An ordinary person drives a Tesla

When it comes to cars, I am an ordinary person. I don’t know a lot about them, but I don’t know nothing. I haven’t driven hundreds, but I’ve driven a few (via test-drives, rentals, and borrowing). I am the type of person who has never driven a Tesla (though in 2022, I test-drove a Leaf—nice!; a BMW i3–fun!; and a KIA Soul—junk!), but jumped at the chance to rent a Tesla 3 for a few dollars more than a gas car. The last time I rented a car was 2 months ago and I got a VW Taos (I loved it).

What I knew about the Tesla was that I should watch some videos (five) about how to drive it. I got the general idea, but the details were too many and confusing to commit to memory.

When I picked up the car at Hertz at the Halifax airport, they showed me how to get in the car (that was the part I’d memorized) and that I should return it at least 80% charged. I asked them where and how, and they waved in a general direction, saying “Oh, there’s one just over there; it’s easy.” The Tesla had a long range battery, supposedly able to go 488km, and I was driving to 120 km away, so I figured it would use half the battery to get there and back, and leave me with lots for driving around the area.

This was a 2022 model. It had 2 sticks on either side of the steering wheel—the left for signalling, and the right for Drive (RNDP)—and two roller balls on the steering wheel—the left for controlling music, the right for a) speaking to the car and b) adjusting cruise control. But the vast majority of the controls were on a larger-than ipad display directly to the right of the steering wheel. Because of this, the Tesla 3 is easily the most dangerous car I’ve ever driven (including my 1965 VW Beetle). The reason is, of course, constant distraction from the road.

The display was set up with 4 areas: the right 2/3 was taken up with a constantly swiveling and rotating map as it keeps “you” in the centre (when I zoomed out to get an idea of where I was actually going, it showed that for a few seconds, then preemptively zoomed back in).

The top left showed what gear I was in (RNDP) in tiny letters, battery life (also tiny), my speed and the speed limit, with the max amount I’ve set for cruise control (which is called something else). This can be confusing as I was constantly looking at 3 speeds: my speed, how it compared to my max set speed (when using cruise), and the speed limit (see above).

Below it, taking up 1/3 of the screen was a moving diagram showing my position as more or less stationary, and other cars and objects hurtling toward me or past me. Cars in the other lane were hurtling towards me, as are cars I passed (and sometimes a large truck imposed as a gigantic white box practically covering my tail at the bottom of the screen). This view of the world is far less informative than just looking through the windshield! Not only a constant distraction, it was also alarming as the objects in the opposite lane seemed to pose a threat but were, in fact, on the other side of the road! So, useless information. There is undoubtedly a way to turn this distracting window off, but I never found it.

Late in my 3-day rental of the Tesla, I discovered that this stream of objects around me did not include cars in my blind spot. When about to change lanes on the highway, I checked my side mirrors and the display, where everything seemed clear, but as I started to merge left, I suddenly found a car there, coming out of my blind spot! I swerved back in the nick of time, and noticed only that the display had a red aura on the left of the screen—not even a warning sound, and still no image of that invisible car!

And finally, on the bottom of the screen was a bar of icons for select controls (including games, ffs). There is a way to put icons for specific things you want on that bottom control, but as a rental I didn’t bother to figure it out. Most of the controls are accessed through an icon in the shape of a car. Lots of icons and icons within icons that you can’t possibly access while driving without risking your life.

Which brings me to another point—the car was strangely prone to wandering. I couldn’t take my hands off the steering wheel for a second without the car trying to go somewhere other than straight ahead. I know there’s some kind of autopilot somewhere that should, maybe, take care of this, but it seemed to be greyed out in the menu—possibly disabled for the rental car.

My rented Tesla 3 was also quite loud inside, especially for something without an engine. There seemed to be a whistling of air through the window edges, and I was constantly surprised that the windows weren’t quite all the way up. I’d put them up, and then sometime later, still bothered by the noise, I’d put them up again—as though the palpable vibration in the car was rattling them down a bit. And speaking of vibration, there was a lot of feedback from the road through the steering wheel. All of this made for a tense drive. I was very uncomfortable in the seat which, it seems, was designed for a man—the head rest too high for me and was a head-repelling lump rather than a head-accepting cushion or bucket.

Electric cars are known for their acceleration and speed, and I did floor it coming onto a highway and found myself at a sudden speed of 160kph! Impressive, but terrifying as in no way was the car built for it, vibrating unsteadily on the road. I dropped speed PDQ. To be honest, the car felt steadiest at about 70kph.

The regenerative braking that people make such a fuss about was very easy as I practically drive like that anyway—using the gas pedal for speeding up and slowing down, and using the brake less. But unfortunately the effective slow-down-to-stop of the regenerative braking makes you lazy/forgetful of actual braking, which is sometimes required.

While the car didn’t adequately warn me of some situations, it did like to scare me by alerting loudly that it had undertaken some kind of “necessary” minor steering control — which I could neither detect, nor see why it would have been necessary.

I did nearly back into an oncoming car on the road when I meant to nudge forward instead of back because I’m used to a more definitive change from drive to reverse than a tiny flick up or down of a stick the size of a teaspoon.

Meanwhile, I was surprised how many theoretically automatic things the Tesla didn’t do. One was when I was coming up behind someone quickly, despite having the foot off the gas pedal, while the car was slowing it wasn’t slowing fast enough. It gives a warning that you’re about to rear-end the car in front, but why the hell doesn’t it just apply the brake? (The 2021 Leaf I test drove did just that.)

Back to that cruise control, I was quite excited when I learned you could set your tolerance for speeding by percent—so, say you like to go 10% over the speeding limit, you set that and it should have you driving at 110 in a 100kph zone and 55 in a 50kph zone, etc. So I thought “Fantastic! I don’t have to look for speed limit signs, the car knows the limits, so I can just drive in cruise and it will drop and raise my speed as we go through the zones!” Right? Nope. Interestingly, it did slow when going through tight corners and curves, or past construction cones, but it completely ignored the speed zones, meaning I still had to watch the signs on the road (and/or on the screen), slow down or speed up, and re-set my cruise speed (just like most other cars). The cruise was weird too. You disengage it by braking or pushing down on the drive stick, but the latter seemed to have irregular results. This is where I discovered that the right ball-button on the steering wheel (which reminds me of the Thinkpad’s red clitoris) on the steering wheel can be used to nudge your speed up or down. The car seemed to be aware of my e.g. 10% tolerance setting, but mostly ignored it. It seemed erratic as to whether my max. speed defaulted to the set percentage, or just went by the speed I was going when I re-engaged the cruise control. Compared to all this, the cruise control on the VW Taos, was a breeze to figure out and use.

Watching how-to videos on the internet I discovered that you can get it to park for you—e.g. into a tight space—so you can get out and tell it to go park itself. But the video said “if you want to watch/experience it doing this” you have to pretend to get out of the car! What? You can’t just pull up to a spot and click an autopark button? Not that I could tell, but I never tried to do this.

As for the “talk to the car” button, well it didn’t understand “activate cruise control; turn on cruise control; cruise control; defog the window; adjust side mirrors; or anything else I tried to ask it to do when I couldn’t find the controls myself—except “go to such-and-such-a-place” which, while it had a strong desire to send me to somewhere in the US, worked most of the time.

Many of these things may have been updated in a newer version of the car, or have some tricks that only hours of watching “How to Drive a Tesla” videos would reveal. I’m sure any Tesla owners reading this are thinking “oh that’s easy, you just do x—.” But remember, I’m an ordinary person renting a car, and I shouldn’t have to pull over to poke around a menu of icons or watch youtube videos to implement basic controls.

Sometimes it would wipe the windshield for no reason. And while the lights were on “auto” it either didn’t have high-beams, or they were woefully inadequate. Driving at night there was a dark patch at exactly my eye level, and I was desperate to use high-beams, if only I’d known how. There was also something weird about the back window as the rear-view mirror showed only a sliver of vision through it. Fully half of the rear view mirror was taken up with the interior back “deck”, if you will, of the car. Plus the mirror needed constant adjustment—probably due to the aforementioned road vibration in the car.

The last thing is partly Tesla’s fault, partly Hertz’s, partly someone else’s—and a little bit mine. Remember my calculation of the kms I could drive on one battery charge, and the Hertz rep.’s blithe directions to a charging station? Well, imagine my surprise when, in the afternoon of my 2nd day with the car it told me I was nearly out of distance of the closest charging station. At least it did that much. But it claimed the nearest station was 81km away, on the other side of the province.

I tried to understand more about the battery level and the distance it could go by using the on-screen energy icon. But (fucking Tesla!!) it showed a large bewildering graph with all sorts of options that showed more strange information, when all I wanted to know was how far can I go on this battery? More time searching the internet revealed how to change battery percent to number of kilometers (easy!), and I also learned tips on how to conserve the battery.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine searched for charging stations and discovered that in fact there were many all around us. So I drove to one called Flo but, expecting a building, or a sign or something couldn’t find it, so I found the next nearest one on the internet, and called them. I explained I had a rented Tesla I needed to charge and could I come to that address. Evidently I got a centralized Flo agent, but after some confusion as to where I was, he determined that there were 3 chargers in my area, but they were slow chargers that (I asked) would take 11 hours to charge the car! The closest fast charger was 61km away, in Liverpool, and it looked like I had enough energy to make it. And I did, but only just, with the battery down to 5% and dropping a percent every couple of kilometres while I kept a mantra of “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” in my head.

The Flo charger was baffling, but thankfully there was a Tesla 3 charging right beside me, so I asked its owner how to do it. A very nice man! He found my adapter and discovered it didn’t fit the Flo fast machine. Furthermore, the only way to use the Flo machine was with a Flo card which you can only get in the mail after you sign up for an account! I thought I was completely, completely screwed, but he told me there was a charger that anyone could use without an account, very close by at a Best Western. And he got me to download the app PlugShare so I could see where charging stations were. But, he said, the only other ones around were slow chargers.

So I was back to where I started—but now I had an empty battery, and I was 12 hours from needing to catch a flight out of Halifax 200km away, while my luggage was at my friend’s house, 61km away! Thankfully, the Best Western charger worked (it was easy!) and I got enough charge in just over 2 hours to make it back to my friends’ place, and they found a very kind waitress who would let me use her slow charger overnight. Some people are so nice.

This is mostly Hertz’s fault, who should have told me about the PlugShare app, what kind of stations to look for, which can’t be used, and how long it takes to charge etc. As well as to keep the battery level topped up to about 80% and not run it down to the ground. The Flo people, upon hearing I had a rented a Tesla and clearly didn’t know how to charge it should have told me I need an account and card to use their machines (i.e. that they were inaccessible to me). And I should have paid more attention to that tiny battery icon and figured out earlier that I would need to charge.

The Tesla 3 I rented drove like I imagine a Saturn would (caveat: I have never driven a Saturn), and felt generally bewildering and frustrating the whole time. But I did like the fast acceleration and the heated seat which, in the morning of my return drive to the airport with a fully charged car, not only warmed my back, but relaxed much of the tension that had built up there over the past few days from driving the fucking Tesla.