On June 22, 2019, I drove off the Tesla factory in Fremont in a long-range Model 3. I knew something about what driving an EV would entail. I also knew that I would encounter some unknowns such as range anxiety. But what I dreaded were the unknown unknowns that lay ahead of me. My experience in driving this car since then is recounted below.
I had been researching the economics of EVs since the early 1980s' when I was working at EPRI. In those days, EVs were just a gleam in the eye for technologists, economists and futurists. The only EVs that energy consumers were familiar with were golf carts.
A survey of car buyers revealed that they would suffer from range anxiety. Several people said maybe an EV would be good to have as a third car, perhaps for grocery shopping over the weekend. But no one had an interest in buying one.
Gradually, as the decades passed, EVs began to look more and more real. They started appearing on the roads around the year 2010. I began paying attention to them. They were either very small or very expensive. Some had a Nissan Leaf, which they had bought to get access to the car pool lane on freeway.
In 2018, several of my friends acquired the Tesla Model 3. Many of them were engineers. They said maintenance was minimal. An electric motor was virtually maintenance free, unlike a gasoline powered engine. And acceleration was swift. Not a single person who had bought that car complained about it.
I take the plunge and buy the EV
Finally, in June 2019, I decided to get that car to replace my beloved 2004 Porsche Boxster, which was a two-seater, and a convertible with incredible looks and exhilarating acceleration. Within a month of buying it, my wife and I had driven it to Yosemite National Park. Driving it with the top down on the valley floor with 4,000 ft high walls of granite on either side was absolutely amazing.
It only had 80,000 miles on the odometer, but the convertible’s top had begun to rattle and become difficult to put down. More worryingly, the car had begun putting out black smoke in the morning, once in a while. Repairs would run in the thousands of dollars.
So, with a heavy heart, I traded it in for a Model 3. I ordered the Model 3 at a Tesla show room in Dublin, California, just a fifteen-minute drive from my house. I bought it without doing a test drive, just relying on the experience of my friends.
The car cost me $48,500 after rebates, much less than what a new Boxster would have cost. Tesla gave me $7,500 for the Boxster so the net out-of-pocket cost came down to $41,000.
The federal income tax credit of $7,500 was cut in half for all Teslas by the time I placed the order. That cut was based on the volume of cars that Tesla had sold. But even that cut-in-half credit was going to disappear at the end of June, which was just a couple of weeks away from the time I placed my order.
I urged Tesla to produce the car before that deadline but all they could say to me was it was beyond their control. It was a race against time.
Thankfully, they beat the deadline. There was a catch. I would have to drive to the Tesla factory in Fremont to pick up the car. So, off we went to Fremont in the Boxster. Over there, we signed the paperwork and handed over the keys to the Boxster. The young woman who was going to deliver the Model 3 to us looked at the grey convertible, sat in the driver’s seat and said: “Are you sure you want to hand over this baby to me?” I said, yes.
She drove it to a parking lot behind the factory. Then she reappeared and took us over to where the new car would be parked. Several grey Model 3’s were parked there. All brand new and shining in the early afternoon sunlight.
One of them was going to be mine. She took us to that car. Unlike the two-seater, this was a sedan that seated four comfortably and five uncomfortably. She went over all the controls with me and my wife.
I had picked the grey color to match the Boxster’s grey. Later, I would discover it was the most popular color for the Model 3. I would also discover that unlike the Boxster, which was always easy to find in a parking lot, I would not be able to identify the Model 3 because so many grey Tesla cars would be parked all around it in just about any parking lot in the Bay Area. More than once I had found myself trying to enter someone’s car, much to my embarrassment.
The controls were very different from the Boxster’s. There were no knobs on the dashboard. A touch screen controlled the car. I would have to learn how to use it.
It did have an accelerator like all other cars and a brake pedal. But the gear shift lever was next to the steering wheel, as in all American cars. I had not driven an American car since the 1980s. That would take some getting used to.
After a 45-minute lesson in how to use the controls, she handed over the car to me. There was no key, just a card. Even that was just a backup. You opened the door and drove the car through your phone. That was new.
So, we sat in the car and embarked on the 45-minute drive home. The first thing I noticed was that as I approached the first stop sign and took my foot off the accelerator, the car slowed down dramatically even before I pressed on the brake. That was my first encounter with regenerative braking. In a few minutes, we were on the freeway.
As I got on the ramp to the freeway and pressed on the accelerator, the car began to move at lightening speed. I had to take the pressure off the accelerator pedal.
When we got home, we went for dinner to a local pizzeria to celebrate.
In the five years that have elapsed since, I have put 38,000 miles on the Model 3. The car has many positive features and a few negatives.
The positives of the Model 3
There are several positives. It has much lower driving cost. I am getting 3.92 miles per kWh. It is substantially less expensive to drive than an equivalent gasoline car that gives 30 mpg.
Tesla estimates that the energy efficiency of the Model 3 is equivalent to that of a gasoline car that gives 130 miles per gallon.
The maintenance costs of the EV are much lower. There is no oil to change, no engine to tune, no spark plugs to clean or to replace.
The car’s acceleration is truly amazing. The car is faster than a Boxster or most gasoline cars on the road and I say that based on actual experience on the roads and freeways.
It has regenerative braking, so the brakes hardly get used. The only time I use them is when a car ahead of me slows down suddenly and I run into a sudden jam on the freeway. The other benefit of regenerative braking is that the energy released when the car slows down is that the charge goes back to the battery.
The car handles the road very well. It slows down automatically as I go around bends in the road. Going uphill or downhill is seamless since there are no gears to shift.
The cruise control has visuals built into it. If traffic slows ahead of me, the car begins to slow down automatically.
The quality of the audio system is great, much better than what I have heard in all my previous cars including a Mercedes, a Volvo, a BMW, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic.
And then there is the touch screen on the right side of the driver. It shows just about everything you would ever want to see. For me, the most interesting feature is the graph that shows energy efficiency for every mile driven.
The car is essentially a computer on wheels. And Tesla automatically upgrades the software now and then – remotely, over the wire software.
You can charge the car at home or at a Supercharger. At home, I am on a three-period time-of-use (TOU) rate. It is PG&E’s EV2-A rate. The off-peak price is around half of the peak period price. However, PG&E’s rates have been rising rapidly during the five years in which I have driven the Tesla. The off-peak price has seen the steepest increase. It has doubled from 17 cents/kWh.
I always charge during the off-peak period and runs through 3 pm. I plug the car into the Siemens Level 2 charger in the evening. The car has been set to begin charging at midnight. Usually, it reaches the 80% limit which I have set based on Tesla’s recommendation in six to seven hours. I always keep 20% of the charge in the car.
When I am on the road, I charge at Tesla’s extensive Supercharging network. In addition, some hotels and some shopping malls and offices provide free Level 2 charging.
Within a one-hour driving radius from my house, there are literally dozens of Superchargers. Prices vary considerably across the Superchargers. Some have time-of-use pricing and some don’t, for reasons best known to Tesla.
Finally, for some minor issues like changing the air filters, installing a front license plate, and checking and potentially replacing tires, Tesla will send a technician to my house. No other car that I have owned has done that.
The negatives
The biggest one is range anxiety. Despite having the Long-Range version, I still suffer from it. What if I am driving in a remote area and the battery’s charge is dropping rapidly, past 80 miles? That’s happened to me a few times, usually in the hills, where Wi-Fi is bad. Once it also happened just an hour away from my house when an unexpected trip came up and the car was not fully charged.
Other negatives include the car’s poor interior finish, which is way inferior to what I have seen in Porsche’s, Mercedes Benz’s and BMW’s. The wheel rims are easily grazed, spare parts are often scarce, the car’s lack of knobs for carrying out basic functions is annoying. The touch screen has gone dark unexpectedly a few times. I had to call Tesla to fix it.
Tesla provides no loaner cars when the car is being serviced, for example, to check on some issue that could not be done at home, or to replace a windshield which was cracked after a pebble hit it at high speed on the freeway.
Then there is the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature. It was offered free for a month. I tried it a couple of times and did not like it. I deactivated it.
The battery began losing range slowly from Day 1 onwards. It was supposed to be 325 miles when it was brand new. But the moment I got into the car to drive it home, it showed 313 miles even though it was fully charged. Now, after 38,000 miles, the range is down to 292 miles.
The unknown unknowns
One only discovers those after-the-fact. Much of what I have above was either known to me or roughly known to me. What I did not know was that after one gets used to driving an EV, it becomes very difficult to drive a gasoline car.
The latter needs a physical key, it does not have regenerative braking, it does not have an informative touch screen, and its cruise control does not adjust your speed dynamically based on the traffic ahead of you. I have even had difficulty figuring out how to turn the key at times while starting the car. I have sometimes left the key in the ignition while filling it up with gasoline and sometimes I have forgotten to lock the car.
Is my experience a net positive?
Yes, without a doubt. The positives outnumber the negative. I would give it a net promotor score of 7 on a scale of -10 to +10. I would buy it again in a heartbeat.