- All right, I'm finally doing it. I'm finally reviewing the car
that I've been daily driving for the past year and a half which is the Tesla Model S Plaid. I put 30,000 miles on this car
right here, which is a lot. And the thing about this car, I think there's a lot of first impressions out there about it where
people drive it for a week, two weeks, something like that. And a lot of 'em are right, but a lot of 'em are kind of like you have to live with the car to see if you will actually get used
to some of these features. And so now from an owner's perspective I can tell you which features I like and which one I really hate 'cause there is one that I really hate. There's also an option on this car that almost no other cars
in the world right now have because it was pushed to next year. But I was lucky enough to get it which is the carbon brake package. I'll tell you about that
in a second as well. But yeah, let's review
the car I actually own. So let's start with
the outside of the car. This is what a lot of
people would actually tell you is an older design, which it is. The model S is a decade
old car at this point and the silhouette is pretty similar to when it first came out but it's gotten some
facelifts over the years and I'm gonna throw in my
subjective opinion here. I still think it's a
really good looking car. It's a really nice silhouette. It is a big sedan obviously,
but it's a hatchback for one. It's got the 21 inch wheels on
it, which I think help a lot. And we'll talk, like I said
about the brakes in a second but this is a one and
a half year old Plaid so it doesn't have the new headlights but I still think they're pretty good. You can see the new fog lights up front, a little bit of that
active passive arrow slack on through there. Big grill at the front for
an electric car anyway. The front trunk, oh, I should say this is wrapped by the way. So this sat in black and how dirty it is is
is obviously not normal and there's a little bit of black camo in here and on these. I think that was tasteful, anyway. So the basics as far as specs are this is a triple motor power
train sedan from Tesla. It's got one motor between
the front two wheels and two motors between
the back two wheels. That's where most of your torque is. Obviously you're accelerating, you're shifting off those back wheels. A lot of that weight goes rearward. So that's super helpful. It'll do that two seconds,
zero to 60 on a prep surface. It's a monster in a straight line, okay? I'll get to the driving
experience in a bit. But also, it showed
about 390 something miles on 100% charge when I first got it. We're now 30,000 miles in and it shows about 365
miles to a full 100% charge. So it's about a 8 to 10% range degradation which is close to normal,
a little more than normal but close to normal for an
electric car that you get new. Now you can't talk about owning a Tesla without talking about a key. Now, you can have a card
key or a regular key fob but I think what a lot of people do and what I do is use the phone,
use the app on your phone as the key to the car. Because number one,
it's incredibly reliable as far as how close you
need to be to the car for it to actually unlock the doors. How close I get right there, right there. And when I walk away from the car, it's really well calibrated as far as closing and locking too. So that's really good. But then the app itself
has a lot of good features. I mean you get the unlock and lockability you can preheat the car. Here's the interior climate control. You can heat the seats,
heat the steering wheel, do all kinds of stuff like that. Beep the horn, see where the location is, view charging stats, call service. You can even summon it to you if you're kind of far away
across the parking lot. I don't do it much, I don't recommend it but the app is really good. Then you get into controls and you can see all the
controls to open the car you can see your tire pressure. And this will actually bring
you to one of the first things that I don't like about the car which is that the front
trunk is not powered so it won't open by itself. I mean, it's kind of a bonus to have a powered opening front trunk but for $130,000 car, you'd think that that would be included. And there's some other stuff that I'll get to that you'd think would be included but isn't. Either way, pretty
decent sized front trunk, not huge, but not tiny. You could probably fit, I don't know, a duffle bag and a half, three backpacks, something like that. But I almost never use it
'cause it's not powered. I have to open it manually every time. If I'm in the car like this,
I'd rather throw something in the powered hatchback, which is huge. So this does not get much use
on the car I actually own. They use it more on other EVs. So here we come around the back. Again, I don't know about you but I think this is a good looking shape. The lights are flickering on video but they don't usually flicker. That's how you know that it's a Plaid unless you have the text that says Plaid. And if you know what about
the nice thick 3D one, then you know. A little carbon fiber spoiler back here. But here's the powered
opening rear tailgate. I mean this is a ton, a ton of space. I can fit all kinds of stuff in here. And then underneath this is a sub trunk where it's grocery bags, where there's duffle bags,
Frisbee bags and charging. I have a tire pressure inflater over here. I mean this is a gigantic amount of space. There's a tiny bit of a curl up here with the dual motors under there. But over here pull these
and they release the seats. They don't fold down automatically but you can then fold these down. And I have fit two entire
bicycles next to each other in the trunk of this car. Now again, I'll say for $130,000 this should also let me
pull the seats back up but they don't, I have
to do that manually. So I'll pop over here
and put them back up. Now I'll actually start
with the back seats here which I think are decent back seats but I'll get to interior
build quality in a second. But for the size of this car, which is a pretty big car most of this space is actually
behind me, in the trunk. And these are okay backseats as far as size. So this is a six three driving position and I'm right up against
the chair in front of me. If the person in front of you is smaller, the space is better. But comfort wise, I'm all right. It's not the worst thing in the world. But then you do have this screen down here which is pretty solid. So this is again, part of
Tesla's extremely minimal complete lack of buttons in the interior which is gonna mean as I close the screen that basically all of
your controls back here are gonna be on this screen and you can change your HVAC
as far as where the air blows and to turn it on or off
and change temperature all through the screen. I don't do much of the other
stuff, which is watching videos on the tiny screen or
controlling the music. But you can, if you want to. You can also heat the back
seats, but not cool them. You got two USBC ports down
here and some floor lights. But these are decently comfortable seats. Not that I spend a lot of
back seat time in my own car, but I find that this is pretty good. There's also a huge sunroof
that is very well tinted which I also like a lot. This is a solid back seat but if you're gonna talk about
build quality and comfort let's do the front seat. Oh, by the way, this is another thing
When you get passengers this is the number one thing they don't understand about the car is how do you get out? It doesn't look like there's any handle but this is a touchscreen button
to unlock that latch there. Anyway, front seat. So these handles here
are the number one thing that I believe, this is
total speculation from me but I'm pretty sure they're
the number one thing that break on Tesla's is just the interior. The handle slides in for
aerodynamic purposes. But anyway, you get in the car and you are in the cockpit
of a jet, basically. This is, in my opinion,
a sweet looking interior. I like it a lot. You can see this is the white interior. All the Plaids also have
the carbon fiber here but this trim matches up nicely. The shapes are nice. Multiple materials here. This is a good improvement, a pretty big improvement
from Teslas of the past. I'll turn my fan speed down so you can actually hear me over that. But it isn't up to the speck of, I mean you've heard this
before, the Mercedes, the BMWs, the Porsche of the world other $130,000 cars will feel
like better build than this. Here's some examples, right? This carbon fiber sheet here
is supposed to open halfway and then open all the way. It opens all the way for me,
but it doesn't stop halfway. You can hear it try but that's been broken
for most of the time that I've owned this car. If it stayed open, I would
also be able to pop this back pop this back and have
a ton of space in here. But also this pops back. There's more storage in here. I like the way it's laid out, but it's just not the most, there's creaking,
there's just a little bit of extra wiggle room on some of the stuff you'd like there to not be. It's fine for me because
that wasn't high on the list for reasons why I got this car or why I like this car or
enjoy it as a daily driver. But it would be nice if
this stuff worked, right? Okay, so there are two things that I really like in this interior and two things that I really dislike. You can probably kind of guess
what I'm talking about here. I'll let you form your
guesses as you watch. But anyway, the things that I really like are actually one, the shape of the yoke. I really like it. I think this is one of the things that you spend some time
with and you get used to. And I wouldn't go back to a normal wheel and this is gonna be subjective it is a lot more square and
you do a lot more of this. And when you're driving you kind of have to
find those awkward spots where maybe you're doing a full K turn or maybe you're pulling
outta your driveway and you have to do a little
more movement with it. Those are the couple of things that you find you have to get used to. But for most driving, which in America is a lot of straight roads a lot of subtle turns like this, this is totally comfortable and it gives you much more visibility to this screen here. And then the other
second thing that I like is the software is really responsive. Now again, there's not a lot of there are almost zero
real buttons in this car. I mean, you could consider the hazards even not a real button. Door handles not a real button. I guess these are the
only real buttons, right? You can still go park,
reverse, neutral, drive by touching with your foot
on the brake, one of these but you don't really do that much. You actually end up swiping
on the screen to go forward swiping on the screen to go backward. That brings me pretty quickly to some of the things that I dislike. So here's the two main things that I really, really don't like about driving and using
this car on the daily. One, the buttons on the yoke, right? So this is an important distinction from the shape of the yolk itself. Like I said, the yolk you can think whatever you want about it but they've also chosen
to put the blinkers the left blinker and the
right blinker on the yoke in the form of a capacitive touch button. It's not a real clicking button it does have some haptic feedback but it's a capacitive button. Your headlight adjusting is
also a capacitive button. Your horn is a capacitive button. That's right, nothing
happens when you push this. This is just your airbag. Your autopilot here, your wipers, and your mics for your voice control. I hate this. I really, really don't like this at all. And I found, I was trying to see how long it would take
me to get used to it. Fact is in about 1000 miles your muscle memory is perfect. You find you're driving
and you know exactly how to hit that button
while you're driving. That's no problem. But the button is
unresponsive all the time. My right blinker, sometimes I will try
for 10 seconds in a row to press all over this thing
and it's straight up won't work and I'll just have to
merge without my blinker. I swear to God, that's a real thing. This thing is unresponsive all the time. The left blinker 99% of
the time works for me. The right one's just bad. This is hard. I mean if it was stocks,
I would've been cool. If it was real buttons,
that would've been cool. But not a fan of capacitive
touch buttons in a car. I know Elon keeps saying things
like, "All input is error." Look, it's 2022, we're not there yet. You need real buttons
for real confident input. And that's also true
about the HVAC controls, which means you gotta slide over while you're driving by the way. So it's kind of hidden
a little bit back here and you gotta hit the
temperature or slide it up and then change your fans
and your fan speed like this. Now this is cool. Like this interface of being able to point the air wherever you want and your passenger pointing
it wherever they want. And then there are fans here
that are spinning up air and having the airstreams
collide at a certain angle to send it towards your
face or down over the wheel. That is cool. But I also just want like a
button to turn up fan speed. The fact that I have to go like this to hit the exact fan speed I want while driving is insane,
that is not ideal. If they could update even
just to have like buttons to go right or left to add a little bit or take a bit from fan speed, that would be nice. This is awful. It's cool looking but it's
awful while you're driving. All right, last thing about the software. I will say, the rest of
the software experience is really as good as it gets for an electric car, right? I've tested a lot of EVs now and just different car companies' systems that they've built, Mercedes,
BMW, Volkswagen, Chevy. As far as like what
you want while driving, this does not have Android
Auto or Apple CarPlay, which is bold. That is bold. But all the info you get, which is from your
Bluetooth of your phone, to the Spotify being built-in, to the cameras here to the energy graph. Which look at this, this is just actually recently added with the software
update, but this is sick. Gives you an idea based on how you drive, the elevation of your drive, and where you're navigating to, your live projection of
how much range you'll have versus your original
projection, that's sick. It's also totally missing a 360 view. Why does this car not have a 360 view? There's a front camera, it's right here. There's a back camera,
it's back on the tailgate. There's a camera on that. There's a camera on that. There's cameras in here. Camera in there. Why is there no 360 view? That would've been, I mean that's huge. Most cars I drive these
days have a 360 view but you can see the
responsiveness is really nice. You can instantly view
chargers everywhere. You can view the charging speeds. You can see how many
people are at the charger. You can navigate to it. It'll start preheating your battery. All this is great, great software, but that takes us right into the driving
experience, doesn't it? What's it like to own
and drive a car like this that you charge instead of
go to the gas station with? And to be fair, it's pretty much as good as it gets for an EV. This has a lot to do with
Tesla's infrastructure which is the superchargers, which talk to this car plug and play as good as it gets. Which is basically the reason why I think this makes the best daily driver of any of the EVs that I was considering. But there's a lot more to
the driving experience. So let me show you something. This is one of the things
that is kind of unique about this car that a lot of others don't have right now, which is this car, with the 21 inch wheels has a carbon ceramic brake package. Huge, huge, very expensive $20,000 upgrade to the Brinks. Why did I do this and why
would anybody do this? And would you recommend it? Good question. I'll start by saying that there are a lot of initial complaints and I was one of them,
about this car's OEM brakes. They are, how do I say this? They're okay, they're normal
brakes for normal driving and that's fine for most cars. But this car also happens
to accelerate faster than any other production
car did at the time which slowing down from the speeds that it is capable of so quickly requires more brakes, right? So from normal 30, 40, 50 mile an hour highway
driving, no problem. These can stop repeatedly. But as you quickly find out
when people go to drag strips or do a lot of repeated heavy braking or just spirited driving the stock brakes are after
one or two hard breaks, they start to fade quickly. This is one of the
options that you can take which is there are some other
brake package improvements some other carbon ceramic brake packages. This one is actually really nice. It's very well calibrated so you don't have to get a
bunch of heat in the brakes to initially get that bite
from the bigger brakes. They are more powerful right off the bat and they do not fade. They are great brakes but they're expensive
especially to replace. Should they have come with the car? No, I don't think so. I think there just should have been bigger better steel brakes on this car. If you're gonna track this
car, I would recommend these. I actually wouldn't recommend
ever tracking a model S without improvements to the brakes. (bird squawking) These birds make weird noises, but as you can probably
guess by all that talk, yeah, this car is a
missile in a straight line. It's absurd, it's obscene. You've seen the videos you might have even seen my
own video when I first got it. The initial acceleration, the
straight line acceleration and just as far as like everyday driving the ability to just place
yourself on the road because of your ability to steer and drive and accelerate exactly
the way you want to. It has also a lot to do with the calibration of the
brake pedal and the regen. So taking your foot off the accelerator and having it reliably
and predictably slow down all the way to zero is super helpful. This car is very, very fun to drive in a way that is super fun to me. It doesn't handle as well as a Taycan. it doesn't handle even as
well as some smaller EVs. But I love driving this
car, that's for sure. Oh, and there are also
some other unkept promises that I should address with this car. How many are there? I think there's at least two of them. One of them or maybe three. One of them was the ability to play a bunch of games in this front console. You can play some games. You can see all of the options here. One of them being arcade
and there are some but don't they always advertise
like Cyberpunk in here? That's not available. That never has been. I mean this is cool. This is better than most. If you're at a charger and you could just play games
that are built into the car or watch YouTube videos, that's sweet. But you're not playing
Cyberpunk in this car. So that's one. Two is the full self-driving. I did a full video on the main channel of just me experiencing it and
letting it drive me places. It works sometimes on some roads and there will be plenty
of updates in the future for it to get better but it is very much still a beta and I paid 1000s of dollars for it to be able to do that years ago. And it's just now starting to be available and still in beta. I consider that a little
bit of a botched promise. And the third is, and I don't know if this is still on Tesla's website but claiming a 200 mile per
hour top speed, that's not real. It never has been with this car. It's, I think claimed that it will require a hardware upgrade. Right now the car's top speed is like 160 which on any straightaway, on any track is pretty much as good as you need to go. And with these brakes, fine. This is not a car I think I even want to
go 200 miles an hour in. But they just kept saying it for so long. This car does not go 200 miles an hour. It has a max speed in track mode of 175. But that for me, I think is about it as far as daily driver stuff
to consider with this car. I'll leave it at this. I think this is the best
daily driver in the world for me for a couple reasons. I mean American roads,
lots of straight lines. Being able to place yourself on the road, the acceleration, it's awesome. It's just a fun car. It has tons of space. And then as an EV, I do a lot of road trips. For Ultimate Frisbee, there's games and I might go
from New York to Boston one day or to Ottawa or Montreal or Toronto or back to
New York or Philly or DC. And being able to rely on the
supercharger network is huge. It's a huge part of owning
and driving this car. Also having a charger in the garage starting every day with
a full tank, it's great. So yeah, driving people around,
driving equipment around driving alone around having a good time. I think this is a generally
positive review for me but there's just those couple of things that you don't think about when you don't own the car for a while. Like the steering wheel, like
the brakes, things like that. So there you have it. Matter of fact, one more thing
I'll actually leave you with that I think way more cars
should have at this price range that only this one seems to have which are century mode
and built-in dash cam. Century mode being the
cameras that just record to the internal computer and you can anytime
someone walks by the car have it trigger and record. So anytime anything happens to the car, you have a video of it. And the built-in dash cam, always recording while you're driving, recording internal storage rip that footage whenever you want. More cars should have that. So now I've been fair, I've talked about things
the car should have and not things that this
car has that others should. Okay, that's it. That's my review of Model
S Plaid, The Daily Driver for me for now, anyway. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one, peace.
