I own a 2022 Tesla Model Y. Or rather, my powerhouse wife does. Regardless, I’ve driven approximately 10,000 miles in one, and have formed a long list of opinions.

The Good

• The performance
• The cold / icy driving experience is fantastic. It’s the easiest to drive in slippery conditions that I’ve owned except my old toyota 4x4 SUV, but that’s a high bar.
• The adaptive cruise control eliminates 90% of the annoyances from highway driving (though the industry has caught up)
• The 360 cameras and 360 range sensors make driving in tight confines very easy.
• The incident reports. This is the video replay of any person or vehicle approaching or touching your car. I’ve already seen it save an insurance report and aid in accident reporting.
• The appearance
• The superchargers are awesome. It’s absolutely never been a problem to visit one the 3 to 6 times per year we have to use them. We charge at home overnight, and have not set foot in a gas station except to pick up Diet Coke since we bought the Tesla. It seems crazy we don’t all do this, honestly. I can’t wait for gasoline to be a speciality product.

The Bad

Entering the car

Someday there will be a zombie movie where a minor character is running from zombies, turns the corner to see their pristine Tesla, thank god, and will sadly be eaten while they fumble with the app, key cards, and door locking mechanisms (see next section).

When approaching the car to drive:

• 10% of the time it does nothing. I stand confused as the dash reads “Cameras on”. Then I take out my keycard, wipe it over the window frame trying to find the magic, unlabelled “unlock” spot, and eventually enter.
• 30% of the time it unlocks just fine, I enter, sit down, and drive away - except my legs are cramped and some techno is blaring because it selected my wife’s seat and radio settings
• 10% of the time it unlocks just fine, I enter, sit down, and it won’t let me drive. It insists I place a keycard under the armrest to drive.
• 50% of the time it unlocks just fine, I enter, sit down, and drive away fine.

Obviously I created those percentages, but it seems about right.

Special case: Using the trunk

Using the trunk is a special case. The “right” way is to go through the above process to enter the car, but instead of driving, you use the tablet (see next section) to unlock the trunk.

But, idiot that I am, I assume it will auto-unlock, and I’ll be able to open the trunk by pressing the open button on the trunk itself. According to above, there’s a 90% chance it’ll unlock. But this is wrong because the Tesla doesn’t unlock when you approach from behind, only when you approach the cab it seems.

• 20% of the time, the car unlocks so I can open the trunk fine
• 40% of the time I have to go up to the cab to get the car to unlock, but the trunk won’t unlock. I have to open the driver’s side door to, I guess, fully unlock the trunk, at which time I can go back and open it.
• 40% of the time I just open the driver’s side door (see prev section!) and then open trunk using console.

Walk-away lock

There’s no easy way to temporarily disable walk-away lock. This means that when you’re loading kids, luggage, or anything, and it’ll take multiple trips, and you don’t want the car to lock, turn off climate control, and shutdown, you have to leave a door open. You don’t even have to walk away, just shutting the door while you’re not in the driver’s seat will shut the car down.

And you can enable climate control remotely, but as soon as you open then close the door (e.g., you put a kid in), the whole car will shut down regardless of if you walked away or not. Imagine the Tesla locking your kids in the car, and oops, you drop your phone.

The app

All of this is fine if I can open the app to do any of this. But the app is useless. No matter where I am or where the car is, there’s a 90% chance I cannot connect my app to the car. I suspect my wife disabled my app access at this point.

That fucking tablet.

OK here we go. This is the big one.

In the tesla the UX is awful. You can do exactly one thing at a time, and transitioning between things to do takes at least a click and swipe. Think about all the things you might want to do in a car:

• Open the glove box
• Turn on/off the windshield wipers
• Change the radio station
• Stream via spotify
• Pair a phone
• Open the trunk
• Adjust the speakers
• Enable air conditioning / heat
• Lock the windows
• Turn on/off seat warmers
• Enable rear fans
• Check the range to your destination
• View the upcoming turns in navigation
• Input a new destination for your navigation
• anything else …

Yes, you need to use the tablet to do that. Nope, you cannot do any of those at the same time. Yes, you cannot adjust the winshield wipers without taking your eyes off the road and looking at the bottom corner of the tablet.

There are almost no buttons in the car - just the tablet. Each thing you want to do requires a full-screen interaction, meaning if the passenger wants to do any of this they block the entire in-car display with a fancy popup modal. And don’t get me started on how annoying it is when the FM tuner is left up and blocks my navigation instructions.

This is far and away my biggest complaint about the car. They were arrogant enough to just believe they could make a functional UI from a tablet bolted onto their dashboard. It is a major distraction to safe driving to do anything in that car.

The cold weather performance is not good.

While in general the range is good, the cold weather range is awful. We can drive about half as far as normal, and any statements about pre-conditioning the battery alleviating that are false. You can precondition to gain back some range, but still, a trip to our parents’ place in the country is doable in summer (if you dont run AC), but requires a stop at a supercharger in winter.

The WTF

When you are using cruise control you cannot disable windshield wipers.

I’m not kidding. Why? Because Sir Elon insisted that this car is made using cameras only, and the camera is behind the windshield, so to do adaptive speed control it needs to have a pristine windshield. Most other manufacturers use radar. Going forward, I expect more lidar.

The adaptive cruise control will slam on the brakes for no apparent reason.

About once every 50 miles, it will execute a pretty dangerous-feeling braking. Why? No idea, but most likely the cameras detected a phantom car or obstacle. It once got real nervous about a bridge that was paved a lighter color than the road we were driving on. It will also slow down if a car looks like it’s in front of it when we’re all turning on a highway. I find these things to be dangrous enough that I question the purchase regularly.