It has a lot of shortcomings. But so do other, more (much more) expensive cars.
Also, the days of cheap looking interior are long gone. They couldn’t sell in China otherwise.
And yes, a Tesla is like an iPhone. It doesn’t really excel at anything, but it does most things quite well and very reliably and with a lot of good usability.
The Mark Rober video is at best an exercise in clickbait riding on the current wave of TDS/EDS - or at worst a pump and dump of the LiDAR vendor involved.
I‘d like to see the same experiment repeated with other cars in their lowest trim (the Tesla wasn’t using FSD, just Autopilot, included by default for free).
Most vendors shy away from these kinds of „tests“ - for good reason. Some explicitly forbid you to do them with your cars.
Was a passenger in a colleague’s 4 yo Model S today. Don’t know where this was built, but the quality and finishing is absolutely awful when you compare it to a quality German car like the ones I am used to. And don’t get me started on those disgusting white seats.
Model S and Model X are MIA - Made in America.
Previously, they were sent as CKDs - Knock-down kit - Wikipedia - to Tesla Netherlands and assembled there. But since the opening of the GF in Grünheide, they are sent as complete cars.
Just like in the early days of Model 3 deliveries in Europe (when the cars came out of the Fremont factory), it’s a lottery. Sometimes, you get a good one where everything fits. But if you get a bad one, it usually can’t be fixed because the tolerances of the parts don’t add up.
The seats require maintenance, regardless of color. It’s just you don’t see all the dirt on the black ones - the material is identical otherwise.
I would suggest you take a test-drive in the recently released Model Y and compare.
Tesla’s chief engineer has hinted that Model S and X will “get some love” later this year.
It’s rumored that the S will receive certain design-elements from the Roadster 2.0, while the X will receive certain modifications that make it resemble the Cybertruck. We will see.
Currently, due to the persisting problems with the drive-shafts, I would refrain from buying either. Though the cars actually look better than EQSs from some angles…
An interesting angle from the US: With political opposition to Musk rising (somewhat) and Tesla cars being vandalized more often, there is an apparent spike in insurance premiums that further weighs on resale prices.
Given Mercedes has over 100 years of experience to draw from and the principal form and shape of the Model S was made in 2012-ish, it’s not too shabby, isn’t it?
I completely disagree since FSD is just an over the air software update, it still uses the same cameras regardless. I even had a 3 month trial of FSD when I bought the car which proved to me how ridiculously bad value it is for CHF 7.5k; its completely kneecapped here in Europe with our stricter regulations.
We just have to accept that Musk was an idiot to over rule his engineers and remove the radar, the gold standard for distance measurement plus obstacle avoidance.
Well, it’s apparently coming to Europe in May (-ish), starting in the Netherlands.
FSD isn’t a simple lane-keeping TACC. It has a sense of time and space, if you want to say. It “knows” where it is, it knows what road looks like. That’s why I call the video clickbait.
As for radar - AFAIK it’s a bit more complicated. The engineers could never get the software-stack to a point where a reliable decision could be made when Vision and Radar disagreed - a problem known as sensor fusion.
Despite what people claim or think, radar isn’t a cure-all. The hated “phantom braking” was a result of such a failed reconciliation attempt.
AFAIK, radar is bad at detecting immovable objects (the infamous turned-over trailer). A lot of the deadly accidents happened when radar was still active…
Tesla - and by extension the people in the FSD team - subscribe to the philosophy that because the human driver also has no radar, it’s not needed for FSD (nor is LiDAR).
We will see how it goes. From the comments I can read in the teslamotors reddit, the latest versions are really, really good.
I agree to an extent, but where radar really comes into its own is in wintery driving conditions and fog. In my car autopilot completely craps out or I get multiple camera warnings when driving conditions are poor. I can now understand why some say Teslas are designed and engineered for Californians.
I never had these adaptive cruise control issues with my BMW, it worked flawlessly for the many years I owned it. So if the entire car industry, including companies like BYD (e.g. Bosch Distronic Radar) have them in their vehicles there must be good reason i.e. their engineers know that camera arrays with Ai are just not up to the task.
Yes, but the fire risk is no greater than for the average kitchen. Ideal would be a high voltage (kitchen) outlet, but a standard 220V outlet would do for overnight charging. At around a 30Amp maximum, that is standard for kitchen circuits. The wiring in an old garage may or may not be up to and might need a lower limit. The point is that the cost of an EV charging point is often hugely inflated at the moment.
Which is not a bad looking car. The Xiaomi seems to be a copy of the Taycan though.
I never liked the Tesla look. The back of the S is particularly hideous. And it all got worse when they grew in height. You should know though that I always thought a Volvo 760 looked great.
