500 miles in Tesla’s Model 3
Tackling LA in humanity’s four-wheeled saviour
IF YOU’RE GOING to nitpick, it is a car to nitpick. The dash controls – everything from the cruise control to radio and climate – are accessed almost entirely through a 15-inch touchscreen. Even adjusting the heater vents requires pulling your eyes from traffic. Panel and trim fit ranges from Toyota-perfect to embarrassing. You can’t turn off stability control, which is fine for ordinary people but depressing for you and me. The front boot is so small, it should be labelled ‘second glovebox’. The rear view is a letterbox. The list goes on. That’s if you’re going to nitpick. If you’re not going to nitpick, this is arguably one of the most impressive machines in history. A landmark, like the Ford Model T or original Mini.
Assuming, of course, that its manufacturer can meet demand. More than half a million people have put down refundable deposits (£1000 in the UK). And the car maker in question has never built this many vehicles, ever, in any form. That is also assuming that said manufacturer can make car-making into a profitable business.
Meet the Tesla Model 3. Or rather, meet the Tesla Model 3 as built in late 2017 and experienced in early spring of 2018, in left-hand drive, in America, on a Monday and a Tuesday. If we had tried it on a Thursday or a Friday or maybe a week later, the car might have been different. Better, probably, because that is how Tesla works; the company constantly updates its cars’ software, over-the-air. New Model 3s built six months from now have a chance at being better still, because Tesla is still sorting out how to make cars like this, at this price, in a hurry. As of March 2018, the 3 carries a list of technical service bulletins – factory fixes, applied after the car is sold – that includes leaky rear lights, pre-production parts sneaking onto production cars and whole motor assemblies in need of replacement. Some owners have even developed post- delivery checklists, shared on the internet, so Model 3 people can make sure their car left Tesla whole and proper. (Actual questions from one of those checklists: Are there waves in the glass? Are all interior lights present?)
This is a strange car. Potential for a lot of hassle. Good thing it’s wonderful.
AT THE MOMENT, new Model 3s have been delivered only in America. So we went to Los Angeles, where American car culture is simultaneously at its best and worst. Given the discussion around Tesla’s production ramp-up and quality, we passed on a press car. Instead we rented a privately owned Model 3, in good nick, with more than 4000 miles on the clock. It wasn’t flawless, but it wasn’t an unrealistically perfect media tester, either.
We drove that car around Southern California for two days straight: hundreds of miles in traffic and on the freeways. I got lost in the canyons and idled by the beach. I even sat in a Tesla service centre, waiting on a replacement key. The sun was out, relentlessly, because that’s California. Call it the complete experience.
The base Model 3 costs $35,000 (£25,000) in the US. Or at least, it will cost $35,000 once you can buy it. Every customer Model 3 to date has featured a long-range, 75-kWh battery ($9000, or £6500), a 120,000-mile, eight-year powertrain warranty – the base model is 100,000 and eight years – and the mandatory inclusion of Tesla’s Premium Upgrade package. The latter includes leather, open-pore wood trim, upgraded audio and a glass front roof (a glass rear roof is standard). Plus items like power seats, power-fold mirrors, LED foglamps and a centre console with covered storage.
Small digression. If that last bit seems a bit unlike a premium option, consider that the base Model 3 features an uncovered centre console. That feature is thus obviously for plebeian dipwits. Or those who have never driven a new car, most of which give you covered console storage for free, and which might talk to your phone through something smarter than Bluetooth. ( Bluetooth is currently the only way a Model 3 communicates with a phone, despite the fact that Tesla is one of the world’s leading tech companies and run by Elon Musk, a man who built himself a self-landing, reusable miracle of a space rocket simply because he needed it.)
Sometimes, you wonder if the people at Tesla just want to be different for the sake of it. 4
HUNDREDS OF MILES AROUND CALIFORNIA FOR TWO DAYS STRAIGHT CALL IT THE COMPLETE EXPERIENCE
Model 3s sold to date offer a 267bhp, 307lb ft electric motor driving the rear wheels. Tesla says the car is good for 310 miles of range (220 on the base 50kWh model), 0- 60mph in 5.1sec (the base model will be 5.6sec) and 140mph with your foot to the floor. This upgraded spec leaves few options. Chief among them are 19-inch wheels (dumpy-looking 18s, as fitted to our test car, are standard), metallic paint or the auto-steering, lane- changing version of Tesla’s best-in-the-business Autopilot cruise control ($5000, or £3500). You can also spend $3000 (£2100) on what Tesla calls ‘ future compatibility,’ to make the car fully capable of driving autonomously, entire journeys without a human at the wheel, when such software is ready.
Call that last bit one more of those different-for-the-sake bits. Tesla’s online configurator says: ‘It is not possible to know exactly when [that autonomous software] will be available.’ If you’re even a little cynical, that might smell like a long-term, interest-free loan to a currently unprofitable car
company, remittance date unspecified. For a car that looks remarkable from some angles – the wind-slicked offspring of a bullet and a pompadour – and fat-headed and generic from others. With a front bumper recalling that creepy moment in The Matrix when Hugo Weaving erased Keanu Reeves’ lips. On paper, this all sounds mildly ridiculous.
The details grab you. The neat little tri-fold alcantara flap over the sun-visor mirrors, held down with magnets, which you play with endlessly, because it’s cool and simple and a sheer delight to touch. The motion sensor that shuts off the boot light when the lid has been left open too long. How the damped console doors are held shut by magnets, a soft little two-jawed ballet every time they open or close. The nav system that just plain works, and is faster and more intuitive than any other nav system on the planet, at any price. The way the window switches and door handle are both hidden and obvious at once, blended into the door panel. The interior in general, simple and staggeringly clean, like a dreamy sketch come to life. It’s like someone drew up a car and then removed all the things you think you might want, and then realise you don’t want them, so who cares?
You marvel over this stuff, in little wake-up moments, over the first few miles. The cabin is tighter than it looks, airy but surprisingly close quarters. The roof rails are low; I’m only 5ft 10in, but the 3’s window tops fell below my eyes while sitting in the rear seat. But the roofline between those rails gives lots of headroom, front or rear, and the cockpit feels airy, thanks to that low dash, the low doors, the acres of roof glass. The combined effect gives the odd and not unpleasant sensation of sitting in a bathtub, surrounded by bodywork like water. At the wheel, the bonnet duck-bills in front of you, low, like a ’90s Honda. Visibility is great everywhere but directly aft, where the high trunk collapses the rear view into a glass sliver.
The steering is interesting. Electrically assisted, with three settings. Comfort is woolly and distant; the car mushes into a lock and stays there, hands-free. It seems to aggressively want to be driven with a finger – use two hands, and you tend to struggle with maintaining a course, never a light- enough touch. The wheel just ends up gooping back and forth, as if the car’s nose were sat in a vat of pudding. The steering’s Standard setting is more lively and heavier, but still muddy. Sport is the best of the bunch. You hit the button on the touchscreen and find yourself wondering if someone has monkeyed with the suspension and somehow dialled a bunch of caster into the car. It snaps to centre and murmurs actual feedback, loading up like magic.
I went to the hills first – the Angeles National Forest, north-east of town, and the canyons outside Malibu – because LA traffic is terrible and hills are not and I desperately wanted to know if the car was going to be any fun in a corner at all. It was, but in an odd way. Most EVs shout their weirdness at you. In the Model 3, you don’t think so much about what makes the car different as forget that it’s different at all. The seats are fantastic, supportive and free of fatigue. 4
IN SPORT MODE THE STEERING SNAPS TO CENTRE AND MURMURS WITH ACTUAL FEEDBACK
Road and driveline noise are hushed, the interior eerily quiet. At speed, you mostly hear the air-conditioning fan blowing in the ducts, and tyre scrub – the subtle grumble of shifting tread – from the low-resistance Michelins. Plus a surprising lack of wind noise. Like Tesla’s Model S (but not the X, which suffers from excessive wind shout), the car just glides around in a subdued whirr.
This is not a light car. Tesla says the 3’s kerbweight is 1730kg, and you feel it. Most of the 3’s mass is in the battery pack and motor, and that stuff lives low in the car’s frame, as it does on the Model S. But a few engineering band-aids help. There’s enough spring rate to hold up a house, for one. There are also steel coils here, unlike the Model S’s air suspension, so the car reacts a bit more traditionally in transitions, and over lumpy Tarmac. Body roll could be measured with a microscope; the dampers and anti-roll bars are stout enough to keep the car feeling locked down, with a ride that’s firm but never flinty.
The hills around LA look like Spain, if Spain were less uptight. They’re dappled with bony trees and the smell of eucalyptus. On weekends, they fill with slow parades of Corvettes and motorcycles, trains of hot hatches and a hundred classics. But during the week, the place is mostly empty. So you find where the road gets giddy, and you see how slow you can make your hands, to compensate for the 3’s bulk. The Tesla skates through corners, much of its compliance in the tyre. The car isn’t quick but it’s not slow either, and there’s a solid smack of torque from tip-in to full throttle. Which means you use the throttle for glassy little instantaneous acceleration hits, leaning on the car’s nose like you can’t in a Model S, doing silly and inadvisable things in canyons.
So you lean on it, and then you lean on it more, because it’s fun and pretty talkative and seems to want it. The nondefeatable stability control tends to grab a brake caliper in quick transitions, or when the road compresses or yumps suddenly; if you put the system in its ‘Escape a snowy driveway’ slip mode it gives up a smidge of yaw, and the car does tiny little scrabble-slides on throttle. It feels like an odd cross between slaloming a boat through choppy seas and dancing with working feet but wooden knees.
In the city, the Model 3 feels more normal. That instant torque again makes the car feel quicker than it is, because there’s always enough squirt on tap for darting into traffic gaps. The battery appears to sip charge in normal driving, even with the air-con on; after two days on the move4
in LA and two charges, Tesla’s claimed 310-mile range feels pessimistic.
Most of the complaints are rooted in the build. Quality is noticeably dumpy in places. Our test car exhibited varying fender gaps and door seals with whole inches of untrimmed mould flashing. If you open the door in a hurry you can beat the automated window-drop mechanism, clanging the frameless glass against the body trim, because the glass has a huge drop to get past the roof. ( Likely because it tucks extremely deep into the seal when you shut the door, to minimise wind noise.) As on the Model S and X, that touchscreen can also be genuinely maddening. It is an enormous billboard of light, even when dimmed, and perpetually distracting. It occasionally goes reflective in direct sunlight. You can’t use it eyes-free. And while most of the controls are logically placed, you can find yourself on a crowded road, wanting simply to change some minor detail of the car’s interior or behaviour or stereo, and having to pull over simply to yell at the dash and madly poke around for the right sub-menu.
Especially if it’s a feature you might use a lot. The Model S
AFTER TWO DAYS IN LA, TESLA’S CLAIMED 310 MILE RANGE FEELS PESSIMISTIC
and the Model X sit their main controls for Autopilot on a column stalk, and the system’s critical road- display and ‘prepare to take the wheel back’ graphic lives in the instrument cluster. But the Model 3 places both those items in that centre screen. It was annoying enough to use – the S and X make the system a delight – that I eventually slogged through LA freeway traffic without touching Autopilot, fuming at the screen.
These are not small issues, but they are solvable. The funny thing is, you find yourself wondering how much they matter. I’ve met several Model 3 buyers or reservation holders over the past six months. All followed car news, which means all were aware of Tesla’s production stumbles. None cared. Which says something about the car’s appeal, and why people are buying it. It’s so good at being a stylish, functional, innately special thing, you brush over the unpleasant bits.
In other words, to borrow a phrase from one of those customers, ‘ Why should I care about fender gaps? I don’t want anything else. And what would I get, at this price, anyway? All the other EVs for similar money are commuter penalty boxes. This is a real car.’
Maybe that’s you, then. If you’re buying the car in America and want the cheaper Model 3, get in line. Delivery starts
later this year. Ditto if you want the coming all-wheel- drive version, or left-hand drive outside America. UK pricing has yet to be set, and Tesla says right-hand- drive vehicles will start leaving the plant in 2019.
‘Says’ is the key word there. Tesla is a company of caveats. But it also has the ability to tweak its course more than most; to revamp its production process, chasing quality issues, or to software-fix mistakes while you sleep because those processes are so new, and the company is so motivated by the desires of the firm’s detail- obsessed, micro-managing chief executive. (Musk describes himself as a ‘nano-manager’.) If Tesla wants to make the touchscreen easier to read and use, to make it more justifiably replace a traditional dashboard, the company can do that in an air reflash, for every Model 3 in a given market. If they want to solve control problems by making the entire car voice-activated, they can chase that, and they might actually pull it off.
And at the end of the day, the basic product is sound. Like the Model T, the Model 3 democratises a previously flawed and bourgeois experience; like the first Mini, it resets a blueprint while sneaking a bit of fun-to- drive under the radar. It works remarkably well as a car. It works even better as a stylish, usable piece of tech that makes most current EVs feel stuck in the Dark Ages.
Is that enough to continue floating a company? Are Tesla’s factory staff capable of jibing ambition and potential with the kind of quality you need to sell half a million cars without excuses?
If it is, and if they are – if Elon Musk can do all that – he will have truly launched the first genuinely cool and affordable EV. A luxury that isn’t a one-trick pony. Which means he will have legitimately changed the world.
If Musk can’t do it, then we can at least salute one hell of an idea. And hope that, years from now, we won’t have to point to the Model 3 with a little sadness, saying, ‘Shame, isn’t it? That a good car just wasn’t enough’.