My observations:
The car is a TON of fun to drive, and the touted instantaneous torque and acceleration are no exaggeration. Until you get used to it, it’s scary. If you give the accelerator a quick jab, even if to only about 25% of its travel, you’re taking a ride that will slam your head back against the headrest. You quickly learn to treat that accelerator pedal with gentleness and respect.
Much of the engineering, both hardware and software, feels almost magical. In many ways they have thought of everything, however……
There are also some design choices that are just stupid, such as having so few physical controls that many otherwise simple tasks must be controlled through the touchscreen. There are workarounds, and you do get used to most of it after a while, but it’s obvious that some design choices were just for the sake of form over function.
The powertrain’s wicked acceleration and the car’s solid handling (probably due to the low center of gravity because of the heavy battery) are highly addictive, but the quality of the body structure on top of it is suspect. My rental doesn’t have that many miles on it, yet there are rattles and squeaks everywhere. It sounds like an old worn-out pickup truck. And the car’s very stiff suspension makes it ride rough over bumps and just exacerbates all of the squeaks and rattles. From what I’ve read, rattles and squeaks are very common with these vehicles.
The charging process (at least on Tesla’s Superchargers) is very well though-out, and is consequently simple and easy. However, it felt weird to sit there alongside a bunch of other people, and even on Tesla’s fastest 250KW chargers, it took about 25 minutes to charge from 25% to 80% (the car was set to stop charging at 80% - more about that in a minute). The cost to charge from 25% to 80% was a little less than $19.00, so contrary to popular belief, “fuel” for EVs, while cheaper, certainly isn’t free.
Just like the lithium-ion battery in your phone, lithium-ion batteries in an EV don’t do well if you frequently charge them beyond 80%. That’s something the brochures certainly don’t tell you. No matter what the advertised range is, if you want the battery to last as long as possible you have to limit your charging most of the time to no more than 80% of that figure. Occasional charges to 100% are probably OK (such as when taking a road trip), but the rest of the time your maximum range really isn’t available.
As for road trips, I haven’t done anything like that in one, but the way the nav system projects battery usage and plans out charging stops, including estimating expected charging time and remaining battery level when you reach each one, is pretty cool. However, while Tesla is adding more charging stations all the time, when you put a cross country trip into the system you realize how far it is between some of them. Nowhere near as reliable and convenient as gas stations.
With very little cold weather experience with it so far, I will say that the cold definitely reduces range by several percent per day, and heat-producing systems such as heated steering wheel, heated seats, and the climate control system further drain the battery, but not nearly as much as I expected. I was also surprised by how well the heater worked with no engine heat to rely upon.
Conclusion: I have to admit that these things are a ball to drive and quickly become addicting. However, I think they’re just barely on the cusp of being practical for anything beyond daily city driving. The cold weather issues are also real, though maybe not quite as bad as I expected. My ICE car doesn’t suddenly develop a slow leak in its gas tank and lose range when the weather is cold, but these cars effectively do.
Aside from providing some (very expensive) driving fun, I still think EVs are a solution in search of a problem. Heck of a lot of fun to drive, but still not as affordable or practical as a conventional ICE vehicle.
#27 I drove from Minnesota to California going thru South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, California in a old gas car. There was a whole lot of nothing let alone gas stations in some places yet I never worried about gas and range. Yet electric car owners have to plot the steps to a car charger and spend hours waiting to get it to charge.
Electric cars are way more expensive, cost more to keep charged and the range you are told about is a lie as you cannot go past 80% charge too often or you wear the battery out and you are now looking at a huge payment for a battery. If the car is in any way damaged the insurance company will write it off and you will pay for a car you don’t own plus a new one you have to buy. Think cell phone broken and you still owe on it.