Hello, this is my first post. We have a Tesla Model S75, black, with air suspension and premium interior upgrade. I looked at this site when my wife and I were considering buying a Tesla – and found some helpful information about battery management among other things. But I wanted to wait until we'd lived with the car for some time before sharing our ownership experience.
I list here the many benefits of driving our Model S75 for 35,000km (22,000 miles) plus a couple of slight concerns.
Starting with the obvious, it’s environmentally friendly. After half a lifetime of doing our bit to heat up the planet it does feel very good to be leaving a smaller environmental footprint when we drive. Before much longer, we’d like to charge the Tesla from 100% renewable sources. At this stage our 8.4 kw rooftop PV system (no battery) needs a little top-up from electricity from the grid during charging.
Surprisingly, it’s an excellent motor vehicle. I say surprisingly, because with the Tesla’s zero emissions and many impressive tech features it’s sometimes easy to overlook its performance as a motor vehicle. Acceleration, braking, handling, suspension, comfort are all excellent. The biggest surprise was handling: we expected the weight (just over2 metric tonnes compared to a BMW 4 series under 1.8 tonnes) could see the Tesla wallowing in tighter corners. But the handling at speed in tighter corners** is really good – which I attribute to the fact that most of the weight is the battery, which is located low under the cabin floor. (**I’ll come back to a safety feature at the end)
It has a silent cabin. We both love listening to music and it’s always been hard to enjoy music in our cars over the rumble or roar of the car engine. No more. The Tesla is super quiet. Perfect for even the quietest piano sonata or Mark Hollis.
The tablet touch screen is brilliant: huge, felexible and full of features. Before test driving the tesla we test drove Mercedes (C-64AMG), BMW 4-series, Audi S5 and a Jaguar. We’ve owned a Merc and a BMW X5 in the past, so we had other points of comparison. They all had clever driver aids, satnav and some with a head-up display on the windscreen. But none of them were as good as the Tesla’s big screen and electronic dashboard. I still haven’t explored all the features (though I’ve mastered Spotify, USB, podcasts and the other music options). But I did turn on the biohazard a/c function for the first time recently on a very dusty day – giving me an oasis of purified air.
No new model envy. I’ve mostly bought cars second-hand and never gave much thought to comparisons with newer models of the same vehicle. But I did experience ‘new model envy’ when I bought new motorcycles and saw significant improvements added within a year or two of my purchase. Tesla’s overnight software downloads means, in effect, we keep getting the newer model. Over the past year I’ve acquired, among other things, smarter headlights, a surround radar and a more flexible and user-friendly touchscreen. I also got a 14-day trial of the autopilot software, which was fun.
Acceleration is powerful. OK I touched on this earlier, but the acceleration deserves its own heading. Being electric, the car is phenomenally quick from zero to plenty - and I realise we have one of the slower models. I was thinking it's sportsbike quick (I’ve owned several) until I was neatly burned off by a bike at the lights. But it’s still faster off the mark than nearly every other car, which is both good and bad. Like a fast motorcycle, I think you could easily lose your driver’s licence in a Tesla.
We waste zero time ‘refuelling’. Stop the car, plug it in, walk away. It couldn’t be easier. I did a rough back of the envelope estimate that I used to refuel my car about 40 times a year, each averaging 5 minutes of wait, refuel, pay and 5 minutes of going out of my way to stop at the service station. That worked out to nearly 7 hours of time I saved in the last year from not having to refuel a petrol engine car — one hour of which I’ve spent writing this ;-)
The supercharger network is super. Kudos to Tesla for building the refuelling infrastructure to allow us to travel long distances. In a parallel world this would have been done by governments and private companies as a wave of electric cars came onto the market. Maybe that’s the next 10-20 years?
Servicing is easy. The annual service interval is great, though the nearest to us is in Sydney 300km away. Still, we go to Sydney a few times a year, so it’s just a case of combining that with something we really want to do in Sydney. Remote diagnosis is another thing that surprised me. For a short while we had the suspension going into Jack Mode after a few days of the car not being driven. Tesla offered a remote software diagnosis if the problem recurred – but my wife fixed it by simply selecting Jack Mode when it was in Jack Mode which made it revert to normal.
I can’t not mention range anxiety. It was one of the things we worried about when buying the car. But this has not been an issue for us. Our longest trip was around 700km each way. We simply plugged in the destination to the GPS map which told us when and where we could top-up our range at superchargers along the way. That said, we cannot just choose to go anywhere, as you can in an ordinary car. If we’re not on highways/destinations serviced by superchargers we need to make sure there’s accommodation or a restaurant which have destination chargers.
The only other concern would be battery life. We don’t know how long the battery will last or how much a future replacement battery will cost. This uncertainty is probably the biggest leap of faith we have in this technology. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Overall impression: After driving the Tesla for 35,000km we honestly can’t imagine buying another petrol or diesel car. We’ll be interested to see what Merc and BMW eventually come up with as direct competitors, but our Model S75 still feels like the future.
**on corners, I recently went into a tight corner a little too hot but I believed in full control — yet the car took over the steering (which had no give for a second or two) to ensure we stayed within the lines marking the lane. I didn’t realise that was among the standard driver aids. When this car surprises, it’s usually on the upside.
Thank you and happy driving to you all.
I list here the many benefits of driving our Model S75 for 35,000km (22,000 miles) plus a couple of slight concerns.
Starting with the obvious, it’s environmentally friendly. After half a lifetime of doing our bit to heat up the planet it does feel very good to be leaving a smaller environmental footprint when we drive. Before much longer, we’d like to charge the Tesla from 100% renewable sources. At this stage our 8.4 kw rooftop PV system (no battery) needs a little top-up from electricity from the grid during charging.
Surprisingly, it’s an excellent motor vehicle. I say surprisingly, because with the Tesla’s zero emissions and many impressive tech features it’s sometimes easy to overlook its performance as a motor vehicle. Acceleration, braking, handling, suspension, comfort are all excellent. The biggest surprise was handling: we expected the weight (just over2 metric tonnes compared to a BMW 4 series under 1.8 tonnes) could see the Tesla wallowing in tighter corners. But the handling at speed in tighter corners** is really good – which I attribute to the fact that most of the weight is the battery, which is located low under the cabin floor. (**I’ll come back to a safety feature at the end)
It has a silent cabin. We both love listening to music and it’s always been hard to enjoy music in our cars over the rumble or roar of the car engine. No more. The Tesla is super quiet. Perfect for even the quietest piano sonata or Mark Hollis.
The tablet touch screen is brilliant: huge, felexible and full of features. Before test driving the tesla we test drove Mercedes (C-64AMG), BMW 4-series, Audi S5 and a Jaguar. We’ve owned a Merc and a BMW X5 in the past, so we had other points of comparison. They all had clever driver aids, satnav and some with a head-up display on the windscreen. But none of them were as good as the Tesla’s big screen and electronic dashboard. I still haven’t explored all the features (though I’ve mastered Spotify, USB, podcasts and the other music options). But I did turn on the biohazard a/c function for the first time recently on a very dusty day – giving me an oasis of purified air.
No new model envy. I’ve mostly bought cars second-hand and never gave much thought to comparisons with newer models of the same vehicle. But I did experience ‘new model envy’ when I bought new motorcycles and saw significant improvements added within a year or two of my purchase. Tesla’s overnight software downloads means, in effect, we keep getting the newer model. Over the past year I’ve acquired, among other things, smarter headlights, a surround radar and a more flexible and user-friendly touchscreen. I also got a 14-day trial of the autopilot software, which was fun.
Acceleration is powerful. OK I touched on this earlier, but the acceleration deserves its own heading. Being electric, the car is phenomenally quick from zero to plenty - and I realise we have one of the slower models. I was thinking it's sportsbike quick (I’ve owned several) until I was neatly burned off by a bike at the lights. But it’s still faster off the mark than nearly every other car, which is both good and bad. Like a fast motorcycle, I think you could easily lose your driver’s licence in a Tesla.
We waste zero time ‘refuelling’. Stop the car, plug it in, walk away. It couldn’t be easier. I did a rough back of the envelope estimate that I used to refuel my car about 40 times a year, each averaging 5 minutes of wait, refuel, pay and 5 minutes of going out of my way to stop at the service station. That worked out to nearly 7 hours of time I saved in the last year from not having to refuel a petrol engine car — one hour of which I’ve spent writing this ;-)
The supercharger network is super. Kudos to Tesla for building the refuelling infrastructure to allow us to travel long distances. In a parallel world this would have been done by governments and private companies as a wave of electric cars came onto the market. Maybe that’s the next 10-20 years?
Servicing is easy. The annual service interval is great, though the nearest to us is in Sydney 300km away. Still, we go to Sydney a few times a year, so it’s just a case of combining that with something we really want to do in Sydney. Remote diagnosis is another thing that surprised me. For a short while we had the suspension going into Jack Mode after a few days of the car not being driven. Tesla offered a remote software diagnosis if the problem recurred – but my wife fixed it by simply selecting Jack Mode when it was in Jack Mode which made it revert to normal.
I can’t not mention range anxiety. It was one of the things we worried about when buying the car. But this has not been an issue for us. Our longest trip was around 700km each way. We simply plugged in the destination to the GPS map which told us when and where we could top-up our range at superchargers along the way. That said, we cannot just choose to go anywhere, as you can in an ordinary car. If we’re not on highways/destinations serviced by superchargers we need to make sure there’s accommodation or a restaurant which have destination chargers.
The only other concern would be battery life. We don’t know how long the battery will last or how much a future replacement battery will cost. This uncertainty is probably the biggest leap of faith we have in this technology. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Overall impression: After driving the Tesla for 35,000km we honestly can’t imagine buying another petrol or diesel car. We’ll be interested to see what Merc and BMW eventually come up with as direct competitors, but our Model S75 still feels like the future.
**on corners, I recently went into a tight corner a little too hot but I believed in full control — yet the car took over the steering (which had no give for a second or two) to ensure we stayed within the lines marking the lane. I didn’t realise that was among the standard driver aids. When this car surprises, it’s usually on the upside.
Thank you and happy driving to you all.
