every revolution begins with a hard pivot
you can't take a step forward without a leap of faith
no one can change the world without a
wise investment
and you can't unironically use cliches like that without being kind of a
horse's ass and yet like the prius owners that came
before them tesla enthusiasts brand themselves not as mere car buyers but as
sponsors of an electrified future the next leap forward for the automotive
industry and therefore the world which was fine when all tesla needed to
do was sell a handful of expensive sports cars to the aforementioned
enthusiasts but the thing is the model y is tesla's
second crack at phase three of their super secret master plan
and as everyone knows phase three is when you're supposed to make a profit
so have they done enough to attract the kinds of folks who buy cars rather than
promises the answer is well yes
given the choice to have any car they wanted my in-laws ultimately chose the
tesla model y and they were kind enough to loan it to me to use as a daily
driver for a few weeks so i could share my thoughts with you
so why don't we go for a ride oh sometimes the key thing you gotta
touch it here it's usually pretty good
everything about the tesla experience is different starting with the dealership
tesla can call it whatever they want it's still a dealership we booked our
test drive ultimately decided on the car and then got a notification a whopping
four weeks early that it was ready for pickup so far so good unfortunately
that's basically where the positive customer service experience ended
they've been very slow about communication and supposedly due to
kovid my poor boomer in-laws only got about 15 to 20 minutes of facetime with
a tesla representative and were directed to watch a series of videos to learn how
to drive the car on their own now for a tech savvy tesla buyer that's probably
not a problem you wanted to play with it anyway but given that most of our
audience is the person who their parents or grandparents call up for questions
about their tech i'm sure you'd appreciate if that first hour or two was
offloaded to the dealer another difference with the delivery compared to
a normal car is inspecting your vehicle for obvious qc problems
this one had a cockeyed logo some random red marks on it a misaligned panel and
it came with a broken wall charger out of the box to tesla's credit they did
send a technician to my in-laws house to sort these problems out
twice due to a communication issue but
we're gonna have to do it again because as i arrived on set alex actually
pointed out that one of the rear lights has a seal problem and has condensation
in it so time for round three tesla makes it very easy to overlook
these kinds of things though with one simple trick by creating a product that
looks and feels so futuristic compared to anything their target customers have
ever seen that they will bend over backwards to ignore its flaws and
honestly i'm not immune to it here's some of the things that really impressed
me the phone pairing is so easy that every other manufacturer should be
embarrassed it took me and my wife about 15 seconds and it repairs every time
flawlessly the quality of the backup camera on the huge screen means i
basically never looked in my rear view mirror the audio volume dips subtly when
a door is opened to make it easier to greet a passenger and the touchscreen is
as responsive as a phone or a tablet all
these things coming together is how tesla somehow manages to have both some
of the lowest rated initial quality out of any auto manufacturer according to jd
power while also maintaining the highest owner satisfaction according to consumer
reports but maybe there's an even simpler reason people love this thing so
much daily driving the model y was unlike any
other car that i have ever driven all the way from a geo metro three banger to
a ferrari something or other on a track in vegas
just map the accelerator
to go from zero to 60 in just 4.6
seconds and the party keeps on going past a speeding ticket all the way to an
instant impound oh we going fast boys as someone who's not used to it though
having 384 horsepower and 376 twerks available made me immediately
prefer chill mode which smooths out the
acceleration for a more chill not to mention more economical
driving experience as for the handling the low center of gravity and responsive
steering made it feel less like operating a large heavy vehicle and more
like a small remote control toy one like
with any new toy though whoa slow down i
need chill mode quickly turned into
what can this baby do and i have to confess
the model y gave me an itch for performance in a car that i've
never really felt before and by far the
lamest thing about going back to my volt from this is the passing ability you
don't have to be going zero to have it kick check this out we're at 95
kilometers hello and this is the long range model it's
not even the performance one but if you're like me Linus's opinion
can only hold so much weight like he kind of enjoys the vagueness of the volt
so take it from me someone that basically did a masters in suspension
design instead of actually doing my coursework so this
really unfortunate thing happened between shoot days one and two of this a
big rock chipped the windshield of Linus's in-laws car so
we have the fastest model y performance around
it's a rental so how's the acceleration
holy crap that is very impressive but at the same time i
don't know if it's worth the premium over the standard model you still get
the permanent magnet motors so the electric wall of torque is still there
in that like this is impressive but the other one is too as for the handling on
the surface things are promising up front you get a double a-ARM sort of
like suspension and on the back you get a multi-link design that actually
contains the rear power train to isolate all of the bumps and stuff from the
chassis and the driver all of this along with a low center of gravity translates
into cornering speeds that are hard to believe with a 4 400 pound car but the
problem is is that you can hook it into a corner although
you don't really feel what the steering's doing the electronics just
kind of come in and there's a bit of understeer
i don't know what's happening i'm corning really fast but i feel like you
know on a long twisty road you could have a lot more fun in a car with half
the power only car nerds care about handling on the track though most people
just want a nice space to exist in for the duration of their commute and
it's quite a nice space to spend your time i have my doubts about the upcoming
7-seater being comfortable for anyone over the age of about 13 but for the
5-seater option the front seats are reasonably comfortable with all the
adjustments i'd expect and the rear seats have heaps of room tesla does
benefit a little bit from the macbook pro effect as far as their interior goes
though where someone that's only ever owned a 500 dell runs out buys a 3 000
macbook pro and is like wow man apple's
the best but without ever trying a 3 000
Windows machine i mean in fairness though that is tesla's plan right turn
non-car people into car people with their sheer sex appeal and then
hopefully figure out how to get better at building cars before they end up
needing an upgrade cause i get it car
guys are always harping on the interiors of tesla and how much they suck for the
price and i was briefly converted to the car guy's side when i test drove an audi
q5 the second i sat in it i was like oh
yeah now i get it until minutes later
the audi q5 was disqualified by my non-technophile aunt and uncle when the
sales rep explained that it doesn't have a touch screen because you input text by
drawing little letters on a touch pad like you're in kindergarten learning to
finger paint it's like what
honestly watching the sales rep try and sell that kind of oversight on a vehicle
that cost more than the model y was kind of pathetic all right then this
is the part where i tell you the tesla tech is mind-blowing and the reason you
should buy this car right now right well
for the most part i love the ability to use your phone as a key and for climate
control they've also managed to make most basic car controls work well on a
touchscreen something that pretty much every other car company has failed
miserably at but when it comes to entertainment and navigation
honestly i'd rather just have Android auto now hold on hold on tesla fans
i have a question for you have you actually used Android auto
no didn't think so james from our team actually just upgraded to a model 3 and
has exactly the same feedback as me while spotify does work fine if you have
a premium account everything else uses bluetooth where you can't browse content
or scrub through podcasts like there's not even a button or voice command to
skip ahead a minute to get past an ad or go back a minute to repeat something
that you missed why can't tesla just let Android auto run in a window or
something you know the kind of thing they totally could do because many other
manufacturers have done it the only answer i can come up with is that tesla
like apple seems to believe that they know what's best for their customers
better than their customers do and they like it this way with that said it's not
like tesla does everything wrong as far as software goes updating the os on say
afford sucks over-the-air updates remain one of
tesla's biggest advantages although some traditional auto companies are matching
it now or at least offering some way to update the infotainment system and we
have to give tesla credit for this shift in the industry and it's a really
important one because as vehicles get smarter there's going to be a lot more
things that need updating like driving assists tesla's adaptive cruise control
is super intuitive to use allowing easy one-touch activation and it even works
at low enough speeds that i can use it in school zones although in practice i
actually found myself using it a lot less than i expected one of the things i
noticed often was that if i was on adaptive approaching a stopped vehicle
like at a light it wouldn't do a great job of accounting for the vehicles in
front beginning to accelerate once the light changed so the car would end up
kind of like slamming on the brakes and then gradually increasing my speed again even
though that wasn't necessary my most frequent passenger my wife is
susceptible to motion sickness and found the lurchiness very unpleasant so i just
kind of couldn't use it as for the other driver assists well i didn't opt for the
full self-driving package because from my point of view eight thousand dollars
is an awful lot of money to effectively beta test for tesla so my expectations
were pretty low but even then i was still disappointed when the automatic
lane departure started bouncing me back and forth between the left and right
lanes at more and more extreme angles until finally i had to take over since
it was just gonna drive right over the line now there's a good reason that
autopilot is basically banned in the eu in north america when a tesla smashes
into a stopped car or something we will jump to blame the driver like oh they
were reading a book or playing a video game in europe they've realized that
these behaviors are just a symptom of telling people that their car has
autopilot technology when in reality full self-driving which is what
autopilot sounds like is years away from being safe enough to trust people's
lives with it and tesla makes matters worse for themselves with their lack of
transparency about the safety of autopilot forbes found autopilot to be
about equal if not a bit worse than manually driving a car when the numbers
are properly represented speaking of safety the automatic wipers straight up
suck and a german judge recently ruled that the method of manually adjusting
the wipers on the touchscreen is classified as distracted driving
and honestly for good reason what is this i mean i wouldn't even mind so much
if the wipers could be easily controlled from behind the steering wheel like most
cars but no tesla insists you do every
damn thing with the touchscreen they even have wiper controls on the stock
but only for cleaning or a single wipe not for actually setting the wiper speed
dinking around with my wipers in the dark in the rain on a touchscreen is not
safe and i should never have to do that period so now we're going to get into
the real answer to the question i posed in my chevy volt video why didn't i buy
a tesla for myself it's not because of range anxiety i feel like being able to
charge the car at home and at work more than offsets that or the qc since that's
something that is bound to improve as they get more manufacturing experience
it's because liking a car and i do
doesn't mean that i like the policies and the behavior of the company that
produces it and supporting tesla's bad attitude could have negative
consequences for the entire industry sure they're doing lots of good things
by aggressively pushing electrification it is without a doubt better than
sticking with gas but then in other ways they seem to be regressing one of the
anti-consumer things about the company it's noisy squawking when things are
going well then utter lack of transparency when there's bad news or a
data point that doesn't fit the narrative is poised to take a nosedive
moving forward elon wants to have the benefit of his disproportionate amount
of media coverage and openly brags that his company doesn't even advertise but
can also alienate portions of his most loyal customers when things don't go his
way without a pr department how will the public get explanations for
spontaneous glass shattering bumpers disappearing after a ride through a
puddle or a roof that flies off a vehicle on the way home from the
dealership what about the arguably much bigger issues like the actual safety
record of tesla's irresponsibly named autopilot what about the inconsistent
policies with respect to their handling of customer data their opposition to
right to repair and the fact that they don't follow through on promises like
saying that they would share their software and technology with other companies except that never happened
like there is so much to love about this car clearly a lot of thought has gone
into making the experience like i said unlike anything else on the market but
part of loving something is wanting what's best for it which means being
honest with it and honest with yourself moves like
building rear heated seats into every vehicle and then charging you a
micro-transaction later are already being adopted by the rest of the
industry because tesla got away with it so that's the question you should always
be asking yourself would i still be okay with this if it was someone other than
tesla doing it if the answer is no you've got to send a message as for how
you would do that well they don't have a pr department anymore so that's out but
i did hear that mr musk is pretty into the whole twitter thing so you could try
that massive shout out to dji by the way for sponsoring this video the dji mavic
air 2 which we used for all of our in-air footage for this video has the
ability to shoot video and HDR take panoramas in HDR and record photos with
more dynamic range currently no other dji drone offers all three of those HDR
features particularly HDR video mode it's got a 48 megapixel photo mode
allowing you to shoot with high dynamic range of course and up to 48 megapixels
it features hyperlapse which enables you to capture the passing of time in a
pretty unique way and the latest firmware update now includes digital
zoom in 1080p 2.7 k and 4k
i'd also by the way love to shout out mission raceway stabilized cinemas and
rid view stables what was what was the horse's name paloma paloma she was
awesome she was amazing what a trooper she was and a couple more things i
couldn't find a spot for these in the script the audio system is not very good
but i don't really have any constructive criticism because i have no idea how
they'd fix it seems to be a problem with just like glass surfaces everywhere
causing reflections even having a conversation in that car you can kind of
hear your voice bouncing back at you and thanks to you for watching if you guys
enjoy these kinds of car videos leave a comment let us know what we did well let
us know what we didn't do so well it will actually help us out a lot moving
forward oh yeah and go watch the vault video if you haven't