In my previous post I answered the three most burning questions for any potential in Tesla Model S owner.
In this post I elaborate on the driving experience in some detail..
So with those burning questions answered, what’s it like to drive the Tesla. Well, approach the vehicle with the ‘key’ in your pocket and the door handles will pop out and it will unlock itself automatically. Open the doors and step inside, the sill is a little high and wide and the A pillar thick and steeply raked. That’s not to say it’s hard to get in or out of the car but you sometimes have to be mindful of your head. At this point the vehicle has switched on. The climate control is cooling/heating the interior and the navigation system is up and running. The big screen in the middle of the dashboard is on and showing you two of the apps. Most of the time I had the navigation app and the media app open. Switching to the Energy app when I wanted to see how the battery use was going. The Navigation app is Google maps with live traffic information pulled down from the net over the inbuilt 3G connection. This 3G connection allows the maps to be rendered, traffic overlaid and routing to be controlled accordingly. The routing also takes into account the range of the vehicle and will route accordingly to take advantage of topography, weather and Superchargers. So, for example, leaving our house near Wakefield to the Supercharger in Birmingham we were routed via the supercharger in Barnsley to ‘top up’ for 20 minutes and the navigation app predicted an end charge of 18% in the battery. The 3G connection is also used to stream media via Rdio. This is quite a good service which i’m sure you can get the best out of with some investment of time in playlists. The biggest problem is 3G. During the days I had the Tesla there were significant portions of the journey’s we undertook where the 3G connection was lost and such is the lack of investment in the UK networks, meant that dropping to 2G was pointless. At which point the maps do not render and we had no streaming media. Thankfully you are not blind in navigation as the dashboard turn by turn nav is from Garmin and does not require to be online. The frustration did become apparent when trying to find the Warrington Supercharger. The Google Maps were unavailable and Garmin only got us to proximity. It’s a small niggle but not one I see getting any better, in fact I have noticed a significant degradation of service on 2G in the last 2 years.
The 3G is also used to download OTA software updates. A great feature and as the car can also be connected to wifi, at home for example, which means that software updates can be scheduled to run overnight while you and the car are sleeping.
As i’ve said earlier, the driving experience is not dissimilar to a modern automatic but one that is very smooth and responsive like no other car on the road. The controls are familiar but it’s important to note that this is with ‘normal’ settings. There are two driver controlled settings that can make the driving experience different and less like a normal car. Firstly, you can turn off ‘creep’ mode. That is, when you release the foot brake it doesn’t move forward like an automatic but only moves when you apply throttle. I tried this and remain undecided if I like it or not. The other and more significant setting is that of regenerative braking. Turn it up to normal (low is more like a normal car) and when you lift off the throttle the drivetrain turns from motor to generator and adds power back into the battery. The effect is that you use the motor to brake and not the foot brake in a lot of normal driving. This takes more getting used to but when you do it makes for a very smooth driving experience that you simply can’t match in a traditional vehicle. The easiest way to describe it is when travelling on a dual carriageway 70mph road that has traffic lights. You’re doing the legal limit and the lights ahead change. Jumping off the throttle will cause the car to brake at a rate that would be classed as heavy. In other words, you’d wake up a sleeping passenger. In practice you feather the throttle to gradually and smoothly bring the car down to walking pace and transfer only to the brake pedal to scrub the last few mph. In some cases not requiring the foot brake at all. There are a few less obvious advantages here. Firstly less use of the brakes means more energy recovered into the battery and not wasted in heat. Secondly, less use of the brakes means less brake dust and less time cleaning 🙂 and finally, as the brakes are actually one of the few serviceable components, the service costs of owning the vehicle are reduced significantly.