Tesla fan boys will tell you that the Model S, 3 and X are the greatest vehicles ever put into production and that “…none of the brain dead dino-juice legacy car companies will ever catch…” (actual quote from a Telsa buddy of mine).
In this video we discuss more than a dozen Tesla problems or shortcomings, many of which are quite unexpected. From excessive road noise, to a lack of basic radio management tools (like mute and reordering favorites), to the inability to read road signs and act on them, we explain and demonstrate many issues.
[00:00:10.300]
Okay, so I have been in an ongoing feud with my brother in law over how perfect or imperfect model threes and just Teslas in general are. And so I decided to make this video to explain to all the Tesla fanboys that while Tesla clearly makes a fantastic product and I don’t use that word lightly, by the way, fantastic is really it. I mean, the likelihood of a startup being able to work in this industry with all the complexities and regulations and international problems is absolutely astonishing that they are able to produce such a good quality vehicle with such innovation in it.
[00:00:54.280]
That being said, it is far from perfect. There are lots and lots and lots of deficiencies. And that’s probably the right word, deficiencies. So and there are lots of places where other manufacturers beat Tesla on various various items. I’ve broken this into several different categories. The first category is just what’s missing on a Tesla. So on the standard plus model of the Tesla model three, which is the second from the bottom level, what’s missing is a phone charger.
[00:01:34.270]
You have to buy that separately and you think, OK, well, that’s a bit weird, but fine. Right. OK. How about floor mats? Doesn’t come with floor mats. Really. You want fifty thousand dollars for a car and you’re not going to shop floor mats, ok. I could live with that. I guess heated rear seats. OK, again, pretty minor. Pretty nit picky. I’ll give you that. A wild take note, by the way, that all of the vehicles have heated receipts.
[00:02:02.410]
You have to pay an extra 400 dollars to get them turned on. Which, by the way, I’m not complaining about as far as the design goes. I think it’s brilliant idea to build these things in, to keep production costs down and sell it later when people decide they want it. However, I think 400 bucks to turn on the heated seats in the back that are already there is a bit steep. You can’t buy a KIA. You can’t buy that.
[00:02:26.170]
You can’t buy most cars these days without. Well, most is exaggerated. There’s lots of cars at the low level that have heated rear seats built in. There are no vented or cooled front seats at any level. I personally don’t like vented or cooled front seats. My wife, however, can’t live without them. She loves them. OK. Now is where we get into some real weirdness.
[00:02:54.760]
I don’t want AM radio OK, understood. Except I for me I have a couple of talk radio stations I listen to on A.M. and you just can’t get them, which is super weird because you know the car is capable of it apparently. They removed it from the model S’s. So the receivers there, they just didn’t want to put it in. No Wi-Fi. So you. Yes, it has a connection, a cellular connection. So it goes out to the cloud.
[00:03:25.360]
It will do its downloads through that if you if you don’t connect it to your own Wi-Fi. But my daughter, for instance, doesn’t have much of a data plan. And so she prefers to use the data plan on my GM vehicles. And, you know, Ford, get this all pretty much everybody has this. So you can turn your car to a hotspot. Yeah. Not the Tesla. Can’t do it. Weird crisis? No, it’s just fine, but weird.
[00:03:56.060]
Now, here’s another super, super weird one. No Android Auto or Apple car play. How is that possible? And the answer is because Tesla wants you to use their systems.
[00:04:06.940]
And by the way, their systems are pretty good, but it ain’t no Android auto and it ain’t no car play. So it’s just not as good as as Android Auto in particular. Now, let’s see here what else is missing. There’s no heads up display even as an option. And you think heads up display. What’s that? Well, let’s just a little display, a little projector that projects onto the windscreen under the you know, the front windshield.
[00:04:31.720]
What, you know, core core items are so things like your speed roadsigns and we’ll get to roadsigns in a minute. Things like that. And it puts them up just below the driver’s line of sight. It’s really handy feature. It’s really cool. It doesn’t cost squat for me to put a little pico projector. Probably costs somewhere in the area of 50, 60 dollars to put in. That may be a slight exaggeration, but I doubt it at any rate.
[00:05:00.280]
So it’s not there. My wife’s twenty nineteen Mazda six x5 has it. We’ve had it on a number of vehicles and it is great. Google Maps and you think. Let’s go Google Maps. I read it. It’s got Google Maps. Well, sort of. It has base Google Maps. In other words, what they’ve done is they’ve licensed the mapping the maps for Google, but they haven’t licensed the searching capability for it. So, you know, on a Google map, you can search for something and say it’s really not the area.
[00:05:31.160]
One can slide the map over. And then there’s a button says, search this area. Yeah. That’s not there. You can’t do it. Also, the voice commands on the Teslas are really weak. So you can’t say something like coal. You know, the local Tim Horton’s, you can’t say call the nearest General Motors dealer. You can’t do any of that. It just won’t work. Where I can on my phone. And if it had ever it auto, I could do it.
[00:05:56.990]
Now, as far as problems go, just flat out problems. There’s a couple of things. This is different category. The biggest problem is road noise. So here we are driving just north of Calgary, and I’m not sure what you can hear me, but the audio. It’s probably a little bit drummed out because the the cars picking up about 80 decibels of what a meter appears, you can see it and there’s wind noise through some of the windows as well, which isn’t terrible, but it’s not great.
[00:06:29.500]
The point of this isn’t that it’s not it’s not acceptable. It’s hot. It’s quite loud and certainly far louder than my Cadillac and even my Ford before that. My electric Ford. My electric Cadillac. You probably can’t hear this because my phone has very good sound cancellation, but this thing is loud. I’ve got wind noise coming through the doors. Because they don’t see all 100 percent, they’re good. But they’re not far from perfect. Nowhere near as good as my other vehicles.
But the road noise is quite loud. And that’s because they use cheap glass. On the doors and single being glass driven Model S’ and X’s and my own Model 3. I have not driven the why, although I expect the Y is exactly the same as the three. Given that it’s pretty much the same vehicle, just a little larger. The road noise in these is very loud. I have been driving, you know, luxury vehicles for years and they use multi pane glass and you think, you know, landlords, which is two or three pieces of glass laminated together.
[00:07:37.300]
And that really keeps the road noise down. Tesla uses cheap single pane glass on the sides in particular. And as a result, even the support people I’ve talked to have said, yes, we know about it. It’s noisy. Not much we can do. It’s what it is. Fair enough. Again, is this a crisis? No, it’s still a wonderful car. But, man, it’s annoying when you’re expecting an electric car to sound like an electric car.
[00:08:00.490]
Yeah, it doesn’t. It’s loud when you’re driving on anything other than actually even on perfect roads. It’s it’s loud. You’ll seldom get it below 60 decibels driving in Canada. You’ll get it on because we they put a gravel and tar surface down so that in the winter on paved roads, it’s a little more grippy. Another problem, the pillars are quite large. That is a game far from a real crisis. It’s just a it’s just a problem that you’d learn to live with.
[00:08:32.200]
I think the reason they’ve done this is to keep a structural integrity, because I’ve chosen to go to a glass roof, which, by the way, is a lovely feature, a that gets me to a point of what’s missing. There is no sunroof. Now, I hate sunroofs. All I want to do is close them. I don’t really know why people like them, but my wife loves sunroofs, literally will not buy a car without a sunroof.
[00:08:51.820]
The rear view mirror is also a very, very small, hard to see back. So that so that the viewing angles around the vehicle are not very great. Not very good. Now, here’s one that going to drive Tesla fanboys crazy when you put it on self steer, auto steer. You know, you would expect that it will keep you in your lane keeping and do the adaptive cruise thing, which, by the way, I had adaptive cruise on a 2012 Dodge Durango.
[00:09:19.290]
That’s hardly a new feature. But moving past that, though, back to back to the problem, you would expect that because it’s all camera based in particular, that it would avoid potholes, especially big potholes, but more of more importantly, obstacles. So I was driving my Tesla model three yesterday and I had it on autopilot. The self-drive was going along it in front of me appeared a mudflap from a very large trucking thing, mudflats, pretty small, dude, and it’s flat.
[00:09:52.440]
So just drive over it. Yeah. Okay. You know, it wasn’t small. Was the attachment that it had to the truck that had come off. So it had a metal rail at one end and I had a swerved to avoid that thing. Had to take control of the car very quickly, which of course I was doing so. Fair enough. But it it didn’t do it for me. And it never does. It does not avoid potholes.
[00:10:18.030]
Right through the portals. Look at these foam foam, apparently, Elan said in February that they’re working on that and they we’ve get it and I’m sure they will eventually. The question is, are they going to include that in the base autopilot or are you going to have to have the FSD, the full self-drive? Here’s one I’m going to demonstrate, which is the music info. So when you’ve got your music, your screen up showing what music is on, most stations put out a push, a single line of metadata.
[00:10:50.230]
Metadata is just data about data. So in other words, the name of the station, the name of the song, the name of their album came from whatever they want in a Tesla. Instead of having that scroll or instead of having it clickable so you can click on it on this big 17h screen and have it come up the details instead of that, you’ve got about 25 characters. So you’ll see here that, in fact, often I have no idea what’s plain and I can’t see it.
[00:11:20.940]
I can’t bring it up, which is super annoying. Certainly a little thing, but annoying. All the same. Now back to driving in the center of the lane with the autopilot. So what it does is it picks the dead center. It estimates worthy right and left lines are and it estimates the center of that. The problem is, well, there’s two problems that one, it often gets it right, which means that you’re driving in the groove and you think, well, what’s the problem with that?
[00:11:49.540]
Well, I’m going to show you the problem with that. First of all, I never drive in the group. I always drug slightly to the left. If nothing else, it helps the road wear out less. Secondly, I avoid a lot of potholes by doing that. And thirdly, when it rains, which is what I’m going to show you here, it’s a heck of a lot safer because I’m not driving in the trench where the water is.
[00:12:09.190]
So I can avoid hydroplaning.
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And this is why you don’t want to drive directly in the center of a lane, because if you do, you’ll be driving where everybody else drives. And that is going to get you a one heck of a hydroplaning situation. You need to drive out of the group’s event. But the Tesla won’t do it. Tesla will only drive dead center of the lane. It should instead the left a little bit. At least in my opinion. Another problem, though, is if you have we’ll see a section of the road where it gets particularly wide for some reason, you know, a ramp used to be there or a ramp is there for that matter, and vote the dotted line to your right ends.
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The vehicle can lurch to the right to get in, get into the dead center, which is unnerving and unnecessary.
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So there is an area just doesn’t know what to do at all where there’s no lines and just tries to split the difference and put you in the middle of it. The vehicle should have a preference to hug the left and it should be off by a few inches so that it’s not driving in the group. It’s avoiding a lot of obstacles and water and whatever else. But it doesn’t it wants to drive that center. Will they fix up the future? No know probably, but don’t know.
[00:13:41.110]
OK, what’s next? Signage. So you would think that a vehicle that’s this advanced would recognize signs, road signs. So speed limit changes, stop signs, so on and so forth. My wife’s twenty nineteen Mazda does several other vehicles I’ve owned. Do they just use the camera and they, they read the sign and go up. It’s 60 kilometers an hour down. Oh there you go. That’s cool. Oh it’s a stoplight. There you go.
[00:14:07.090]
And at very least they put it up on the little screen and my wife’s Mazda CX5. It does a wonderful job. It actually puts it up in the heads up display. It tells you the speed limit changing to this and then it will slow your vehicle down. Wonderful. The Tesla model three will not do that without the self, without the full self-drive. And that feature, by the way, only come for full self-drive or FSD last week.
[00:14:31.150]
So if you’ve spent in Canada the eleven thousand six hundred dollars for full self-drive and you’re on the advance advance software, you will now apparently gets stops. Stop signs. Speed limit changes on and so forth. Read from the cameras. Pretty weird because I thought it had always done. I think what they should do is make it available to slow the vehicle down. I understand that it’s not going to speed the vehicle up. But when you’re going from an 80 zone to a 60 zone or whatever speed limit you choose, as long as slowing down the vehicle should recognize that and slow down appropriately.
[00:15:10.180]
But it just doesn’t. Next stuff there. There’s a little camera button and it shows you the rear camera. You think, OK, that’s kind of nice, but who cares? Well, true, but you can’t see the front. So if you’re trying to park headfirst, which, by the way, I virtually never do, I’m a backyard guy. But once in a while, I have to pull in and there’s an air down on the front.
[00:15:29.810]
This and you make me want to make sure you do not scrub it. Now, can you think. Well, just look at the window, dude. Your head’s about this. Both the right height. Not quite. The camera is actually a few inches higher than you and certainly probably up to a foot higher than where your eyes are in your head. And it will see down much better over the hood than what you will. To the point that one of the really nice features about a Tesla is if you’re driving in that model three, which is a mid-sized car, you can often see over the car in front of you and detect vehicles in front.
[00:16:06.520]
So the display will show you, which is nice. So that camera is positioned to do it. It just doesn’t. Something that drives me crazy is the charging lock on the charging. You know, you go to plug it in to to charge it up. It does a walk and maybe in California and other places where Tesla is born. This is an issue where somebody would randomly unplug your charger. I’ve never had a vehicle, Ford or my Cadillacs.
[00:16:35.320]
They plug in. I’ve never had them lock. They don’t even option. Don’t even offer it. That’s probably a mistake. They probably should offer it. But to have it lock by default and to have you not able to turn that lock off is quite annoying. Now, the defense of that is, well, you just open your door if that’s what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to open the driver’s door and then the charged log will come off and you could just unplug.
[00:16:57.790]
Well, in my case, that doesn’t work. Probably 80 percent of the time I have to reach into the vehicle and I have to press the unlock button on the on the inside. Now, if I want a Tesla charger, superchargers something that’s a button and press item, withdraw it. But it’s just a pain. I don’t want to do that. I want it to just plug in like all of the other electric vehicles and be done. But it won’t do that.
[00:17:21.670]
Here’s something that for people that are used to electric vehicles will drive you absolutely bat beep crazy. One foot driving, one pedal driving. Now, Tesla and most Tesla drivers will tell you that one pedal driving is the best. And it may be the way of the future, but. There’s definitely a big issue with it. One pedal driving is the notion which you don’t use the brakes. What you do is you take your foot off the gas and the vehicle goes into region mode right away.
[00:17:55.950]
So the electric motor spins backwards and starts producing electricity. Wonderful idea. Love region all over it. However, in the Model three, for some inexplicable reason, we only have two modes, what they call standard and what they call low. So standard is downright dangerous if you’re not used to it. You’ll get rear ended using this if you’re not careful. So when you take your foot off the gas and you’re in standard, it’s a standard region.
[00:18:26.220]
That vehicle will all that lurch. I’ve had, I don’t know, 15 people drive my Tesla now and all of them have been really taken aback by this. So I haven’t set the low. When I realized there’s a Tesla owner that I’m weird. Most people put it on on the regular one. And the way they avoid lurching is to just not take your foot off the gas. You sort of ease your foot off the gas. OK, here’s the problem with that.
[00:18:50.160]
If you’re a hyper miler and I am, I want to coast a lot. You cannot coast in a Tesla. It’s not possible. The low region is like high region on my Cadillac or by Ford. It is very strong. So they should have a third setting, which is none. And that’s what I would like. So I would like to set my one pedal driving to none. And then the vehicle will coast. So when I’m coming up to a stop, I make it.
[00:19:21.870]
See, it’s a half a kilometer away. I’ll just take my foot off the gas and I’ll bet the coast beautifully. But it barely slows down. And then I can apply the brakes as I get closer and to this to the stoplight. And it will come to a halt. And of course, the brakes when I say the brakes. It’s actually not going to use the calipers. What it’s actually going to use is the region. And that’s what I would like.
[00:19:42.120]
That’s what I have, my other cars. And it’s great. Another mistake in the Tesla is that sort of traditional musk fashion is a bit of a overpromise here, which is Tesla has given you the maximum spec that that battery can do. So, for instance, I have a standard Tesla standard, plus I believe it’s gold and that is a 402 kilometer battery. According to Tesla. And it’s now exactly almost to the day one year old and I took it in and it charges now to 350 five kilometers.
[00:20:15.690]
And you think, well, yeah, it’s a year old. It should drop it. OK, but, you know, it doesn’t drop a bit. Other companies, why don’t they drop generally? Well, let’s take a look at the Chevy Volt or the Cadillac ELR. This is a quote out of Wikipedia to ensure the battery pack lost more than 10 years. It does two things. The Volt GM decided to only use about half of the 16 KWh capacity of the battery. So what they do is it will only charge to 80 percent of capacity and it never charges below 30 percent. What they’ve got is they have reserve. What they are calling reserve cells. So let’s say your battery pack will just make up a number. Say it’s one hundred kilowatt. Right. It’s a it’s a big battery. So you’ve got 100 kilowatt battery pack. Let’s just for the sake of argument, say that there’s 100 cells in there, by the way, is an awful lot more than 100.
[00:21:01.800]
Let’s just call it a hundred cells with these other companies. You will find that the number of the cells, let’s say 15 percent of them, are just completely unused. May, as the cells that are used start to wear out, the software will turn those cells off and turn on the new cells, which means you don’t. Yes, the battery degrades, but no, you don’t see it because it’s not over promise. The battery is supposed to produce 16 kilowatts or twelve kilowatts KWh, whatever number it is, and it will even though some of the cells are dying and are old.
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And that’s because it’s subbing in new ones automatically. It avoids the warranty experience. You know, it’s yeah, it’s an issue. The you can only mute from the driver’s wheel. So you think it’s not really an issue? Well, it is if you’re if you’ve got kids. No, my kids aren’t. My kids drive the cars. So this is not a problem for me. But I’ve certainly had other people that have driven the car. Point this out on the screen.
[00:22:01.050]
You see at the bottom right hand corner, there’s volume up and down and you can just press and hold it and it will change the mute and it will it will not use or it will change the volume. But you can’t just click on it and have it mute, which means the passenger will, you know, somebodies partner, mom or dad, it’s in the passenger seat. Can’t mute it to go bark at the kids. The driver has to click the steering wheel to get it.
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You. It’s not a problem. Well, no, but it is annoying. I’ll tell you that for. For others that to drive this. Another thing is there’s a bunch of little Easter eggs and fun stuff in the vehicle and you can’t turn the volume up or down on that and you cannot meet those. So, for instance, I was in a lineup for a COVID test COVID-19. Yes. And I turned on something. One of these little Easter eggs that spilled to the car and just then a nurse came up to the window and knocked on.
[00:22:52.690]
Knocked on the window. So I rolled it down. And I thought, oh, I’ll just meet this fun thing. Yeah, you can’t. You can’t. When something started these little fun things, these Easter eggs, which, by the way, I love them, I wish they’d put more of them in. But I’ve got to be able to control them a bit. You can’t turn the volume up or down and you can’t use them. So you just have to wait for them to finish.
[00:23:12.770]
And I look like a moron with this. This was either Jingle Bells or more cowbell, which will. You can look those up later, if that would treat you. But yeah, I just looked like a moron talking to this nurse with, you know, I need more cowbell in the background while in the foreground, actually, because it was quite loud. Another strange thing that is very annoying is that you cannot change the order of your favorites and you think, well, sure you can.
[00:23:40.820]
You just put them in in order. OK, well, that’s a pretty crappy way to do it, because over time, radio stations change and you want to change the way things are listed. So I like to have all of my news radio at one at one section and all of my rock and roll and another. And then I’ve got a weird section of favorites. And you you can’t do that at Tesla, but when you’ve added a favorite, it’s in whatever order it’s in and you think, well, that’s that’s a problem.
[00:24:06.440]
Well, it’s annoying for a car. That’s been it. That’s had this, you know, roughly this design for a decade. And they still don’t have this going. So, yeah. Yeah, it’s annoying. Something that I haven’t had a problem with, but I have talked to others who have is you can’t force a check for updates. So you would think that you would be able to go into the software section and say it’s like check for updates.
[00:24:31.120]
And at very least if if Tesla wants to manage it, that it would come up and say, no, there there is an update, but, you know, it’s not released to you or you or your region yet or something to that effect. But now there’s no way to force a check for updates. So apparently the dodge around that is to go to a Tesla service center, which for an awful lot of people, because there aren’t a lot of service centers, is to go to a body shop, a repair shop, and you could hang out near there.
[00:24:59.480]
And those apparently have some higher priority. So if you just hang out there, you will often get the updates. That’s something I read online. I watched a couple of videos on. It seems to work. I’m not saying that that’s the case. I’m just saying lots of people said, OK, continue it. You hear the blinkers. So the indicators left and right are very, very easy to put on permanent left or right. So, you know, the idea is you lift the blinker a little bit, the control arm, and it will flash three times and turn off.
[00:25:30.440]
But it’s very, very easy to get it stuck on left or right. And because the clicking noise is so quiet, you often won’t notice it also. And this is that’s minor. Really minor, but it is there. What is frustrating is if you turn the wheel and I don’t know what the number is, will be, I’m sure Tesla will have some comment on this when you turn the wheel back. So let’s see if your right indicator on and you make your right hand turn and then you straighten the wheel back to center.
[00:25:57.650]
It very seldom will turn that off unless you’ve made a very hard left turn. So like a you know. But if you’re just coming off a ramp or something and you put your indicator on, yeah, it’s going to stay on, which is not good. OK. So here are some oddities that I have. My Tesla for the first month that I owned, it would only get about two hundred twenty five kilometers per charge. Now Tesla Port guys can figure out what was wrong online.
[00:26:27.740]
They monitored me driving for a week or so. Then there was an update to this software and I also took it in for repair. At the same time, the guys in repair said they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So and now it does seem to be okay. Only had it for a couple of days, but it does seem to be getting a much better range now. So but that was the case for a month and they were not we’re not able to resolve what that was.
[00:26:52.790]
That was super weird. Another oddity that I have personally is the glass roof. Most people love sunroofs. I have no time for them at all because Tesla’s done such a wonderful job of darkening that it doesn’t really bug me. But I thought it was going to. If you’re one of these people that really hates light coming in from the top. It might bother you with pretty minor, but it is there. I also prefer the wipers to have the drive, the passenger side.
[00:27:19.550]
You know what I what most people have defined is backwards. So sort of instead of swiping up one way, I expected the swipe of the other. You get a much larger clearance on it for the for the rain or for whatever else you want. I don’t know why Tesla hasn’t gone with that. And in fact, I don’t know why most manufacturers don’t do that anymore. I read an article from GM about, oh, there maybe was Mercedes.
[00:27:43.040]
A decade ago are arguing that there’s some mechanical issues with doing that, that it it adds some complexity. I would also prefer a hatchback. Which is why I’ll probably change this to a model Y shortly. They don’t corner that great either. People think that these are really sporty and they they rip. And by the way, they do. They really hold. It’s awesome to drive it 110 kilometers an hour and match it and zip around a guy that, you know, that’s like like you standing still.
[00:28:10.580]
It’s wonderful. But like, you know, mustangs and and muscle cars, the days of yore, they’re great. Just don’t hit a corner that fast. So and by the way, yes, this is better than a Mustang in the corners and lots of other cars, but it’s far from perfect. It could be. It certainly could be stiffer. And as far as the style goes, I had somebody told me that they thought it looked a bit like the next Toyota Camry.
[00:28:34.580]
While I disagree with that, I argue that, well, my phrases ain’t no catty eight, no Cadillac. I had a Cadillac. I’ve had a couple of Cadillac ELR’s. Those are beautiful cars. It’s like driving art. This is fine. And I understand that Tesla’s trying to produce, not trying to lose.
[00:28:53.810]
They have produced a vehicle that is different without being scary. Right. So they don’t want some nutty looking, you know, future Terminator repeal. That’s the Cybertruck. Right. And that’s, you know, that’s for a limited market. But for mass market, they’re trying to produce something a little more generic. Well, I think this is just a little too generic. I would like a little more styling. But, you know, that’s me, for God sakes, if you’re looking at it, looking at an electric vehicle, you really got to go drive model three.
[00:29:23.170]
The price is great. Cars, great. There’s just little things that might bother you. All right. If you have any questions or concerns, please get a hold of us at w w w that you are attacked. That’s it. Have yourself a great day.
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