every revolution begins with a hard
pivot
you can't take a step forward without a
leap of faith
no one can change the world without a
wise investment
and you can't un-ironically use cliches
like that without being kind of a
horse's ass
and yet like the prius owners that came
before them tesla enthusiasts brand
themselves not as mere car buyers but as
sponsors of an electrified future the
next leap forward for the automotive
industry
and therefore the world which was fine
when all tesla needed to do
was sell a handful of expensive sports
cars to the aforementioned enthusiasts
but the thing is the model y is tesla's
second crack at phase three of their
super secret master plan
and as everyone knows phase three is
when you're supposed to make a profit
so have they done enough to attract the
kinds of folks who buy cars
rather than promises the answer is
well yes given the choice to have any
car they wanted my in-laws ultimately
chose
the tesla model y and they were kind
enough to loan it to me to use as a
daily driver for a few weeks
so i could share my thoughts with you so
why don't we go for a ride
oh sometimes the key thing you gotta
touch it here
it's usually pretty good
[Music]
everything about the tesla experience is
different
starting with the dealership tesla can
call it whatever they want it's still a
dealership
we booked our test drive ultimately
decided on the car
and then got a notification a whopping
four weeks early that it was ready for
pickup
so far so good unfortunately that's
basically where the positive customer
service experience
ended they've been very slow about
communication and supposedly due to
kovid
my poor boomer in-laws only got about 15
to 20 minutes of face facetime with a
tesla
representative and were directed to
watch a series of videos
to learn how to drive the car on their
own now for a tech savvy tesla buyer
that's probably not a problem you wanted
to play with it anyway but given that
most of our audience is the person who
their parents or grandparents call up
for questions about their tech
i'm sure you'd appreciate if that first
hour or two was
offloaded to the dealer another
difference with the delivery compared to
a normal car
is inspecting your vehicle for obvious
qc problems
this one had a cockeyed logo some random
red marks on it
a misaligned panel and it came with a
broken wall charger out of the box
to tesla's credit they did send a
technician to my in-laws house to sort
these problems out
twice due to a communication issue but
we're gonna have to do it again because
as i arrived on set alex actually
pointed out that one of the rear lights
has a seal problem and has condensation
in it so
time for round three tesla makes it very
easy to overlook these kinds of things
though with one simple trick
by creating a product that looks and
feels
so futuristic compared to anything their
target customers have ever seen
that they will bend over backwards to
ignore its flaws
and honestly i'm not immune to it here's
some of the things that really impressed
me
the phone pairing is so easy that every
other manufacturer should be
embarrassed it took me and my wife about
15 seconds
and it repairs every time flawlessly the
quality of the backup camera on the
huge screen means i basically never
looked in my rear view mirror
the audio volume dips subtly when a door
is opened to make it easier to greet a
passenger
and the touchscreen is as responsive as
a phone or a tablet
all these things coming together is how
tesla somehow manages to have
both some of the lowest rated initial
quality out of any auto manufacturer
according to jd power
while also maintaining the highest owner
satisfaction
according to consumer reports but maybe
there's an even simpler reason people
love this thing so much
daily driving the model y was unlike any
other car that i have
ever driven all the way from a geo metro
3 banger to a
ferrari something or other on a track in
vegas
just map the accelerator
to go from zero to 60 in just 4.6
seconds and the party keeps on going
past a speeding ticket all the way to an
instant impound
oh we going fast boys as someone who's
not used to it though
having 384 horsepower and 376 twerks
available
made me immediately prefer chill mode
which
smooths out the acceleration for a more
chill
not to mention more economical driving
experience as for the handling
the low center of gravity and responsive
steering made it feel less like
operating a large heavy vehicle and more
like a
small remote control toy one like with
any new toy though
whoa slow down i need chill mode
quickly turned into what can this baby
do
and i have to confess the model y gave
me an
itch for performance in a car that i've
never
really felt before and by far the
lamest thing about going back to my volt
from this
is the passing ability you don't have to
be going zero
to have it kick check this out we're at
95 kilometers
hello and this is the long range model
it's not even the performance one but if
you're like me
linus's opinion can only hold so much
weight like he kind of enjoys the
vagueness of the vault
so take it from me someone that
basically did a masters in suspension
design
instead of actually doing my coursework
so this really unfortunate thing
happened between shoot days
one and two of this a big rock chipped
the windshield of linus's in-laws car so
we have the fastest model y performance
around
it's a rental so how's the acceleration
holy crap that is very impressive but at
the same time
i don't know if it's worth the premium
over the standard model you still get
the permanent magnet motors
so the electric wall of torque is still
there in that like this is impressive
but the other one is too
as for the handling on the surface
things are promising up front you get a
double a-arm
sort of like suspension and on the back
you get a multi-link design that
actually contains the rear powertrain to
isolate all of the bumps and stuff from
the chassis and the driver
all of this along with a low center of
gravity translates into cornering speeds
that are hard to believe with a 4 400
pound car but the problem is is that
you can hook it into a corner although
you don't really feel
what the steering's doing the
electronics just kind of come in and
there's a bit of understeer
i don't know what's happening i'm
corning really fast but i feel like you
know
on a long twisty road you could have a
lot more fun in a car
with half the power only car nerds care
about handling on the track though
most people just want a nice space to
exist in for the duration of their
commute
and it's quite a nice space to spend
your time
i have my doubts about the upcoming
7-seater being comfortable for anyone
over the age of about
13 but for the 5 seater option the front
seats are reasonably comfortable with
all the adjustments i'd expect
and the rear seats have heaps of room
tesla does benefit a little bit from the
macbook pro effect as far as their
interior
goes though where someone that's only
ever owned a 500
dell runs out buys a 3 000 macbook pro
and is like
wow man apple's the best but without
ever trying
a 3 000 windows machine i mean in
fairness though
that is tesla's plan right turn non-car
people
into car people with their sheer sex
appeal and then hopefully figure out how
to get better at building cars before
they end up meeting an upgrade
because i get it car guys are always
harping on the interiors of tesla and
how much they suck for the price
and i was briefly converted to the car
guy's side when i test drove
an audi q5 the second i sat in it i was
like
oh yeah now i get it
until minutes later the audi q5 was
disqualified by my non-technophile aunt
and uncle
when the sales rep explained that it
doesn't have a touchscreen
because you input text by drawing little
letters
on a touch pad like you're in
kindergarten learning to finger paint
it's like honestly watching the sales
rep try and sell
that kind of oversight on a vehicle that
cost more than the model y
was kind of pathetic all right then this
is the part where i tell you the tesla
tech is mind-blowing and the reason you
should buy this car right now
right well for the most part i love the
ability to use your phone as a key
and for climate control they've also
managed to make most basic car controls
work well on a touchscreen
something that pretty much every other
car company has failed
miserably at but when it comes to
entertainment
and navigation honestly i'd rather just
have android auto
now hold on hold on tesla fans i have a
question for you
have you actually used android auto
no didn't think so james from our team
actually
just upgraded to a model 3 and has
exactly the same feedback as me
while spotify does work fine if you have
a premium account
everything else uses bluetooth where you
can't browse content
or scrub through podcasts like there's
not even a button or a voice command to
skip ahead a minute to get past an ad or
go back a minute to repeat something
that you missed
why can't tesla just let android auto
run in a window or something you know
the kind of thing they totally could do
because many other manufacturers
have done it the only answer i can come
up with is that tesla
like apple seems to believe that they
know what's best for their customers
better than their customers do and they
like it this way
with that said it's not like tesla does
everything wrong as far as software goes
updating the os on say a ford sucks
over-the-air updates remain one of
tesla's biggest advantages
although some traditional auto companies
are matching it now
or at least offering some way to update
the infotainment system
and we have to give tesla credit for
this shift in the industry
and it's a really important one because
as vehicles get smarter
there's going to be a lot more things
that need updating like driving assists
tesla's adaptive cruise control is super
intuitive to use allowing easy one-touch
activation
and it even works at low enough speeds
that i can use it in school zones
although in practice i actually found
myself using it a lot less than i
expected
one of the things i noticed often was
that if i was on adaptive approaching a
stopped vehicle like at a light
it wouldn't do a great job of accounting
for the vehicles in front beginning to
accelerate once the light changed so the
car would end up
kind of like slamming on the brakes and
then gradually increasing my speed again
even though that wasn't necessary my
most frequent passenger my
wife is susceptible to motion sickness
and found the lurchiness
very unpleasant so i just kind of
couldn't use it as for the other driver
assists well
i didn't opt for the full self-driving
package because from my point of view
eight thousand dollars is an awful lot
of money to effectively
beta test for tesla so my expectations
were pretty low but even then i was
still disappointed when the automatic
lane departure
started bouncing me back and forth
between the left and right lanes at more
and more extreme angles until finally i
had to take over
since it was just gonna drive right over
the line now there's a good reason
that autopilot is basically banned in
the eu
in north america when a tesla smashes
into a stopped car or something
we will jump to blame the driver like oh
they were reading a book or
playing a video game in europe they've
realized that these behaviors are just a
symptom of telling people that their car
has
autopilot technology when in reality
full self-driving
which is what autopilot sounds like is
years away from being safe enough to
trust people's lives with it
and tesla makes matters worse for
themselves with their lack of
transparency
about the safety of autopilot forbes
found autopilot to be about
equal if not a bit worse than manually
driving a car
when the numbers are properly
represented speaking of safety
the automatic wipers straight up suck
and a german judge recently ruled that
the method of manually adjusting the
wipers on the touchscreen
is classified as distracted driving and
honestly
for good reason what is this i mean i
wouldn't even mind so much if the wipers
could be easily controlled from behind
the steering wheel
like most cars but no tesla insists you
do every damn thing with the touchscreen
they even have wiper controls on the
stock but only for cleaning
or a single wipe not for actually
setting the wiper speed
dinking around with my wipers in the
dark in the rain
on a touchscreen is not safe and i
should never have to do that
period so now we're going to get into
the real answer to the question i posed
in my chevy volt video
why didn't i buy a tesla for myself
it's not because of range anxiety i feel
like being able to charge the car at
home and at
work more than offsets that or the qc
since that's something that is bound to
improve as they get more manufacturing
experience
it's because liking a car and i do
doesn't mean that i like the policies
and the behavior of the company that
produces
it and supporting tesla's bad attitude
could have negative consequences
for the entire industry sure they're
doing
lots of good things by aggressively
pushing electrification
it is without a doubt better than
sticking with gas but then in other
ways they seem to be regressing one of
the anti-consumer things about the
company
it's noisy squawking when things are
going well then
utter lack of transparency when there's
bad news or a data point that doesn't
fit the narrative
is poised to take a nosedive moving
forward elon wants to have the benefit
of his disproportionate amount of media
coverage
and openly brags that his company
doesn't even advertise
but can also alienate portions of his
most loyal customers
when things don't go his way without a
pr department
how will the public get explanations for
spontaneous glass shattering
bumpers disappearing after a ride
through a puddle or a roof that flies
off a vehicle on the way home from the
dealership what about the arguably much
bigger issues
like the actual safety record of tesla's
irresponsibly named
autopilot what about the inconsistent
policies with respect to their handling
of customer data
their opposition to right to repair and
the fact that they don't follow through
on promises
like saying that they would share their
software and technology with other
companies
except that never happened like there is
so much to
love about this car clearly a lot of
thought has gone into making the
experience
like i said unlike anything else on the
market but part of loving something is
wanting what's best for it which means
being honest with it
and honest with yourself moves like
building rear heated seats into every
vehicle
and then charging you a micro
transaction later are already being
adopted by the rest of the industry
because tesla got away with it so that's
the question you should always be asking
yourself
would i still be okay with this if it
was someone other than tesla doing it
if the answer's no you've got to send a
message as for how you would do that
well
they don't have a pr department anymore
so that's out
but i did hear that mr musk is pretty
into the whole twitter thing so you
could try that
massive shout out to dji by the way for
sponsoring this video
the dji mavic air 2 which we used for
all of our
in-air footage for this video has the
ability to shoot video and hdr
take panoramas and hdr and record photos
with more dynamic range currently no
other dji drone offers all three of
those hdr features
particularly hdr video mode it's got a
48 megapixel photo mode allowing you to
shoot with high dynamic range
of course and up to 48 megapixels it
features hyperlapse which enables you to
capture the passing of time in a pretty
unique way
and the latest firmware update now
includes digital zoom in 1080p
2.7 k and 4k i'd also by the way
love to shout out mission raceway
stabilized cinemas and
ridgeview stables what was what was the
horse named paloma
paloma she was awesome she was amazing
what a trooper she was
and a couple more things i couldn't find
a spot for these in the script um the
audio system
is not very good but i don't really have
any constructive criticism because i
have no idea how they'd fix it it seems
to be a problem with
just like glass surfaces everywhere
causing reflections
even having a conversation in that car
you can kind of hear your voice bouncing
back at you
and thanks to you for watching if you
guys enjoy these kinds of car videos
leave a comment let us know what we did
well let us know what we didn't do so
well it
will actually help us out a lot moving
forward oh yeah and go watch the vault
video if you haven't