Tesla Model 3 | Explaining the Cult

[Music] now i've held off on doing tesla videos for quite some time for various reasons i didn't want to borrow one from an owner because they typically have an emotional attachment to these things or to get it from corporate pr inside the brand because they like to control the messaging to an extreme degree so i paid out a pocket to rent this to kind of go over the pros and cons let's get into kind of the interior space what this is what it's designed for and all of the rust [Music] before i get into the social commentary and technical stuff in the shop i need to talk about the interior space and i chose the model 3 because this is probably the most important product to tesla i chose the standard plus trim level because it's also the cheapest tesla you can get at around thirty eight thousand dollars now this is rear-wheel drive only they've kind of cut out some of the features here and you have two other trim levels both dual motor or all-wheel drive with more power the interior space it is super simplistic they went for an almost scandinavian design aesthetic here solid piece of wood across the dash a very simplistic dashboard design and almost completely removing all the physical knobs buttons and switches that you find in a normal car and they are all relegated to a center touch screen this car is entirely software designed and this is on purpose there are window switches on the door there are a couple controls on the steering wheel you have a turn signal stock and your drive selector reverse neutral and drive on the right hand side but everything else you have to do from the touchscreen including adjusting the steering wheel and other basic functions like adjusting the mirror now let's talk about build quality and kind of ergonomics since there's not a lot to confuse you here you're always interacting with the screen but when you look at some of the physical design like the door panels they have tried to give you a more upscale look and feel so it's a softer touch plastics there's the micro suede or alcantara on the door panel and then hard plastics on the bottom that still fit like a bottled water now the thing is as great as this looks you can see that some of this is just appearance because when you pull on this and it has a very just kind of chintzy feel to it overall when you close the doors things tend to rattle and what this is to me is this is reminiscent of more of a cheaper compact car something like a honda civic or a hyundai elantra in terms of build quality and feel but they've tried to elevate some of the materials to give you more of that upscale feel and that's not really a bad thing because at 38 000 you can argue this is expensive but again there's nobody else doing this with an eevee drive train the next thing to talk about is seating comfort there's a ton of foam and padding on these seats and this helps in long distance trips it also helps to absorb some of the harshness and suspension this is tuned a little bit more firm so you don't feel it as much with all this give here the next thing that is a huge pro is all the glass it gives you an open feeling to it and this has 90s level visibility out of the front there is so much glass here but the negative part of that is reverberation from sound when you're talking on the phone or you're having a conversation you hear that kind of echoing effect and it definitely translates into kind of a poorer sound experience from the audio system i'm going to put up the sound graphs here and i will compare them to kind of the higher end audio later but needless to say there is a lot of echo in this cabin and this is what happens when you put all this reflective material in here in terms of rear seat comfort you can fit two people back there and the seats are padded much like the front it's a really good space to be the trunk room is great and you can fold down the rear seats to create more cargo capacity and when i looked at the shape of this car it makes not a lot of sense to me that it's not a hatchback given kind of how the sedan market is doing the door handle design on the outside and i know this is kind of a weird topic but most cars or suvs at this point have grab handles they've gone for this kind of built into the door type thing the door handles don't automatically pop out so you kind of have to go digging in there to pull them out if your hands are full it can be a pain in the ass and i've constantly come into this thing fighting with the doors you know in winter it's going to be more of a pain in the butt and you can argue all you want about aerodynamics how minimal that's going to make on a car like this but if you like the cool factor and struggling that's on you now let's get to the meat and potatoes the electronics namely the central screen i've never seen a level of software design in a car like this before until now things like just opening this storage door if you try to close it too hard it will give you an alert on the screen to close lid gently and that's the level of detail that's in [Music] here there are little hidden things like a camera here right above the rear view mirror but that's the thing this car is constantly data logging it's constantly monitoring the cameras and some of this is good like you have a drive recorder it's monitoring 360 around and it can log to a memory card where in case you get in an accident you have proof of what happened but again this is the elements of technology of a connected car that is heavily reliant on a bunch of sensors and all this so there's a mixed bag that goes into the future of software updates security all that but this is tesla is a software company first they are a tech company first and they are trying to become a world-class automotive company or automotive manufacturer so a lot of this central display and screen technology is more there for to speed up assembly you get rid of and cut out a lot of oems that have to make switches you don't have to design all the switch gear all the knobs buttons and switches that constantly have to be updated they are points of failure so there's ways that they can creatively cut cost by implementing software that you can update over the air which tesla is very committed to in their current generation of cars now when you scroll through this you can quickly realize this is one of the best pieces of software ever and it at least in a car it's almost like ios or an android usability there is some lag when you get to some of the apps it takes a while to load functionality when you get to the web browser slow or cumbersome some of that is because of the data connection some of it is just this is trying to do everything like a mobile os including being a car now the scary part about this is you know if this has a kernel panic or it just shuts down you're pretty much all your controls are here or if you have a screen failure you can't use anything in this car absolutely nothing and again this is what happens when you start to move everything to the software side you really have to have a lot of faith in the manufacturer that they're going to support this and keep it bug free now let's talk about some of the good things with an ev obviously i can run the ac all the time and of course it drains the battery but i can sit in my garage with the ac on and i don't have to worry about toxic gas or killing me and that's one of the nice things i've found doing in the garage sitting in here a lot it's just a nice quiet experience now the other part like most tech companies they lock you into the ecosystem which means you don't have apple carplay or android auto in here you have to use their own audio services and they also have their own apps which is really gimmicky like the farting stuff like the dj app or you can make your own beats and all that it's got a huge wow factor up front like the games in here that you can use the steering wheel brake and gas to kind of play around and all of that is what tesla is really good at right now they have so many people employed to work on this stuff they might as well make use of it but over time they're gonna need to improve on the core things which is this is still a car at least until it drives itself and that's my last point when you cut out things like a hud or a center gauge cluster or all the physical knobs buttons and switches you're heavily reliant on using a touch screen and when this car doesn't drive itself and it truly doesn't drive itself and tesla won't take responsibility if you crash that leaves you open to being distracted by a monster center screen and there's so many studies right now even one funded by the fia that came out last year that studied android auto and apple carplay and people interacting with just a simple ui like that had more people had more reaction time problems than somebody that was inebriated with alcohol and i'll kind of post up the study so you can see it so until this car becomes purely functional non-driving no steering wheel a lot of this stuff is really a detractor if you're really responsible you might be able to handle it but if you're a younger driver it is you're constantly fidgeting with this and that's the counterpoint to all this technology figuring out a way to mix the past with the present until this goes away let's head into the shop and talk about some of the mechanical stuff underneath the tesla model 3 there's certainly not a lot to look at underneath here but i'm going to cover this in a bit of a different way because i'm going to go more in depth on tesla electric vehicles in the future so this is kind of the starting point so i'm going to give you my views on some of the things that i've learned and learned from other manufacturers as well this model 3 is shared on the model yr architecture they're almost identical they use the standard skateboard design which is the entire floor pan here that is completely flat this is where the battery storage is panasonic chemical corporation helped tesla kind of to design this and they've taken over and tesla is one of the few manufacturers in the world that does most of their assembly in the united states so of course their costs are higher but they're investing a lot of money in the infrastructure here and elon musk which started tesla had a lot of his fortune from paypal when he sold it off and he kind of had this dream of building electric cars the way that he wanted to do and he started with the roadster a long time ago which was just a hacked up elise or exige from lotus now we fast forward all this time and tesla as a company is trying to reinvent the wheel and a lot of what you're gonna see here and a lot of what i'm gonna talk about is just exactly that that means starting from ground zero in a lot of ways and doing things that may not make logical sense but over time they're going to figure out how to make manufacturing of vehicles not just electronics more efficient at this point in time tesla has a tech company mindset and some of those things from that industry carry over here two things that stand out one is fix it later they want to have the ability to go back and fix things after it's released to the public and this is really common in computing it's really common in software it's really common in the cell phone industry just get it out there you have timelines you have deadlines you've got to meet and just do it and tesla is critically married to the investors which flood them with cash if they don't meet expectations they don't mean pricing they don't meet sales figures that cash could dry up or they make a major mistake and the model 3 is the perfect example of let's get this thing out no matter what the case is so over the first couple years of manufacturing you've seen some pretty serious revisions to the car in fact the car that originally launched may not even share some of the same manufacturing techniques as they make improvements to not only plant flow but to manufacturing processes this is a heavy car and we've learned this over looking at the body in white there's a lot of excess fat here they didn't have the time to get down to like the gram strategy something that mazda talks about a lot in their sports cars where can they take out weight that's not needed so what tesla did is they kind of overbuilt everything you have a steel body this isn't there's not a ton of aluminum on this car which brings down cost but the manufacturing was kind of overkill to start so as time has gone on they've refined that they've cut things out they're using less contact or welding points less securing points more structural adhesives they've cleaned that up and also you look at things like the control arm the upper a-arm and the double wishbone on the model 3. originally when this car launched it had kind of a zip-tied piece on it that there was all this talk about well what is it why did they do it that way and in retrospect we understand that they were just trying to get things out before they had a part or a mass-produced piece that they could include on all of them so this is one of those experimental beta cars that's going to evolve more into a complete piece as they get more manufacturing time under their belt and that's kind of from a consumer or customer perspective one of the big reasons why i've been phobic to kind of fully embrace tesla they're using the general public as their beta testers now the thing is it seems like most of the tesla people that are buying these cars are okay with making excuses for all these little things that are wrong and i'm going to go into chicago auto pros who is one of the bigger details and detailers in the chicagoland area that does a ton of paint work or paint correction on the tesla products and i'm going to talk to jason the owner about some of the things that he sees not only on the exterior parts like paint and body gaps to see his feedback so let's head over there what's up guys it's jason from chicago auto pros and i want to talk to you a little bit about the tesla quality issues that we've seen here in the shop tesla's are probably one of the most common cars that we get in the shop here to protect and perform our services on one of the first things that we noticed when tesla cars started coming into the shop is how soft the paint is and soft versus hard paint we've seen a lot of german cars volkswagens audi's bmws that have hard paint and and that means that they're hard to scratch but they can also be hard to buff out too where teslas because they're painted in california and they're water-based paints it makes it it's soft so it's it's a lot easier to scratch so we see them coming in with swirl marks and love marks and washing marks and it's pretty easy to buff out those marks but it's also very easy to put in these marks we've also seen because of the soft paint that the front ends chip really really easy so we put a lot of paint protection film on a lot of teslas to prevent that problem from happening we've done a lot of teslas in the shop over the years the model 3 the model s when it first came out and recently the model x's and the model y's and now we've seen a lot of different kind of issues with both the model y and the model x we've seen fitment issues body alignment issues we recently had a tesla model y in here that the back tailgate the hatch there it was literally just missing paint like they didn't fully paint the entire car on that same model y they actually had on the interior they had some alignment issues they had the headliner that wasn't fully glued in so it looked like it was sagging already with tesla being such a new car manufacturer i think they just have some bugs to work out with some of this little stuff and we see all new cars with little tiny issues from the manufacturer it could be dust nibs or wet sanding marks but a lot of the alignment issues is something that tesla they really got to start working on now we can talk about quality we can talk about qc we can talk about manufacturing but this has been a stain on tesla's reputation and they're fully aware of it but again when you're starting up car manufacturing from its infancy basically again reinventing the wheel these are problems you're going to run into but panel gap issues and pain issues aren't just something tesla experiences the brand new civic type bar that i looked at which is being built at a plant that's being shut down it had some of the worst panel gaps and paint match i've seen in modern history of any car ford a company that's been making cars for 100 years every mustang we've looked at has had serious panel gap issues just horrible something that you wouldn't expect now there's only so many things you can do with over-the-air updates to software and tesla's been great about it improving certain features giving you more horsepower using the camera system on the car improving autopilot and adding autonomous driving features but there's certain things that you can't get added mechanically and this is another problem with being an early adopter on more of a beta project this car does not have a heat pump and a heat pump is useful for those that live in colder climates not everyone lives in california so in order to get heat in the car in the winter it has to really utilize that battery now tesla's adding a heat pump to the model y and soon to the model 3 with some manufacturing changes but if you get a car like this that doesn't have it you're not going to get it and these are the things that you know as a new manufacturer as a consumer you know you're buying into a lot of things that may not be fully developed yet and you have to be prepared for that now the other part to talk about is yes you have double wishbone suspension in the front it's something that is disappeared off of cheaper cars but they can do it here because they don't have the packaging constraints of an internal combustion car where you need to jam so much up front they no longer have to worry about that so they can fit the more premium suspension which gives you more negative camber under compression all the benefits of double wishbone the rear is a multi-link and it's a five link rear and this is the rear wheel drive uh version of this car they also have a dual motor when you go up in price it also increases battery density so you can go you can go farther without having to recharge now just because this is made in america doesn't mean all the parts come from america and this is one of the things when you source out different oems i talked about some of the electronics but in terms of the control arms are made by a japanese company in the rear the knuckle design in the back is the aluminum pieces come from china the damper assemblies come from mexico the sway bar or the end links for the sway bar come from south korea this is just a complete global product but all designed and built in america again that's rare but there's so many parts that are sourced from elsewhere a lot because of cost availability and the tight time frames that tesla has to go and you're going to see some of these components or suspension components in terms of bushing damper springs all of that change over the course of the life cycle and be improved as well much like many other manufacturers do but i think that's a good time this is a this is a huge crash course on kind of the basics of the manufacturing process i'm going to take this for a drive see how it is and then we're going to get into the final thoughts [Music] i'm setting off in the tesla model 3. that is brisk and it certainly does not sound like anything does it so let's cover this right off the bat everybody gets all hot and bothered by electric torque the instant gratification of being thrown back in your seat while not hearing anything it's disconcerting considering the fact that we're used to something making a lot of noise and for mainstream cars like economy cars luxury cars in your daily commuters companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to make the internal combustion engine silent or unassuming or getting to a stop or coming to a idle position where you don't feel an engine that has all these moving parts and all of that engineering to make all that happen is just ridiculous when you look at the alternative of this you don't have to worry about any of that you don't have to worry about frequency vibration isolators in every corner of the car how you balance an engine how you balance all those moving parts you just have to worry about how you integrate an electric motor and the drive train or the transmission of the car and make work on everything else in terms of suspension in terms of ride quality chassis stiffness brakes all the other mechanical systems that you need inside pretty much any vehicle so let's talk about some of the driving characteristics of this car i hear a lot about it so since this is rear-wheel drive and the standard option which is a great starting point because putting all that torque and power to the front wheels as we see on the economy the economy-grade evs that are out there is a bad idea when you put it to the back it just feels a lot more controllable it feels more natural the traction stability control don't have to work as hard to keep keep limiting power and you don't feel anything through the steering wheel you don't feel all the tugging that goes on with trying to do that so in terms of drivability it feels really natural transparent and steering feel you have three modes on this car you have sports standard and comfort in typical modern vehicles when you put a car in comfort that's kind of the sweet spot because it doesn't feel overly assisted it doesn't feel unnatural in this car it's way over boosted like in comfort you feel the electric assist fully on and you can turn it with your pinky so sport mode really has the most natural feel to it with standard giving you a little bit more of assist so it feels very direct the steering is quick and it's quick to kind of make this car feel way more nimble and it works quite well i have almost no issues with it this tester has like 24 000 miles on it and there is some like clunk in the steering there's a little bit of clunk when you get back to center and i don't know if it's play in the joint but it's just something over time and depending on how you drive it you know you just don't know what this car has been through now in terms of regenerative braking you have two selections you have low and standard in standard mode it feels like break by throttle you kind of lift off and it comes all the way to a stop on its own without touching the brakes and it takes some time to get used to it but once you do it's very natural now again acceleration is its strongest point and i think even on the standard plus model that doesn't have the dual motors this thing is so quick off the line and most normal people this is going to be a dream come true and the best part is is unlike a lot of its competitors where you have to do so much work on trying to get four cylinders and that would be the primary competition you're trying to put turbos on four cylinders you're trying to do every manufacturer is trying to do and give you the same feeling of an electric motor in a four-cylinder design and it this i mean i can see why so many people are so excited for the future of electric cars because it eliminates half the problems that you get with modern internal combustion cars there is a lot of echo in here and again our audio tests kind of confirm that there is a lot of reverberation time in here and just talking i can hear it and it's annoying uh the other thing is because this cabin is so quiet now you don't have a transmission you don't have engine noise you don't have exhaust noise every single creak and rattle comes through so there is some leaking wind noise through the door panel there is some creak in the back and this becomes what you're chasing instead of trying to reduce engine noise you're trying to chase panel fitment issues body gap issues all the things in manufacturing that can get really annoying and annoying for a service center to try to fix and chase down so if you're somebody that gets used to this low noise floor and you start to hear a creek in the back it's going to drive you absolutely insane so this is the counterpoint of making a car so quiet but as it stands i think there's a couple things left to talk about suspension damping they've moved all the weight of this car like we talked in the shop everything's low there's no massive motor that's sitting way high up in the car all the batteries are down low all the weight is down low so what you get is a sense of nimbleness from the car granted it is heavy but it the suspension tuning is good enough where there's enough wheel travel when you really get it on unsettled there's a lot of up and down body motion and it's great on most normal pavement if you're driving hard it does tend to lean way too much on its traction and stability control on this car i feel like it's constantly cutting in to save you and that's probably a good thing because when you get into the higher trim levels most normal people i've never experienced this amount of power nor do they have the driving skill to kind of understand how to use it but i'm splitting hairs here this is dampened and set up probably about as good as any 35 40 000 car it finds a good blends but blend between being firm and not too firm but this is not a sports car and there's companies that kind of try to turn this into that but it's not that and i think the press and the media try to oversell the fact that the specs and the straight line speed is so impressive here that you can do whatever you want this doesn't have a ton of grip it does have a lot of roll when you really really start to turn and accelerate and try to get through corners fast it's not the most like refined or sporty experience but it's not really trying to be that the last thing i'm going to talk about and this is one of those intangibles about cars if you've grown up in car culture if you love cars and you're not kind of like on the eco side the green side the electric car side have you ever watched a movie or listened to a song on mute just completely turned the sound off and just read subtitles it you remove a huge part of that experience if you're blessed enough to be born to be able to hear things the audible senses all the things that go on in the world it's part of our experience and while this may be the perfect solution for a daily driver replacement for luxury cars for compact cars when you get into the sports car segment and you start making these faster and more confident not having that vibration that tone that you get from really good sports because i'm not talking about like the eco turds i'm talking about the the natural vibration you get from v8s high strung v12s v10s that's what's always going to be missing here and that's somebody that is a car person it always feels like you're driving a simulator versus a car and i know this is the future but again it's the counterpoint of going to an ev that you're losing a lot of that you're losing a lot of the passion that existed in some of the older cars that you know are going to start dying out but let's get into the final thoughts and talk about the rest of the pros and cons of the tesla model 3. final thoughts on the tesla model 3. consider this a foundational video and there will be more content to come now let's talk about the pros and the cons of the model 3 in terms of a car because that's what it is we're still driving it the negatives are the suspension has a lot of float in it when you're driving it a bit harder in the corners it tends to want to wash out and on really bad pavement it's very firm so they can clean this up a bit and the aftermarket has been very effective at making this a much better handling car in terms of acceleration and performance this is going to blow the doors off of pretty much everything in the segment and for people that the people that are interested in this car that don't have seat time in a wide variety of vehicles this is has such a wow factor in terms of all of that torque even on the base trim that i drove it it's more than most people will ever need and when you go to the dual motor you go to the performance version people are just they're just not going to gonna fathom how fast it is but again this is not a sports car just because it can go fast in a straight line doesn't mean it has the handling to match and that's an area they can definitely improve and the car has the capability of being better in that area now the interior space it's really good for this price point it kind of feeds into that entry level or middle level luxury car and you can thank the ev drivetrain for this at pretty much any speed the noise floor is really low with the exception of the reflections from the interior glass they could do some work on trying to add some sound deadening in there the audio system is great but again that suffers from all the reflections the overall usability the seating comfort like the vegan leather all that stuff feels really good and high quality until you start to shut the doors there are some rattles things don't feel like they're built to the highest quality the fit and finish isn't the greatest but visually the visual impact is very good they knew how to balance a lot of the things out to kind of suck you in and that goes right down to the technology they've used the right amount of gimmicks and cleanliness to just blow most people away the negative part is when you relegate every single physical control to a touch screen it creates a level of distracted driving that we have yet to see phone use has been banned the use of electronics and cars yet they've added 10 times the amount of distraction in this tesla the fact that you can open up a web browser while you're driving and browse the web is absolutely unacceptable and there's enough studies to support that this hurts driver reaction time having to interact with core functions of a car by touching a screen is not good and just as a quick example a rotary knob down by your center console that you turn you you use muscle memory to turn that you can feel one way or another and you know exactly what that's going to do and you don't have to look it just happens and you can continue to drive when you have to interact with the touchscreen it requires you to physically interact with it look at it and because there's no physical feedback you have to look for visual cues and that's where the distraction is and tesla knows it but they're betting on the fact that people don't care about that so in the future they definitely need to blend the past and the present into something more cohesive because other manufacturers are going to figure out how to do it better than them but interior exterior this is a great package it's got so much potential again for the long term and they're really going to start digging into the mainstream cars like corollas the elantras the accords this is really going to start to take over that market when they get the battery capacity up the price down and they're working on that right now but i think the last thing to talk about is the social commentary now elon musk is an industry disrupter he knows how to shake up markets that are stale he's also the consummate salesman he can basically promise and tell you something and get you to buy it without even seeing it and there's some magic to that and that's also why he's got so much money pouring in from investors and doing this in a market like buying cars and trucks because it's so insanely expensive to get people that aren't particularly interested in cars and trucks interested in a new brand the hats off to them because i haven't seen something like this since the prius was popular in the mid 2000s people who were never really into cars all of a sudden got on the bandwagon of how hybrids and the prius are going to change the world it's so green everybody should own a hybrid and now it's kind of transitioned into tesla now all of a sudden evs are everything and everything else is garbage and people ask me all the time well why would you even consider an internal combustion car evs are way better well in some cases i agree and i've already explained that in this video however there's over six and a half million vehicles sold in the us every year and only about 250 000 of those are evs and there's a reason for it we are at the limit of battery capacity and production there's not enough raw materials to make enough batteries to replace all these internal combustion products and the battery capacity is not big enough to completely replace the big suvs and the trucks and in products that you need to get everywhere in the case of this tesla the supercharging network i had to drive 25 to 30 minutes away just to charge the thing on a supercharger so while it may be extremely plausible in certain markets like california where you have a good infrastructure i don't have it out here in the suburbs of chicago a lot of states do not have it so that's another huge roadblock to mass adoption of this but from talking to other manufacturers from toyota to hyundai and kia they all say the same thing we cannot make enough batteries we do not have the raw materials enough with our battery suppliers to to make hundreds of thousands of these at a cost that people can afford and the last thing to close this out i get so many comments and people messaging me about evs being more green why would you want to own an internal combustion engine that uses oil gasoline all of that well the truth is and i'm just going to put it this way all cars are extremely wasteful whether it's an ev or a regular car truck they're all made the same way you still need steels you still need the foundries for the alloys you still have rubber in the tires you have brake pads and brake rotors and chemicals or coolants to keep the cars cool you still have all the raw materials that go into building a car then you have the factories the robotics the power the energy and the people and all of the things that go along with sourcing these parts from all over the world even looking at the tesla product we the model 3 there's parts from everywhere and you could argue about battery technology being cleaner than burning oil or drilling into the earth but you know what these things just are wasteful if you're a car owner if you're buying a car we're still consuming something in my state we're run on nuclear power mostly and exelon the company that is responsible for it is talking about shutting down two of the biggest nuclear power plants because of cost the replacement for that coal power plants which if i had an ev is going to be taking coal power so you know it's not about right or wrong it's not what's about better or worse it's what's right for you if you want an eevee go for it i can't wait to see how far this technology gets pushed with battery technology improving every week there's a story about it cobalt free lithium-ion batteries all this it's so amazing but we're still a good 10 plus years away from serious serious mass adoption of all of this but we'll be talking about it endlessly until then thanks for watching i'll see you next video [Music] douchebags ruining my planet hey buddy you're killing the earth with that piece of my father owns more factories and you have teeth i can't hear you over my money

Channel: savagegeese

Views: 377,221

Rating: 4.8429236 out of 5

Keywords: cars, trucks, suvs, 2020, 2021, review, Tesla, Model 3, model y, ev, hybrid, taycan, electric, porsche, macan, bmw m3, audi a4, mercedes, honda accord, tesla problems, best new car, best suv, best used, cargurus, carfax, reviews, toyota rav4 prime, mazda, carvana, autonation, lexus, suv, worst, fpace, problems, comedy

Id: SPEWaBYj4lA

Length: 36min 56sec (2216 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/V_varius]

lmao "My father owns more factories than you have teeth! I can't hear you over my MONEY!"

[u/fellontoblackdays]

An excellent review. A good blend of objective acknowledgement of the achievements and downfalls. Exceptional work! Really love the social discussion of the car industry and consumerism in last 3 minutes. Good work!

[u/oh84s]

I really like how he points out that other manufacturers have panel gap and paint issues too. The way the internet talks you'd swear it was exclusive to Tesla.

I would disagree about his statement Tesla is a software company. Tesla is definitely a hardware company that happens to also be very good at software and AI. They don't sell a single software product.

Edit - I also disagree about his argument that the grid could be fuelled by coal therefore they're not green. While you may find a very few examples of countries installing coal power plants, primarily internationally you see a significant switch to renewables, which is only going to become more so in coming years. For instance, Australia is already getting half to base loan on renewables at times and this is only increasing. The idea that the world will switch back to coal is just untrue.

[u/StaniX]

These cars are just so cheap looking, both on the outside and on the inside. It kinda reminds me of the inside of a McDonalds where they're clearly trying to make it look modern and upscale with the cheapest materials possible.

It just feels so soulless and devoid of personality, which is odd since they're actually pretty quirky in a lot of aspects. That lack of personality or charm really makes it hard to forgive a lot of the quality issues. Its a weird problem.

[u/wildabb]

My friend is currently looking at a Tesla Model 3 and we test drove one. I need to remind myself constantly that Tesla doesn’t make cars for the normal car enthusiast. What /cars look for in cars the Tesla just won’t have but for the majority of the population, it’s the perfect car. So for my friend who isn’t a car guy something like this is perfect but I personally didn’t enjoy the car.

[u/Stengah]

That was one of the most balanced reviews I've seen on it, to be fair though the model 3 performance is quite a better than a rwd model 3. Still most of the criticism ring true on both but the driving dynamics of the performance are pretty damn nice for what it is - especially with the track mode turned on.

The only thing you really need to make it handle great are slightly beefier tires and coilovers and you have yourself a 550ish HP awd track weapon that you can daily drive with an insanely low running cost than anything else in that power/performance range.

[u/Mayjaplaya]

/u/savagegeese thank you for the review. But I'd like to point out in your weight distribution picture on 12:25, the front weight (47.78%) and rear weight (50.69%) only add up to 98.47%.

[u/Barebacking_Bernanke]

As for the conclusions section, Savagegeese really needs to do some research because he's off on a number of them.

There are not enough materials to make batteries needed for mass adoption of EV's.

I've been seeing hand wringing about this since the early 2010's, but the facts are that miners and battery manufacturers have consistently found ways to locate more deposits and reduce the amount of materials used in batteries while improving performance, respectively. You can literally see it with battery prices falling in price every year, which would not happen if that wasn't the case. Just because a traditional car manufacturer fails to secure a good supply of batteries, doesn't mean they are correct when they complain to Savagegeese that there isn't enough stuff out there.

Electric cars are still terrible for the environment.

Public transportation is fantastic. I've lived in the NYC area for most of my life, so I have an appreciation for it. However, I also know that most places in America don't have adequate public transportation options and it'd take decades to build one up. So driving cars is just a part of life in the US. And on that front, the lifetime carbon emissions of an EV is many times better than that of an internal combustion engine, even factoring in manufacturing.

The cars are charged with coal

He specifically brings nuclear plants being shut down and being replaced with coal plants in his state. That's complete nonsense and shows no understanding about modern energy markets. If nuclear power is too expensive for Exelon, they sure as hell wouldn't replace it with the only form of energy that's almost as expensive, which is coal.

They'd be replaced with natural gas, solar, and wind which you'll see in MISO's queue. In fact it's a nationwide phenomenon. Just take a look at who's filing to add new capacity to the grid in the next 3 years from FERC which regulates the grid in the US. It's about 2/3 Wind and Solar.

[u/Fizzled10]

As someone who owns a Model 3 and has 42k miles on it, I think this is a very good and fair review. The cars definitely have their own issues, some of them interesting because of how the car is so built around software and the tech side of things. Ask me whatever the hell you want and i'll try to answer as unbiased as possible.

• I had no issues with bad panel gaps although that always seems to be mentioned. I think this was a bigger issue in the older Tesla cars, mine is MY 2019. I do think the paint is subpar, I have A LOT of rock chips on my front bumper. Not many are hugely noticeable, but they are definitely there.
• Some parts of the car are cheap. I personally have no issues with rattling, and I think what a lot of people don't realize is when you have no engine and not many moving parts, you're going to hear a lot more random noises, especially road noise. An example of one of the cheap parts of the car, one of my passengers tried to put the sun visor down and the clip snapped right off. That is unacceptable in a $40k car.
• If you don't live close to a service center it can be very frustrating trying to get anything fixed with the car. Luckily for me I moved within a few miles of one, but before that if anything needed to be done I would pretty much have to drive wherever the closest Tesla dealer was. Since i've moved though, anytime I needed something fixed they just send a mobile repair tech. For example with my broken visor clip, they sent someone to me and fixed it without any issues.
• As others have mentioned, everything being centered around the screen is weird and you have to get used to it, but you really do adapt fairly quickly. Tesla also does a very good job at making things that are important have some form of shortcut on the screen. With that said, yeah I would still prefer to have a dashboard on my model 3 like the S and X do, or you know like every other car does. I do like the comparison he made to it feeling that of an iOS environment. It is very simple and snappy once you get used to it.
• Again with the screen, I very rarely have issues with it, but it has crashed maybe 5 times in the year that i've owned it. It has always rebooted itself within a minute, but still that is something that should really never happen when every bit of information you need while driving is on that screen. Also, even when the screen crashes, all the lights and physical buttons still work, but it is an eerie feeling.
• The car I drove previous to this was a 2008 Stage 3 Roush mustang. I will say my m3 is definitely faster, but it just doesn't feel the same. The mustang was for sure more fun to drive. I don't want to say the Tesla is soulless, but in my opinion it doesn't have much level of excitement unless you're flooring it from a stoplight, and even then it's so smooth and calculated. For everyday driving it's great. I have never really had any issue with the autopilot other than the occasional hard breaking.
• No offence to r/cars, but it baffles me when I read these comments about liking the cars but not wanting to get one because of the "online culture" of the Tesla fanboys. I'd hate to break it to you, but the only time I see that is when i'm on this subreddit, or reading stupid comments on youtube videos, and to add onto that, the anti fanboys who shit on the brand no matter what are just as bad as the real fanboys. A lot of people have asked me about the car in random scenarios, and not a single damn one of them has ever mentioned "online culture" or fanboys. If you like the car and think it might suit you, get the thing. If you don't then don't.