Post by alf on Sept 12, 2023 10:55:28 GMT
As mentioned elsewhere I hired a Tesla Model 3 for a recent 12 day trip to Florida. The hire went well although I never used public charging so I can't comment on how that works in the US! However as a way to try out a car, 12 days regular driving was a good one, and I had never driven a full BEV before, only an assortment of hybrids. The main finding is that I am no longer scared that electric cars will not be fun to drive, which as someone who has always really enjoyed driving, and spent a disproportionate amount of time and money on this as a hobby and sport, not just a means of transport, this is A Good Thing.
The car was a RWD model, about 300 miles range and 6 seconds to 60. Hertz were offering it as one of the cheapest cars available full stop, only 10% more than their lowliest supermini on offer, so as a compact exec segment car, it made sense. With most of my work now either promoting the EV features of our Telematics solutions, or working with fleet electrification and carbon reporting companies, I'm starting to squirm a lot when asked what I drive, so with my daily driver nearing replacement, this was useul info. I also wanted some first hand experience as EV''s are so hotly debated.
Getting into a car in the dark after a long flight is not ideal, but - weird lack of aircon working on the first trip aside - its basically auto everything, and the big screen is not hard to use, for navigation especially. The regen braking is the only part that takes any adjustment - while the throttle is responsive, its sensibly mapped to let you pull away slowly if you want to, and creep about car parks without doing a Dukes of Hazard off the top floor. After a short time I came to prefer regen brake feel, and being able to drive off of one pedal 99% of the time. Initial impressions were very positive, its a nice handling car with pleasantly direct steering and more feel and responsiveness than I expected - say a lot more BMW than Audi. Cars either have that immediate feel that make you enjoy driving them and want more, or they don't, and this one definitely has it.
The throttle response was epic, and while I did not get into any of the Troy Queefe antics I am (totally unfairly) known for, RWD was as much of a benefit for EV as it is for ICE. It leaves the steering nice and uncluttered, and gives you that sensation of being pushed not pulled, with it just edging towards oversteer rather than relentlessly dragging you straight on, when accelerating on a bend. Only if I wanted all the beans, did it feel slower than the Jag in normal driving (it was more noticeable 60+). The slight whine it makes under hard load is quite nice, certainly better than an average 4 pot engine thrashing away. And it corners really, really flat yet retains a nice ride quality. Overall its a genuinely enjoyable thing to drive.
We were in an estate of holiday houses with their own garages, and simply reversed into the garage and plugged it into the wall to charge! 12 hours seemed to give only about 25% charge at this rate, but with only one long day - a 150mile trip to the Kennedy Space Centre and back - that was fine. We used the car a lot but mostly for short trips (as you must in America, given their attitude to pavements). On those trips, electric makes loads of sense - you are not firing up some deeply complex machine with cooling and lubrication subsystems all over the place, you get cold air blowing immediately with no "engine" start, there is no MPG punishment until it warms up, etc. It feels more sensible too, especially in Floridian heat, not to be endlessly idling the car in traffic (or, as they do, for 10 mins before getting in, so the air con can work.........). When you are already sweating your bits off on a hot day, walking past a line of idling cars and feeling the additional heat/fumes is not ideal, to say the least, and can make even a petrolhead admire the Greta's of this world if there is no one even in those idling cars, as was often the case when I was running around our estate (for want of pavements I had to do laps).
Another good bit is the storage. The 3 is about right for me size-wise, in a similar vein to another "3" we all know, but it had a huge boot and massive amounts of internal storage for the size of car. Rear seat leg room is excellent and the lack of transmission tunnel means really useful storage bins between the seats and under the dash, plus the double phone space with wireless charging was another nice touch. Its a very easy car to live with, and I like decent amount of storage space around the driver for the unholy amount of satnavs, glasses, microfibre cloths, gum, drinks and so on that I deem essential for human transportation.
Bad bits: "highway" range seemed poor. Even driving at 75 - and very calmly that day - we used 60% charge on that 150 mile round trip. You are not going to go massively past 200 miles without fretting about charging, and that's not a long way. And I still don't buy waiting for charging as much of an experience - in the hot or cold or wet, you'd want to get indoors, and I doubt every charger comes with a cafe - and even if it did, my coffee and pastry consumption would be off the scale (with associated health and financial costs). Hanging about a car park in 34 degrees / 90 % humidity with fractious kids ranks alongside crawling through nettles on the enjoyment scale for me. So while the range on short local trips seemed very impressive, on a motorway/highway - where my main car spends most of its time by far - its not so clever.
The car was also abysmally made. It had done 30k miles and while I thought it was a 19 car from the plate, the paperwork showed it was one year old. The drivers seat base had separated from its frame leaving a big hole between it and the plastic where the seat adjuster switches are. Fake stitching was rubbing off the fake leather, which itself was covered in marks that would not come off as easily as from real leather. Most annoyingly both front windows were atrociously sealed and full-on whistled from about 40mph. There is a slight flutter of air past my current Jag's driver window at motorway speeds that is my least favorite thing about the car, especially on the Autobahn, and no car I have owned - or had in my then-family stable - has done anything like it for more than 25 years. I dislike framless windows for many reasons (freezing up totally in bad ice being one) but 2 of our current 3-car stable have them, with no issues. And one was made in 2006...
I also found the big sceen quite distracting - unfortunately this is the way all cars are going now. It's tempting to look at the big map too much, and even checking speed adds some risk when you are looking across at an angle - dials under the top of the steering wheel as viewed from the driver are much better (and a HUD better still, but rarely standard fitment!). The stalks for gear selectiom wipers etc were sensible but the new Model 3 next year will use the big screen even for this. In the same way that a hands free conversation - while a risk - is an order of magnitude less idiotic than texting while driving, buttons and stalks are a much safer bet than using a touch screen positioned well to one side of the direction of travel.
Overall then, biggest suprise was how little I missed an ICE, and given how snobby I have been about types of them in the past, refusing anything with 4 cylinders or the devil's fuel point blank, this was a surprise. I would have an EV as my daily driver in a heartbeat right now, if they were not so stupidly expensive to buy, and if the charging infrastructure was better. I suspect Tesla drivers have a better time here as they have far more chargers (which I believe have not been opened up wholesale to others?). I have an issue with them as a brand - its a personal thing but I've never liked them. Even after this holiday, I was looking at lease costs for Tesla 3's when Elon Musk opened his massive, power-crazed, sociopathic mouth about Ukraine, suggesting everyone knows Crimea is really Russian and that the parts of Ukraine Russia has taken in a bloody invasion (in which it has characteristically ignored the rules of law) should be put to referendums to decide their future ownership. I won't get into the long list of reasons why that's a shocking idea except to throw two out there: that the current Russian leadership could never hold anything like a fair referendum, and that the pro-Ukrainian people in those invaded lands have either been killed, interned, or displaced and this may have a slight impact on their ability to vote. I also don't like Teslas to look at, which always matters to me - Audi's Etron GT shows how it can be done. Even the little Honda thing is super-cool. This was just a blob.
With my current main car unwarrantyable from the spring, I will continue to look into EV lease costs. Its a real shame the cost savings vs petrol - especially when public charging - are nothing like they were, I used to think of the fuel as "free" for EV. It really isn't. A bigger difference would help with my blood pressure when I'm sitting there waiting for someone whose car was fully charged hours ago to move it, all the time missing out on the valuable free time into which I shoehorn far more than even the oddments spaces around my drivers seat. At the moment I see a lot of polarised opinion - the haters on one side, the evangelists who paint an excessively rosey picture on the other. Of the people I know personally and trust, who have EV's, some find it works very well for them. Others say that if you drive a fair bit and not on a routine, you need to hate your family to get one, because of the amount of time spent hunting out working chargers or waiting for them to become free. That's my main concern right now, and having been at events where people were questioning senior government members responsible for it, there is a blase attitude as to how the 7k chargers a year currently being installed becomes the 70k a year needed for 2030 targets to be hit. But the cars themselves, as a keen driver, hold no fears for me now....
The car was a RWD model, about 300 miles range and 6 seconds to 60. Hertz were offering it as one of the cheapest cars available full stop, only 10% more than their lowliest supermini on offer, so as a compact exec segment car, it made sense. With most of my work now either promoting the EV features of our Telematics solutions, or working with fleet electrification and carbon reporting companies, I'm starting to squirm a lot when asked what I drive, so with my daily driver nearing replacement, this was useul info. I also wanted some first hand experience as EV''s are so hotly debated.
Getting into a car in the dark after a long flight is not ideal, but - weird lack of aircon working on the first trip aside - its basically auto everything, and the big screen is not hard to use, for navigation especially. The regen braking is the only part that takes any adjustment - while the throttle is responsive, its sensibly mapped to let you pull away slowly if you want to, and creep about car parks without doing a Dukes of Hazard off the top floor. After a short time I came to prefer regen brake feel, and being able to drive off of one pedal 99% of the time. Initial impressions were very positive, its a nice handling car with pleasantly direct steering and more feel and responsiveness than I expected - say a lot more BMW than Audi. Cars either have that immediate feel that make you enjoy driving them and want more, or they don't, and this one definitely has it.
The throttle response was epic, and while I did not get into any of the Troy Queefe antics I am (totally unfairly) known for, RWD was as much of a benefit for EV as it is for ICE. It leaves the steering nice and uncluttered, and gives you that sensation of being pushed not pulled, with it just edging towards oversteer rather than relentlessly dragging you straight on, when accelerating on a bend. Only if I wanted all the beans, did it feel slower than the Jag in normal driving (it was more noticeable 60+). The slight whine it makes under hard load is quite nice, certainly better than an average 4 pot engine thrashing away. And it corners really, really flat yet retains a nice ride quality. Overall its a genuinely enjoyable thing to drive.
We were in an estate of holiday houses with their own garages, and simply reversed into the garage and plugged it into the wall to charge! 12 hours seemed to give only about 25% charge at this rate, but with only one long day - a 150mile trip to the Kennedy Space Centre and back - that was fine. We used the car a lot but mostly for short trips (as you must in America, given their attitude to pavements). On those trips, electric makes loads of sense - you are not firing up some deeply complex machine with cooling and lubrication subsystems all over the place, you get cold air blowing immediately with no "engine" start, there is no MPG punishment until it warms up, etc. It feels more sensible too, especially in Floridian heat, not to be endlessly idling the car in traffic (or, as they do, for 10 mins before getting in, so the air con can work.........). When you are already sweating your bits off on a hot day, walking past a line of idling cars and feeling the additional heat/fumes is not ideal, to say the least, and can make even a petrolhead admire the Greta's of this world if there is no one even in those idling cars, as was often the case when I was running around our estate (for want of pavements I had to do laps).
Another good bit is the storage. The 3 is about right for me size-wise, in a similar vein to another "3" we all know, but it had a huge boot and massive amounts of internal storage for the size of car. Rear seat leg room is excellent and the lack of transmission tunnel means really useful storage bins between the seats and under the dash, plus the double phone space with wireless charging was another nice touch. Its a very easy car to live with, and I like decent amount of storage space around the driver for the unholy amount of satnavs, glasses, microfibre cloths, gum, drinks and so on that I deem essential for human transportation.
Bad bits: "highway" range seemed poor. Even driving at 75 - and very calmly that day - we used 60% charge on that 150 mile round trip. You are not going to go massively past 200 miles without fretting about charging, and that's not a long way. And I still don't buy waiting for charging as much of an experience - in the hot or cold or wet, you'd want to get indoors, and I doubt every charger comes with a cafe - and even if it did, my coffee and pastry consumption would be off the scale (with associated health and financial costs). Hanging about a car park in 34 degrees / 90 % humidity with fractious kids ranks alongside crawling through nettles on the enjoyment scale for me. So while the range on short local trips seemed very impressive, on a motorway/highway - where my main car spends most of its time by far - its not so clever.
The car was also abysmally made. It had done 30k miles and while I thought it was a 19 car from the plate, the paperwork showed it was one year old. The drivers seat base had separated from its frame leaving a big hole between it and the plastic where the seat adjuster switches are. Fake stitching was rubbing off the fake leather, which itself was covered in marks that would not come off as easily as from real leather. Most annoyingly both front windows were atrociously sealed and full-on whistled from about 40mph. There is a slight flutter of air past my current Jag's driver window at motorway speeds that is my least favorite thing about the car, especially on the Autobahn, and no car I have owned - or had in my then-family stable - has done anything like it for more than 25 years. I dislike framless windows for many reasons (freezing up totally in bad ice being one) but 2 of our current 3-car stable have them, with no issues. And one was made in 2006...
I also found the big sceen quite distracting - unfortunately this is the way all cars are going now. It's tempting to look at the big map too much, and even checking speed adds some risk when you are looking across at an angle - dials under the top of the steering wheel as viewed from the driver are much better (and a HUD better still, but rarely standard fitment!). The stalks for gear selectiom wipers etc were sensible but the new Model 3 next year will use the big screen even for this. In the same way that a hands free conversation - while a risk - is an order of magnitude less idiotic than texting while driving, buttons and stalks are a much safer bet than using a touch screen positioned well to one side of the direction of travel.
Overall then, biggest suprise was how little I missed an ICE, and given how snobby I have been about types of them in the past, refusing anything with 4 cylinders or the devil's fuel point blank, this was a surprise. I would have an EV as my daily driver in a heartbeat right now, if they were not so stupidly expensive to buy, and if the charging infrastructure was better. I suspect Tesla drivers have a better time here as they have far more chargers (which I believe have not been opened up wholesale to others?). I have an issue with them as a brand - its a personal thing but I've never liked them. Even after this holiday, I was looking at lease costs for Tesla 3's when Elon Musk opened his massive, power-crazed, sociopathic mouth about Ukraine, suggesting everyone knows Crimea is really Russian and that the parts of Ukraine Russia has taken in a bloody invasion (in which it has characteristically ignored the rules of law) should be put to referendums to decide their future ownership. I won't get into the long list of reasons why that's a shocking idea except to throw two out there: that the current Russian leadership could never hold anything like a fair referendum, and that the pro-Ukrainian people in those invaded lands have either been killed, interned, or displaced and this may have a slight impact on their ability to vote. I also don't like Teslas to look at, which always matters to me - Audi's Etron GT shows how it can be done. Even the little Honda thing is super-cool. This was just a blob.
With my current main car unwarrantyable from the spring, I will continue to look into EV lease costs. Its a real shame the cost savings vs petrol - especially when public charging - are nothing like they were, I used to think of the fuel as "free" for EV. It really isn't. A bigger difference would help with my blood pressure when I'm sitting there waiting for someone whose car was fully charged hours ago to move it, all the time missing out on the valuable free time into which I shoehorn far more than even the oddments spaces around my drivers seat. At the moment I see a lot of polarised opinion - the haters on one side, the evangelists who paint an excessively rosey picture on the other. Of the people I know personally and trust, who have EV's, some find it works very well for them. Others say that if you drive a fair bit and not on a routine, you need to hate your family to get one, because of the amount of time spent hunting out working chargers or waiting for them to become free. That's my main concern right now, and having been at events where people were questioning senior government members responsible for it, there is a blase attitude as to how the 7k chargers a year currently being installed becomes the 70k a year needed for 2030 targets to be hit. But the cars themselves, as a keen driver, hold no fears for me now....
