Tesla Model Y
Tesla makes electric cars. But what it’s really doing is chipping away at mainstream America’s resistance to electric cars, one innovative model at a time. The latest is the Model Y, a piercing shot into the SUVloving, trafficstressed heart of the American buyer. Go ahead, trot out all those reasons why an EV doesn’t work for you. The Model Y knocks them dead, and adds onboard digital fart noises to remind you that Elon Musk still has a sense of humor (really — hit the whoopeecushion logo in the vehicle’s accompanying app).
“Fun” certainly describes the Model Y, which can timewarp to 60 mph in as little as 3.5 seconds. That’s faster than several fossilfueled, and increasingly fossilized, highperformance SUVs. On New York’s rollercoaster Taconic Parkway, the Model Y glided past slowpokes in addictive, stealthassault fashion, its dual electric motors emitting the barest whine and whisper. A limbolow center of gravity, a signature of EVs that pack their batteries below the floor, helped the Model Y slingshot through curves with grace and pace alike.
Socalled range anxiety is also banished: The
Long Range version, starting from $52,900, can cruise for 316 miles on a full electric “tank.” That’s enough for round trips from New York to the Hamptons, or Los Angeles to Palm Springs, with miles to spare. An ingenious heat pump, a first for any Tesla, aims to preserve driving range in freezingcold temperatures, long a challenge for electric vehicles. And when it’s time to juice up, Musk’s sprawling Supercharger network can add up to 158 miles of driving range in just 15 minutes on the plug.
That nationwide network, now with more than 9,000 charge spots in North America, underlines perhaps the biggest competitive gap between Tesla and its rivals: an Applelike ecosystem that takes all the guesswork and hassle out of the user experience, from a hyperintuitive, 15inch central touchscreen interface to overtheair software updates. Within minutes, Tesla updated my Model Y to sample beta versions of its latest Autopilot functions, including the ability to halt robotically for stoplights and stop signs. (The latter seems a bit of a work in progress, but it’s coming.)
Tesla was also ahead of rivals in understanding that people live through their smartphones. So a smartphone app replaces a traditional key, precools or heats the cabin, and even summons this sloperoofed SUV to drive itself out of parking spaces
(at short range). And the Model Y’s new wireless charging is one of those brilliant ideas that seems inevitable in hindsight: A driver’s and a passenger’s phone sit sidebyside on the console, in plain view, on a rubberized pad that holds them rock steady even during the hardest cornering. Expect other car companies to follow suit quickly.
Equally inevitable, it seems, is that the Model Y will supplant its Model 3 sedan sibling as America’s, and the world’s, favorite EV. That Californiabuilt Model 3 found 300,000 buyers last year, nearly three times as many as its nearest global rival. To that, the Model Y adds not just the latest upgrades and tech, but the uphigh seating, standard allwheeldrive, and versatile space that have led SUVs to crushing market domination. Try all you like: Resistance is futile. L.U.