention to the car's requests and we just used our own rhythm - this is a stretch of Interstate I know far too well.

In Vegas, we'd booked one night at the Linq which has destination charging for Teslas. The first charger didn't work. The second one didn't want to connect for some reason. We were pretty low on power at this point so we just said "screw it" and plugged into the Superchargers in the same lot. When we came back from dinner, I tried a third destination charger and it worked fine. Vegas, man.

That Vegas supercharger was also a V3, which let the car suck down electrons very fast. It actually peaked at over 900 mi/hr. Interestingly, we didn't see that sort of speed at the V3 chargers in Beaver, UT. Also, note the cost in the bottom corner. We're still not being charged for Supercharging which I'm not going to complain about.

As part of our stay in Vegas, we were staying in a timeshare with no on-site chargers. I know the car will use up about 1% of charge every day to maintain the battery. What we hadn't realized is that the Sentry monitoring pulls another 2-3% or so, so we were losing between 3-4% every day. We'd come in to town with about 32% charge, and after 4 days the car sent me a text message that Sentry had been disabled because our charge was down to 20%. We'd expected some charge erosion but now I know that the Sentry is a surprisingly big draw.

The friends we were staying with drove to Vegas in their electric XC40. As owner Zandr says, it's objectively the worst of the non-compliance EVs but he really likes it. Janel didn't enjoy riding in it, she felt the driveability was not as smooth as it should have been. I did not take the wheel :) They drove about 550 miles to get to Vegas using Electrify America chargers, and Zandr has learned a number of things on how to deal with them and their typical payment challenges. Otherwise, their trip was very much like ours. We both agreed that road tripping an EV is quite relaxing, because the 20 minute stop every 2 hours (or so) means you arrive more refreshed instead of burned out from an 8 hour death march. The lack of significant noise and vibration is also really nice, the car just wafts and the cruise is completely unobtrusive. I personally find the seats very comfortable. In many ways, it's like road tripping the E39 M5.

So there you go, another road trip. Once again, the electric car proves to just be a car. I'll do another post on electrification and SEMA, because that was really interesting.

Keith Tanner said:

...objectively the worst of the non-compliance EVs...

 Had to look that one up (cars specifically made to comply with rules to avoid issues with sales, so often compromise cars that are other models with batteries stuffed into them... probably not capturing it entirely but didn't want to just say "I had to look it up" without providing something for the next person )

...and Zandr has learned a number of things on how to deal with them and their typical payment challenges

I'm bummed that's still a thing this long after our experience with the Leaf. Sounds like the chargers have actual physical problems that cause the connectors to fail the negotiation part, but that's only one part of the issues? Not entirely applicable to this thread, but it sucks that what one would hope would be a standard for non-Tesla-specific charging has an integral flaw; hopefully the issue can be resolved without changing the interface; it's bad enough that EA may have a bunch of rework when one would hope for just lots of new rollout...

One of the real hallmarks of a compliance EV is very limited availability - ie, CA-only. They're not serious efforts with real limitations, so it's not fair to judge dedicated EVs by them. The Fiat 500e is a great example of one. That new Mazda EV looks suspiciously like it falls in the same category.

EA (and friends) have a lot of work to do on the user experience. Zandr reported "I'm ignoring UX and card reader issues. The app always worked". (UX means "user experience") He also reports that about 25% of the 150 kW chargers he encountered weren't working, but all the 350 kW ones were. Probably because they're all brand new.

For reference, 150 kW is about a V2 Supercharger, which is what was being installed until 2019 or so. The V3 is 250 kW (soon to be 300 with a software tweak being rolled out). I've come across a few V3 superchargers in the wild such as that one in Vegas, oddly it was the only one that delivered the higher charge rate. You can't really identify them from the outside unless someone puts a 250kW sign on the top like they did in Beaver.

The latest version of the CSS standard does include authentication so in theory you will be able to pull up, plug in and it all just works. In practice, that's not actually implemented yet according to reports in the field - or it's implemented in a way that is counter-productive and actually causes problems. Sounds like it's all just software at this point.

So the Tesla supercharger experience is still ahead of the rest of the market. It shows that it can be done and hopefully that will drive other networks to try to match that experience. If we want EVs to be mass market, making charging a zero-effort experience is a big part of that.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Maybe this is silly, but is there any reason EV charge stations can't operate exactly the same way as gas stations? IE, you pull up, swipe a credit card, and it starts charging? I have used Electrify America and ChargePoint stations and both require the user to have a dedicated app on their phone or else have a brand-specific physical RFID card on their person. Why? Gas stations don't require that level of interaction or forethought.

I'm guessing it has something to do with data harvesting. 

Well, some gas stations do :) Ever tried to fill a diesel pickup at a truck stop? It's a lot harder if you don't have the right gas card. You end up hiking across acres of blacktop to stand in line to surrender your card, then you have to go back and get it after pumping 25 gallons.

But yeah, it should be easy to charge. I suspect it's an attempt to force customer preference to one brand. I've never used anything but Tesla chargers so I'm not the right person to offer any sort of insight, but I can't think of why the charging station needs a lot of data on you and/or your car. 

One interesting thing from our most recent road trip. We were zooming along I-15 with the cruise set at about the speed limit when I saw flashing lights ahead - someone had maybe not been going the speed limit. There were no other cars around us and I moved over to the left lane to give a little more room. Then the car started to slow, as if a human driver had lifted off the pedal. It dropped down to about 50 mph until we were past the cop, then sped up again. 

The cruise control does occasionally slow down if it's in a place where every other Tesla slows down - there's one corner on I-70 that's tighter than it looks and can only be taken at 75 with intent, and I've found that the car will back off a little for that corner. It will also feather the accelerator when it looks like a car is about to drift into our lane as we pass. But this is the first time I've seen it react in this way to flashing lights two lanes over. I'd call it a correct behavior and Janel congratulated the car once I pointed out that I wasn't the one slowing down - she assumed it was me. This is just the cruise system, not autosteer or autopilot or FSD or anything you wouldn't expect to find on a 2019 VW.

Like I said, interesting.

Another road trip to Denver and back. Nothing too exciting, but a couple of things that might be interesting.

Visited another V3 Supercharger, arriving with about 15% charge. That let the charger unleash all the power, briefly ramping up to the full 250 kW. That's basically 1000 miles of range per hour of charging, or 16 miles/minute. It's a brief surge with a Model 3, but it's fun to see. I've mentioned before that charging speeds vary depending on the state of charge of the battery.

Here's what the charging rate looks like on a 3. You can see how spending the time to charge from 80-100% isn't really worthwhile if you're looking to minimize time at a standstill.

For comparison, here's the new Model S which can take the big power level all the way up to 40% battery.

Anyhow, it was just fun to see the big numbers. We had a total of 20 minutes of stopped time on our trip home from Denver, starting with right about 200 miles of range on board. The ETA forecast by the car was bang on, the actual power level when we arrived at the charger was about 4% less than forecast. This was through the mountains in cool temperatures.

Stopped in at the Tesla shop to check out a Y because Janel's only consistent complaint is that the 3 is shaped like a car. It's a very familiar thing, just taller. The seats are on pedastals and I'm pretty sure there's less headroom. I'd have to forego the top hat in this one. Talked to a Tesla employee who had traded in his Model 3 Performance for a dual motor Y because "I bought a house and you have to buy stuff for them!", he said the heat pump that is on all Model Ys and the new 3s made a significant difference in range erosion. Around town with the resistive heater, he saw a range hit of 30%, with the Y it's more like 10% (his numbers). The Y is a little hungrier than the 3 overall due to the hole it pokes in the air, though.

Also, had our first odd software problem. Three times while hoofing along a relatively busy Denver interstate, the car changed the cruise target speed from 60 down to 50 or 30. Basically, it immediately lifted off the accelerator and started to regen. I'd heard about this from a friend who rented a 3 a couple of weeks ago, but it's the first time I've had it happen. Easy enough to override, I just used the right pedal to accelerate and reset the cruise speed. Stopped using it for a few miles after the third time, and when there are other cars to pace off you don't really need cruise anyhow. After those three instances, it never happened again. In all three instances, there were some confusing lane markings and cars on both sides. It wouldn't surprise me for the car to back off if it anticipated a crash, but resetting the target? Odd. Smelled like a bug to me. 

I don't think I'd care for the car making speed decisions for me.  Even if they're decisions I should have made.  Is there a non-adaptive cruise control mode? 

I've played with the adaptive cruise on my wife's Fusion and while it's interesting tech I can't say as I really care for it.  Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety.

There is no equivalent to "dumb cruise". It will adjust speed based on the car in front of you, and you can set the following distance to "inadvisable" if you want to tailgate at 80. It just won't let you bump draft the car in front ): I suspect the vast majority of new vehicles are running "radar cruise" now. 

The adjustment to a different speed level is a new thing I've never seen before. It really felt like a bug, possibly related to some of the new FSD stuff being rolled out although we don't use FSD. In this weekend's 600 mile trip, it triggered three times in fairly short succession and it seemed to be related to other vehicles on both sides. I'm going to ping some Tesla insiders about it.

Sounds like the speed change is some sort of change related to the speed limit and the combination of slightly dodgy mapping, a bit of GPS error and a specific location with off ramps and surface roads in close proximity. There's a limit to how high above the speed limit TACC will engage on "non-divided highways", and for some reason the car thought it had left the highway and was going much faster than it should have for the surface street. If I'd been three "lanes" over, I could have been on a street with a 25 mph limit and the car won't let the cruise be set for more than 30 mph in that situation.

In other words, it may trigger again in that same area. It's behavior that's been in the cars for a while but I guess I haven't taken this piece of urban highway with the cruise on before.

I also learned that you have have it set itself to the speed limit or even "speed limit plus offset" if you always want to drive 5 mph over the set limit.

Also, the car does not seem to recognize variable speed limit signs with LED displays. It does recognize actual speed limit signs (as does the ND Miata), but not these. I don't have it set to react to signs so this is not a thing, but if you rely on the on-screen display for what the speed limit should be it won't be correct for things like the Glenwood Canyon construction zone.

I am still struggling to see how all those "smart" Things are really helping, and how often they surprise/scare people. I mean you understand what the car is doing/trying to do, but if I think of my parents at 65+, I don't see them driving a modern Car and not being constantly questioning what it is doing. 
Crazy times to live in, I guess..

My 81 year old mother likes the radar cruise on her Sportwagen. It only paces off the car in front, it doesn't make any other override decisions based on speed limits. It also occasionally interprets a car taking an off-ramp as a slowing obstacle, it's less aware of lane markings than the Tesla is. She and dad specifically went looking for a Sportwagen with the driver assist package, actually.

Janel pointed out for lunch that the spot on 470 where we had the slowdowns has also been heavily reconstructed recently, so it's quite possible the map is a little out of date or inaccurate.

I have also noticed more false brake events in my adaptive cruise recently.  Not a big deal but does startle you when it freaks out.  

Wake me up when it keeps idiots from sitting at green lights while looking down at their phone.

Or moves truckers out of the faster lanes

Or keeps the mouth breathers from going 90 down a 25 mph residential street

Or keeps rubber neckers from slowing traffic down when there is a wreck 8 lanes over, on the shoulder

You know, the things that would really make a difference in traffic issues.

I own one of those compliance EV's with 80 miles range on a good day and now with winter in Michigan range is more like 60 miles with the interior heat etc. Still lots of fun though!

I enjoy reading this thread.