I do always have a small chuckle when I read or hear about a Tesla Model Y being described as cutting edge or revolutionary!
The drive units, battery and charging network maybe are, and Tesla have made some real innovations in production tooling and assembly. The screen is more of an annoyance, I'd prefer proper driver display and hardware controls but I've made peace with. It works and the UI is bearable, even if Spotify is a pile of junk.
However, the rest of the car is decidedly low tech and/or simply unfinished...
- Matrix headlights -10 years behind other brands.
- Auto-wipers - who actually knows any more?! They simply don't work.
- Full Self Driving - "coming later this year" in 2019. No sign of it coming to the UK any time soon. Probably won't work properly anyway.
- Traffic Aware Cruise Control - Navigation map data errors? No problem, it will brake hard for a junction that hasn't existed for 5 years, regardless of how close the following vehicle is. But at least we can laugh at those silly legacy manufacturers and their obsolete fully functional and non-beta radar units because we've got...
- Cameras - "the front, left, right, rear camera is blocked or blinded", every single minute of every single winter day. The very definition of nuisance alerts. And don't even think about actually look at the error message, or bing! "pay attention to the road".
- Cameras 2 - parking sensors are so easy and simple, but so very "legacy", instead lets complicate the whole thing by using some camera image processing to generate a useless and gimmicky 3d recreation of the surrounding environment rather than just good old reliable beeps, distance symbology, and a 360 view.
- Cameras 3 - reversing into a space? Good luck, because the steering guidance lines on the reverse camera are nowhere near where the wheels are actually going to go. Watch that white line slide across the pavement with joy (and a sense of impending doom), knowing other manufacturers of "legacy" cars can accurately show you where the wheels will go every single time. Still, good work for wheel refurb shops, I guess.
- Door handles - dark paint job? Good luck finding the handles on a dark, wet and windy night the UK is well known for. But at least we're not like those horrible legacy brands that fit nice little lights into the door handles on their ancient vehicles. You could buy a glow in the dark sticker from Amazon, I guess - make sure to order them at the same time as those filler bins for the sides of load area that Tesla were simply too modern to provide.
- Door handles 2 - watch with joy as your "legacy" car owning friends faff around trying to get in and then out of the car. I'm sure once they are in the fart noises will make all the difference.
- Door handles 3 - giving occasional rear seat passengers the safety brief about how to manually escape in the event somebody drives into us. Extra hardware is bad - so lets have two different electronic and physical methods to open the doors where legacy makes only have a single item, mostly because of...
- Frameless doors - did it rain overnight? Then you'll have a wet bottom as the drips from the window seal end up on your drivers seat.
- Broken LTE - months of driving with no sat nav map and broken LTE connectivity. Yay for progress. Those legacy makes with installed databases, must be like a rotary dial phone. Much better to live in the future and use Waze on your smart phone anyway, because carplay is so legacy it hurts. You can't see the smartphone in the charging location though, so get ready for another amazon order.
- Charge port - it's simply too difficult to unlock the charge cable for a few seconds when the doors are unlocked, we'll leave that for legacy manufacturers. Instead, get your smartphone out to do it even when it's cold, wet and wintery like California mostly isn't. You should have bought our special supply equipment and plug with fancy extra hardware button (you see, we like hardware controls when it allows for upselling!). You'll need the phone anyway, because...
- Charge port 2 - ...it was far to "legacy" to have a light there so you can see where to plug in. Maybe NACS is easier as they have a hole to slide into, but CCS plugs, yeah you'll need the flashlight. Or just slide it all around looking for the correct location, I'm sure that's not going to cause any issues down the line.
- Parcel shelf / load cover - no way to store it in the car. Taking the dogs to kennels on the way to vacation? You're going back home to pick up the load cover again.
- Parcel shelf / load cover 2 - folds up in some silly arrangement rather than just having a retractable cover.
- Integrated cargo net - there isn't one!
- Rear seat heaters - "Excuse me driver, would you kindly turn my seat heater on / up / down / off." Because hardware buttons are evil, apparently. Unless they are on the special charge handle, or under the little flap in the rear door pockets.
And yes, some of those things are being fixed on the new Model 3. But why on earth was a 2020s car built like that? How much extra did I pay for wheels or paint? Add a few hundred more dollars onto the list price, install some reliable single function sensors, get a new product designer that actually understands family use cases and fix all that stuff above. Most are not even remotely difficult.
And yet I do still enjoy the car, but let's not kid ourselves about how cutting edge it is!