Tesla Model Y - 1 Year Review

One year ago today, I took delivery of my Tesla Model Y. In one year, we've put 16,999 miles on it. Before I bought the Model Y, I read and watched a lot of reviews. I benefited a lot from those, so I though I would share my experience.

TL;DR:

Overall, I've very happy with the Model Y so far.

Politics:

Let's get this out of the way...

This might sound strange, but way back an entire year ago people bought cars without much regard to politics. Like most people then, that's what I did. I bought the Model Y because it was a good fit for my needs and desires. Back then, my more liberal leaning friends seemed to think it was great, while my more conservative friends seemed to think electric cars were terrible and I had lost my mind. Now, because of Elon's heavy involvement in politics, that seems to have basically flipped. Sigh. Whatever.

I bought the car because it was a good fit for my needs and I'm not selling it because politics and peoples opinions etc have shifted. So, you know, please don't set my car on fire if you don't like Elon - ok? Ha!

How and why I chose to buy a Tesla Model Y:

The main reasons I went with the Model Y were:

• The long term cost, when factoring in the large Federal tax credit, lower cost of electricity vs gas and lower general maintenance cost were very compelling.
• The Tesla technology integration is extremely well done.
• Electric cars are very fun to drive. Being able to go from 0-60 in 3.5 seconds in a daily driver SUV size car is amazing.
• It had an option for a trailer hitch, which my bike rack could attach to and I could very occasionally pull a small trailer with.
• There is a ton of storage space. On family trips, there would be plenty of room for our stuff.
• Tesla has an unmatched charging network. When I did some maps of potential long distance trips, it was quickly apparent the super charger network would make those perfectly viable.
• I like the idea of using electricity as a fuel. While the reality is that a lot of electricity in my area still comes from fossil fuels, longer term, the grid operators will switch to a blend that includes cleaner energy options that are better for the environment (solar / nuclear etc).
• Full Self Driving (Supervised) is very cool. It's not perfect - more on that below - but it is impressive and it keeps getting better.

Risks I considered:

• Battery Life / Cost of Replacement: If the battery fails in a Tesla and it's not covered under warranty, the cost to replace the battery is quite expensive (~$15k-$20k for my particular car). However, the battery in my car is covered under a Tesla warranty for 8 years or 120K miles. The battery failure rate is also quite low. I did a ton of reading on this before buying my car. Ultimately, I got to the point where I was comfortable with the risk. Long term, if I can put 200k miles on this car and not replace the battery, I'll be happy.
• Depreciation: All new cars go down in value. The Model Y does seem to depreciate faster than gas cars. Since I plan to keep the Model Y for a long time, I was not terribly concerned with this.

Test Drive / Order Experience:

Test driving and ordering a Tesla is the best car buying experience I have ever had. You just do everything in the Tesla app. It's like ordering a new PC from Dell or Apple. You just pick out what you want and order it. It's dramatically easier and more efficient than a more traditional car buying experience.

Pickup Experience:

My pickup experience is strangely the low point of my Tesla experience so far. My son and I drove about an hour and a half, to a nearby city where we were to pickup the car at an appointed time. We went inside to let them know we were there. Unfortunately, for some reason the minimal paperwork that required physical signatures and the car were not ready. This was clearly not the norm. We watched as other folks breezed in, picked up their cars - which were fully charged and beautifully detailed - and left. We ended up waiting for about an hour or two (I don't remember the exact details) while they figured things out.

Once they figured it out and found the car, it was minimally charged and had obviously been washed quickly. Additionally, the charging door was acting up. The Tesla rep could not get it to stay closed fully. He said we could either come back another day, or just have Tesla Mobile Service come out and fix it later. Since we had driven an hour and a half, I opted to take delivery and sort it out with Tesla Mobile Service.

Ultimately, we took delivery, and drove down to a nearby supercharger so we could charge up enough to make it home. When we left the super charger, the charge door flapped in the breeze most of the way home. At some point, it seemed to just fix itself. I never had to have Tesla Mobile Service come out and it's been fine ever since.

I had very high expectations for the pickup experience based on the incredible order experience. The reality of what we experienced was less than I had hoped for. However, it honestly was no big deal. We got the car, had our first super charging experience and had a fun drive home.

Ownership Experience:

The ownership experience so far has been great.

• I've had zero unexpected maintenance issues. So far, maintenance has consisted of one tire rotation at a local tire store and me buying and pouring a jug of windshield wiper fluid into the car from time to time.
• I love charging at home. Unless I'm traveling, the car just always starts the day charged up to 80% (ideal for long term battery health). This has been plenty for the driving that I normally do. Very occasionally (less than ten times total so far), I'll charge to 90% or 100% if I have a long trip coming up the next day. I don't miss the gas station.
• I've only super charged a few of times (probably less than ten times total) on longer trips to the DC area (~6 hours drive) and NC and SC beaches (4 hours drive). Each experience with supercharging has been great. I've never waited for a charger spot and all of the locations I've charged at have been at clean, safe locations where it was easy to find a restroom and something to eat or drink while super charging.
• There has only been one longer trip where we took my wife's car because we did not want to deal with super charging. That was a unique situation where we found out after 10PM the night before that we needed to make an eight hour round trip the very next day for family reasons. We just opted to take her car and not deal with super charging.
• It's the only car I've ever owned where things get better after you bought it. The Tesla team is constantly improving things. Since the car is controlled by software which auto updates remotely, things like the Tesla app, the in car interface, and Full Self Driving (Supervised) are just constantly getting better.
  
  In addition to the software improvements, I also recently got an upgrade to adaptive headlights. Apparently, even though this was not a feature that existed when I bought my car, my car came with headlights capable of it. So, recently a software update hit and suddenly I noticed pixels of my headlights turning off so as not to shine bright light in other drivers faces late at night. It's an very cool feature, that seems very well implemented and I'm very thankful for that improvement. What other car gets better after you buy it?

Things I've Learned:

• Actual driving range is impacted by the weather and the speed you are driving at. This makes total sense when you think about it, but it's not intuitive when you are coming from a gas powered car. Fortunately, if you use the integrated maps - which are insanely good - the battery charge predictions seem to take this into account. On long trips, the battery charge percentages are often accurate to within 1%.
• The intermittent windshield wipers are hilariously bad. If you leave them on auto, they will occasionally wipe when there is no rain. Additionally, they often go at speeds that make no sense when it does rain. It's not a big deal, but with how well everything else works in the car, it is surprising.
• Full Self Driving (FSD) (Supervised) as of the last time I used it, which was a few months ago, was actually generally quite good, during the daytime. I enjoy driving generally, so I don't tend to keep the FSD subscription ($100 /mo) active. However, during months where I have multiple longer distance trips, I do tend to subscribe. On long trips, it's very nice.
  
  With that said, in my experience, it does seem to struggle at night on drives through dark areas. I've had multiple times where I had it engaged and it seemed to be doing fine. However, I would start to get warnings about cameras not being able to see etc and if I disengaged it would not re-engage.
  
  I did have one time where I was letting FSD drive me home and it alarmed and demanded that I take over. At the time, we were headed directly into the sun, which was low in the sky. It seemed like the bright sunlight overwhelmed the cameras the point where the car wanted me to take over. So, I did and everything was totally fine. However, it was a surprising experience. The related alarms etc are quite jarring - as designed, I suppose. If FSD needs you to take over, don't worry, you will know.
• Elon makes a lot of promises. He is clearly a visionary and an innovator. Tesla is amazing. SpaceX is amazing. He has led the creation and scaling of some seriously amazing companies doing seriously amazing things. However, I would not buy a Tesla based on any of his promises about the future.
  
  If you are going to buy a Tesla, I'd suggest buying based on what the car is able to do today. I have a friend who was an early adopter. He has an early Model 3. He believes his FSD experience has actually gotten worse. While Elon promised the Model 3 hardware would be capable of FSD and capable of participating in a robotaxi network, it looks less and less likely that this will be possible without upgrading the cars hardware. I sincerely hope Elon and Tesla make good on their promises to early adopters by providing a free hardware upgrade if that turns out to be necessary. Without my friend's experience with his Model 3, which gave me a lot of confidence in Tesla, I would have never purchased my Model Y.
  
  With that said, I do hope one day my friends Model 3 and my Model Y might be able to be part of a robotaxi network. That would be super cool. I'm optimistic that it's possible. However, I'm a bit unsure that it will be possible with FSD based on cameras alone. Currently, Waymo are the only ones running a real robotaxi network at meaningful scale. Their cars make extensive use of Lidar. Given my nighttime driving experience and the experience I had where the car forced me to take over due to bright sunlight blinding the cameras, I'm not convinced that they might not be right. Elon insists Lidar is not going to be necessary. His logic is that humans can drive with eyesight alone, so why shouldn't cars be able to do that. Logically, that makes sense given good enough cameras. Assuming the Tesla robotaxi rollout in Austin happens as planned this month, that might provide some evidence that he is correct. We will see.

Minutia:

If you've made it this far, you might be the sort of person who likes all the little details. Here are the last few items I can think to mention.

• Adding a couple of interior handles above the doors for less physically capable people would be helpful. When older, less physically capable folks ride with me, I've noticed the handles they would normally grab onto above the doors simply are not there. This is in keeping with the overall minimalist interior. I had never considered this as an issue until I noticed how they looked for them, then struggled with the lack of handles. In my case, they were able to get into and out of the car without them, but it was harder than it would have been with them.
  
  Honestly, a Tesla with FSD would be an ideal car for older folks to age with. It would be highly likely to help them avoid accidents. However, without the handles getting into and out of a Tesla seems to be a bit harder than it could be.
• There does seem to be some small item - perhaps a screw - that is loose and rolls around somewhere when I make a hard / fast turn. Honestly, it does not bother me enough to even deal with setting up a service appointment. I'll probably deal with it before the warranty runs out, but I'm in no hurry.
• The space around the trailer hitch is too tight. It's a pain to get to things. Making this bigger would be a nice improvement. It works now, it could just be better.

That's all for now. I'll plan to post about this again next year, once I have two years of ownership completed.