One Month Into Driving a Tesla Model 3

I have been driving my new Tesla Model 3 to work for about a month now. This blog is intended to give my overall impressions so far. My commute is 20-40 minutes each way depending on traffic and most of it is on highways. I've tried as much as possible to use the AutoPilot feature using different options to see what works best for me. (tl;dr, the Tesla Model 3 is incredible and you should buy one)

Upfront, let me say that we didn't get a Tesla for me to drive to work. We bought the Tesla for my wife to commute in. She works in a different city and commutes about 250 miles each way once a week plus a 45-minute drive from "her house" to work. The result of all this driving is that our 2014 Prius hit 160,000 miles before the 5-year loan was even paid off. Given the number of miles she is putting on it, the low maintenance costs of an electric car, paired with the fact that the electric motors should last ~1 million miles is really appealing. The fact that most of her miles are US interstate miles led us to believe that Tesla's Autopilot would also go a long way to making her commute more manageable. Due to the complexities of life though, I get to be the primary driver for the first few months.

Basics

If you have read anything about the Model 3, you know that it is a bit different as a car. Having minimalist controls with pretty much everything on a single touch screen really hasn't been a big adjustment for me. The speedometer is a bit to the right instead of center, but that was easy to adjust to. Everything I actually use on a regular basis is still controlled by the two knobs on the steering wheel or the two stalks that are pretty much ubiquitous on modern cars. Turn signals are pretty much normal. Wipers are automatic and a little button on the turn signal stalk will do a quick wipe or spray the front windshield. You switch from park to reverse to drive with the right stalk and also use it to activate cruise control and Autopilot. I can adjust volume and channels with the small control on the left side of the steering wheel. Cruise speed and following distance is altered with the one on the right.

Honestly, the biggest adjustment in driving is the fact that when you let off the gas pedal it immediately starts regenerative braking. Once you get used to this though, you begin to wonder why every other car isn't this way. I literally only have to hit the brake pedal when I'm coming to a complete stop at a light or stop sign. A huge amount of driving can be done with just one pedal and once you get used to that, driving other cars where you have to use the brake so much becomes annoying.

Now you might be unhappy that you have to keep pressure on the accelerator and can't coast, but this is easily overcome by the remarkably smooth adaptive cruise control (and Autopilot, but more on that later). My previous experience with adaptive cruise control was not pleasant. It was way too timid and would slow down so early behind other cars that I found it really hard to drive with. Tesla's adaptive cruise control is awesome and the only reason I don't use it much is that I activate Autopilot instead.

Control Panel

Things I don't use as much are all on the large flat-panel display. This shows my speed, lane tracking, and a little figure indicating where various cars are around me. By default, there is also a navigation map up at all times that uses Google maps. I've gotten into the habit of setting it to navigate to most places that I'm going as soon as I get into the car. The on-screen keyboard might annoy me except that I rarely type more than four characters before the smart predictions list the place that I'm trying to get to.

This panel also has all the other settings that I would want to play with including mirrors, driving options, security, audio, climate control, etc. I have found that the things I go to a lot are easy and quick to access. The first week I went through the options for driving quite a bit, but after that, I found the settings I liked and rarely went into them again.

At first, I was worried about having things like the mirror controls on the central panel. I'm almost a foot taller than my wife, so we do a lot of adjustments when we swap who is driving. My fear was unfounded though as the Tesla recalls the settings for different drivers and everything except the primary rearview mirror goes back to where I want it just by pressing a button that says that I'm the one driving. Most luxury cars have this type of feature and I can't overstate how nice it is if you have different drivers who need seats, mirrors, and even steering wheels in different places.

The bottom line is that while the central panel might seem daunting at first, you quickly set what needs to be set and most of the options don't get altered after that time. Contrast this to most cars where you have buttons and knobs that you have likely never pressed after driving the car for years. Why did they make a whole knob for that anyway?

Acceleration

I've been a big proponent of autonomous cars since the early DARPA Grand Challenges. When Google first announced its autonomous car project, I was super-excited. This isn't just because I'm a technophile. The main reason is that I have never liked to drive. I know that there are people who say they enjoy driving, but I never understood them. Most driving is boring. There is nothing exciting about my commute to and from work. At least I hope there isn't anything too exciting as that generally implies something very bad when it comes to rush-hour commutes.

Having said this, the Tesla is the first car that I have owned where I think some little parts of the driving experience are fun. This is mainly because of the acceleration. Note that the car we traded in for the Tesla was a Mercedes C300 4matic. It was no slouch in terms of performance, especially compared to the Prius, but honestly, I preferred driving the Prius because of all the other features of the car. The Tesla puts the Mercedes to shame. The thing is, we didn't get the performance version. We just got the long-range upgrade so that my wife could drive 300+ miles on a single charge. We didn't go for the performance upgrade. Despite that fact, the car has serious acceleration. The 0-60 in 4.5 seconds isn't that fast compared to a lot of other Tesla models, but it is still enough to push you back in the seat. More importantly, it will also go from 40-70 on demand when you get on the highway. Our old Mercedes had good acceleration, but there was a noticeable delay between I would put my foot down and when it would really accelerate. In the Tesla, it is automatic and equally effective at whatever speed. Because I'm often watching energy consumption, I try not to drive with a lead foot, but I have to admit that it is fun to shoot off the line every so often.

I also have to point out that because it is electric, it does all of this remarkably quietly.

Autopilot

There is a certain irony to the fact that the Tesla Model 3 is fun to drive in that my real goal with this car is to not actually drive. As I mentioned above, we bought this car to help with my wife's long commutes and I personally can't wait until robotaxis dominate the road providing transportation as a service. While I wait for the true revolution in transportation to arrive, the Tesla lets me get an early taste.

Our two main upgrades were the long-range and full autonomy. Of course, the current Tesla isn't fully autonomous. Still, it does a really good job on highways. Most of my commute is on highways and when my wife drives between cities it is almost all on high-quality, boring interstate. So a lot of this first month of driving the car has been spent pushing the envelope on Autopilot to see how well it does on my commute and other highway stretches.

Every morning, as soon as I get on the highway, I switch on Autopilot. This is done by pushing down on the right stick twice, something like a double click. At the lowest level, this just activates steering that holds the lane to go along with the great adaptive cruise control that I mentioned above. The result is that the car can drive down a highway with basically no input from the driver.

Of course, the current version of Autopilot isn't designed to drive independently. When you turn it on there is a message telling you to keep your hands on the wheel. In addition, every so often it wants you to apply a little torque to the wheel. When I was first testing this out, that message confused me some because I never took my hands off the wheel, and even if I squeezed tight, it wasn't happy. That's because what it is sensing is the torque, not the pressure. I just have to apply a little turning force. Not too much, because if you really turn the wheel you take back over control and Autopilot goes off, though cruise control will remain on until you tap the break.

For the first week or so I would turn on Autopilot but leave my hands on the wheel. This let me get a feel for what the system is currently good at and what causes it problems. The short version is that Autopilot is a really great driver and I'd feel much safer on the road if every car were using it. Unfortunately, they aren't and it is the poorly behaved human drivers that make it so you can't trust Autopilot completely.

It is worth noting that the three miles of highway closest to my house is a construction zone that has lights. Autopilot still does a great job in this area. I turn it one as soon as I'm heading the right direction in the construction zone in the morning and most days I don't turn it off or take control until I exit the freeway near my destination. In the afternoon I do the same thing in reverse on the way home. The success in the construction zone is largely due to the heavy traffic in the area. Autopilot doesn't do lights, so if I'm ever approaching a red light in Autopilot without a car in front of me, I have to take over. Due to the heavy traffic, I think that has only happened to me once.

After the first week, I started testing it without my hands on the wheel. I actually find this to be much more comfortable. As I said before, the sensor that detects if you are touching the wheel isn't based on pressure, it is based on torque. So even when my hands are on the wheel I still get the message telling me to apply pressure to the steering wheel and I have to do something different. With my hands off the wheel, it is just natural to reach up and push on one side when I get that message. I still pay close attention to what is going on around me and I am ready to take over, but my hands can rest on my lap or the console instead of the wheel.

After the third week, I tried turning on the option for Autopilot to automatically change lanes instead of having me verify/motivate lane changes using the turn signal. Unfortunately, the system requires that you apply torque to the wheel every time it does a lane change, so I didn't find this feature to be very useful. I also don't like all the lane change choices it makes, so I've since turned that option off.

It is interesting to note that the main changes I disagree with relate to the Autopilot wanting to move into a faster lane. As I said above, I don't like to drive. When I do drive, I'm a left lane driver because I want to get to my destination and be done with the tedious driving. I'm not a speed demon, but I do get really frustrated with people going slowly in the left lane. With Autopilot I'm a much more relaxed driver. The driving doesn't suck, so I'm not in as much of a hurry to get it over with. I'm okay staying in a lane that is going a few mph below my desired speed and that stop-and-go traffic in the image above doesn't bother me at all.

Autopilot Shortcomings

The Autopilot system isn't perfect and I do still need to pay attention, especially in heavy traffic. For my route to and from work, I've pretty quickly learned where it is likely to run into trouble. There are some specific locations like one place in the construction zone where the lanes swerve to the left and going straight in the right lane becomes is a right turn lane that I don't want to take. I just make sure I'm in the left lane there and I have no problems. There are places where the lane lines are far apart because lanes are merging or splitting where it often needs to be reassured that I'm paying attention. There is also a spot coming off a ramp where it goes a little further left than I would like. It never leaves my lane, but if there is a large truck in the next lane over it will make me uncomfortable. None of these ever cause me to take over now that I know about them.

Merging

The area where Autopilot struggles the most is merging. This should be no surprise. If you are a young driver or have recently taught a young driver how to drive, you know that changing lanes on highways is often one of the things they find most challenging. For Autopilot there are two sides to this. There is the act of Autopilot changing lanes and there is Autopilot dealing with human drivers changing into the lane I'm in.

When we first got the car, we went through the settings and made pretty much everything as conservative as possible. I still have those settings for most things so if the car in front of me slows enough that I could even potentially hit it I get a notification. However, I had to change the option for Autopilot merging. On the most conservative setting, it would never actually manage to change lanes in busy traffic, it was simply too timid. Once I realized this, I moved up the aggressiveness every few days and I have it on the "Mad Max" setting where it does a pretty good job but still can't move over in some places in heavy, stop-and-go traffic. Granted, that is in part because human drivers are jerks who don't yield when they see a turn signal. If I really have to get over in heavy traffic, I do occasionally have to take over to make it happen.

Speaking of human drivers, the biggest challenge for Autopilot is clearly dealing with other cars in merging situations. In normal flowing traffic on the freeway, it is fine. Autopilot maintains a sufficient following distance that people can get in and it does a very good job of slowing and adjusting following distance when that happens. However, in really tight traffic when you have the jerks who are just going to merge over and take off your front bumper, you have to hit the brakes because Autopilot won't notice what they are doing in time. (As I write that I realize that I could be wrong here, it might notice it, but I'm not willing to take the risk so I hit the brakes before it does.)

When I have to turn off Autopilot, it is basically always due to merging. I'd say that 80% of the time it is because I have to yield more than Autopilot would in order to let someone in. (They need to work on Autopilot's recognition of turn signals.) The other 20% is because I need to get into a lane and Autopilot isn't being aggressive enough. Keep in mind when I say this that most days each week Autopilot completes the freeway part of my commute without me taking over at all.

Braking

One of the other features that you have to play with to get comfortable is adjusting the "following distance". You can do this by pushing the right ball on the steering wheel to the left and right. They say that you are adjusting car lengths and it goes from 1 to 4. Based on my experience, that's not what is happening, but that's a good thing. A one-car follow distance at 70 mph would be stupid. Instead, what it seems to change is how aggressive the car is in terms of braking and how close it gets before it starts braking. Early on I was going between 1 and 3 depending on how heavy traffic was. Now I just leave it at 3 because I find that the 1 and 2 options do more heavy braking than I would like.

Driving the Future

In summary, I absolutely love my Tesla. There is a certain irony that the first car I've ever really enjoyed driving is one where the biggest selling point is that it drives itself so that I don't have to. Thanks to Autopilot, I find my commute to be far less stressful. The improvement to my quality of life in that regard is significant.

Perhaps the most telling thing I can say is that I've been wanting to take a road trip with the Tesla. In the past, the words "road trip" could cause me to turn and run in the opposite direction as fast as possible, but having seen how well the Tesla does on freeways, I'm pretty certain that I can now do most of the trip sitting back and just watching my surroundings or interacting with the other passengers. Granted, how well this works will depend a lot on where I'd be driving, but a lot of our potential road trips are across stretches of the western US where there are lots of highways and not many people. The one weakness of dealing with merging humans isn't really a problem in low-density traffic. Instead, I'll just get to deal with route planning around charging options in sparsely populated areas.

In conclusion, every time I take the Tesla for a drive, I feel like I'm driving a car from the future. What is most awesome is that between software updates and additional charging stations I expect the experience will only continue to get better.