Jon Honeyball’s first drive of a Tesla isn’t an entirely appy experience
Ihave been pondering on the nature of the relationship between us, the users, and the software that comes with new products. In the dim and distant past, we were expected to invest time into learning basic tasks. Hence the rise of courses covering “Microsoft Office Skills” and even – yes, it’s true – keyboard and mouse operation.
Today, everyone has these skills. Age is no longer a barrier, to the point that most everyone can pick up a computing device and understand how it works. And nowhere is this more true than phones. When we load a new app, we don’t want to study the basics of its operation: we expect instant results.
For the trip to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to fly to Los Angeles, pick up a rental car and drive over. I’ve had too many bad experiences at LAX to trust it with a connecting flight, and it’s simply quicker to drive.
Looking at Hertz’s rental options, there was one obvious choice: the Tesla Model Y. Not only was it cheap (around £300 for ten days), it was a prime opportunity for me to try the platform. I had never driven a Tesla but several of my friends swear by them, and I’m very aware of the almost religious love that they have among their fanbase. A quick check of the Tesla website showed plenty of Supercharger options between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and numerous charging options in Vegas itself.
Hertz’s pre-flight emails were clear and concise. Install the Tesla app and this can be your digital key. A QR code on the car’s windscreen would set everything up. There were other explanatory points in the email but, I thought, how hard could it be?
I arrived at LAX after a pleasant but sleepless flight and took the bus to the rental lot. Within minutes I was sitting in the car. This is where things started to unravel. On zapping the QR code, the app reported: “Add Vehicle Error. Account incompatibility detected, we’ll be adding support for it soon.”
Well, I thought, I just need to drive the thing from A to B, so I all I need right now is the route. Cue much stabbing at the screen, and some muttered obscenities, until I finally found the GPS. I typed in my hotel name and the satnav plotted the route, telling me I had to stop for about 20 minutes halfway along to charge.
I won’t review the car for you; it’s perfectly pleasant to drive and I wouldn’t have any issues replacing my 11-year-old Audi A3 with one when the time comes. But what was rapidly becoming clear to me was that much of how the Tesla works is quite different from a normal vehicle. I’m not saying it’s bad, it just doesn’t fit into the immediate vocabulary that you’re used to when getting into a rental car.
My first battle was with the auto steer function. It seemed to become annoyed with me for looking at the central screen and deactivated itself in a huff, telling me it wouldn’t work for the rest of the journey. But the reason I needed to peer at the screen was because much of the information is in a tiny font. Maybe that QR code checks how good your eyesight is.
After a couple of hours, the battery charge was getting low so I pulled into the suggested stop. Supercharging was seamless and I give it an extra ten minutes beyond the required time for luck. As soon as I pulled away, the car said I’d need more. So, I stopped again 30 miles later, and gave it another top up. And then another, because it decided that wasn’t enough either. I arrived at Las Vegas with 10% left in the battery, but having been up for some 24 hours I had given up caring.
I’m sure that regular Tesla owners would have instinctively compensated for the cold weather by charging to far higher than the stated requirement – low temperatures and batteries are rarely the happiest of workmates – but at this point I hadn’t read the stories about Tesla batteries “dying in the cold”.
Over the course of the week, I got to understand the user interface. My initial frustrations started to fade away. But I became firmly convinced that the car desperately needs a “I am new to Tesla” mode which gives a simplified UI, and possibly a 60-second walkthrough of all the things that are different from a normal
What was rapidly becoming clear to me was that much of how the Tesla works is quite different from a normal vehicle
car. Such things matter for a rental vehicle, especially when you’re at the end of an 11-hour flight.
In the future, none of this will matter. I will climb into the back seat, tell the car to take me to Las Vegas, and sit back and snooze. But such RoboTaxi operation seems somewhat far away, especially in the UK.
In the meantime, caution is needed when you have a product that is so significantly different to the established mainstream, especially when you invite tired customers to climb aboard after a transatlantic flight. Getting the formatting wrong in Word is one thing. Controlling a car is quite another.