[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAN EDMUNDS: This is the new Tesla Model 3 sedan.
And we've been waiting for ours for over 20 months.
We put our reservation in in early 2016,
and it's finally here.
Let's take a closer look.
This is the key to this car.
You open the door by just placing it right here,
and then get inside.
Once you're in here with the card,
you can train your phone so that you
can use your phone instead of the card to open the door
and get going.
But you want to keep the card with you,
because if your phone dies, you'll be stranded.
This is the interior of the Tesla Model 3.
And when I first saw the prototypes over a year ago,
I didn't have high hopes, because they
were pretty crude looking.
And there's pretty much a flat featureless expanse
of dashboard here, but it works.
So the screen menus-- you press a little car here
and you see a whole lot of choices.
The quick controls, their lights, the mirror adjustments,
window locks, display brightness,
that's the stuff you'll use most often.
There's a couple of things I don't see here
on this touchscreen, although I may be missing them.
I'll have to keep looking, but they were real obvious before.
One was the internet web browser.
I don't really miss that, but it doesn't seem to be here.
The other thing that I don't see that I do miss
is the power meter.
That was something I played with endlessly in the Model S
and Model X, and actually used it on longer trips
to decide when to stop.
It may be buried in a menu, but buried is the operative word.
The owner's manual also was a button
you could push on the other cars and get to it,
and I don't see that.
I may actually have to resort to reading a PDF
or looking in the glove box, which I can open right there.
And I don't see anything.
There's a really nice bin here.
This little tray comes out, but it's deep.
There's a place to plug-in a power charger there
for a phone cord.
It's got a couple of cup holders here.
This opens up and you've got more storage underneath there.
The other thing is the back seat here, it's 60/40 split.
And the seat backs fold down flat.
It's a really wide pass through into the trunk.
So it's almost like having a hatchback,
but without the hatch.
The trunk opening is pretty big.
I haven't tried it yet, but I think
I could put in my 29er mountain bike, and it would fit.
One of the things about this car is the visibility is amazing.
The windshield is really low, the beltline's low.
There's all this glass.
But even in the back the little 3/4 windows in the rear
are really nicely placed.
And it's really easy to see out the rear side glass.
So there's definitely a feeling of openness,
but also a feeling of just being able to see everywhere.
The blind spots are not a problem in this car.
This car has two trunks-- the regular one
in the back and a small frunk, because this car
is a rear-wheel drive Model 3.
It's not a lot.
A couple of duffel bags will fill it up.
The rear trunk's pretty deep, and then there's
a removable false floor.
And it's at least a foot, more than that probably,
deep below the false floor.
This is the long-range Model 3.
It has a published range of 310 miles.
Tesla has this scheme where you charge the battery--
they recommend that you charge the battery 90% day in,
day out, and use the 100% charge mode
if you're going cross country.
So the 310 pertains to the 100% charged state.
When I've charged it at 90% the last couple of nights,
it goes to 278, which is a nice, healthy number of miles.
And I haven't done a total depletion test yet,
but it seems like it's pretty accurate.
This thing's got plenty of thrust.
I mean it's not ludicrous speed.
It doesn't have that big of an electric motor,
but this thing's pretty darn quick.
Definitely plenty of beans to maneuver in traffic
and have a little fun.
I really like the steering wheel.
It's nice and chunky.
It's not too big, not too small.
A grip feels really good.
And I can program the level of effort.
Right now, I've got it in the highest level of effort
which actually feels really, really nice.
There's a good amount of on-center feel.
I can kind of feel which way the tires are pointed.
I can kind of tell what's going on.
But it's not overly heavy.
But if somebody thinks is, they can just dial it
down one or even two notches.
And the chassis is nicely balanced.
It's got a good low center of gravity,
doesn't roll a whole lot, good grip,
good balance, front-to-rear really feels sorted.
Where it falls down for me is the ride on roads
that aren't really smooth.
Something about the damping is just a little off,
and it feels busy.
You can see that this interior is really nice and clean.
There's two stocks, there's a couple
of buttons on the steering wheel,
there's window switches, and a door opening button,
and this touchscreen, and not a lot else.
This car has the $5,000 premium upgrades package,
which gives it this Alcantara interior trim, leather seats,
the glass roof, and a really cool stereo
that if I turned on, you wouldn't
be able to hear me talk.
So for $5,000, you get three or four things, including this pad
here, where I can put my phone.
And I can see it.
I can have it charging, and it's in a nice comfortable viewing
angle.
It turns out, this glass roof is pretty cool.
It's part of the premium upgrades package.
And I thought it would be like sitting in a wok,
you know, with the sun just beating down.
Obviously, it's cloudy right now,
but I had some sun over the weekend and it wasn't bad.
Now in July, I might have a different opinion.
Touch screen's really nice.
You can see that it's landscape orientation instead
of the usual portrait that you see in the Tesla Model
S and the Model X. The right side is map and music.
The left side is vehicle status, and some of the controls.
Like I could flip through here, and look at the trip odometer.
I can look at the tire pressures.
You know, this touch screen's pretty neat.
There's a lot of features built into it.
They simplified it compared to the Model S,
but also made it a little more complicated in some other ways.
One of the things that's more complicated
is adjusting the mirrors or the tilt telescope of the wheel.
I have to use these two thumb controls to do it.
And these do many different things.
And what they do depends on what you've selected in the menu.
And so adjusting the mirrors is something
you really can't do unless you're stopped, because there's
just too much of this punch, punch, read the menu,
dig into the menu, push the right button.
And I am the kind of person, who when I'm going down the road,
maybe I'll adjust my seat position because I'm
get a little stiff.
And each time I do that, I feel like I want
to tweak the mirror position.
And that's usually a really easy thing to do, but not here.
It's a little bit more of a dedicated operation.
I don't like not looking straight ahead at all times.
I don't like something that makes me look off to the side.
And this makes me look off to the side.
It's not just the map, it's the speedometer,
it's the wiper controls.
I mean, if I want to turn on the wipers right now,
I can push the stock here to get one wipe.
And I've got an auto system, but if I
don't like the way it's going in order to mess with the wipers,
I've got to sit here and do that on the touch screen, which
I'm not looking well I'm going right now, which is not good.
This thing has really high tire pressures.
These are all 48, 49, 47 PSI.
But it might be why the ride is a little bit
stiff here and there.
The thing is, this thing feels like a Tesla.
I thought maybe it would somehow feel less than an S,
but it doesn't really.
I mean, it's smaller, but you don't
feel like you're getting less than the brand suggests.
I mean, this interior is plain, but in a really nice
sleek well-designed way.
It doesn't come across as just something that was mailed in.
There's just this slot across the dash.
And the slot is where the air comes out for the air
conditioning system.
And I can actually-- because there's nothing straight ahead
of me, I can set it up so the air comes through the steering
wheel, straight in my face.
And if you're the sort of person who
doesn't like air blowing straight in your face,
you can separate it into two streams
that goes either side of the steering wheel.
Pretty cool.
The cruise control on this system
is also an adaptive cruise control.
And then it goes into autopilot, because we bought that option.
The control for it's a little bit weird.
There's no stock for the cruise control.
You use the shift lever.
So reverse, neutral, drive, push down again,
you get cruise control, push down
two times you get autopilot.
It nominally sets the speed to whatever the speed limit is.
And if you want to bump it up one or two miles an hour,
you've got to go over here to screen and press
the plus or minus if you want to make adjustments.
Which is not the same as tapping a lever
that you don't even have to look at.
Again, you got to draw your attention away
from the road to the screen, which that's
going to come up again and again,
but that's what you get when you take everything and put it
on a screen and take away all the controls and the gauges.
You're pretty much going to force everybody
to look over here, which just isn't ideal.
So this map has the pinch/zoom capability.
Everything is familiar.
It's a little bit of a pain if you want to change the source.
You have this button that has a musical note on it.
Well that's map and music as it turns out.
You press that, you get a little pop up
that shows what you're listening to.
If you want more, you can do that.
It'll show your favorites.
But if you want to change the source,
you got to press it a third time.
I can pick my phone I have a couple of streaming choices.
But to get that, it's a lot of taps.
You haven't heard me talk about the brakes
much, because this car, like all electric cars,
has regenerative braking.
Because this is a rear-wheel drive car,
it doesn't do quite as good a job
as a front-wheel drive electric car would,
because most of the braking on any car is on the front wheels.
There's no noise here.
There's no shifting.
It's just smooth, seamless torque, and it just goes.
I thought this interior would feel a little bit cheap based
on the prototypes I saw, and just
the fact that I saw pictures of this stark interior.
But it comes across as a really nice design.
The back seat in the middle has two vents
and there are USB jacks just below them.
I'm diggin' this thing.
The Model 3 is a really important car for Tesla.
It's a make or break proposition.
And I think we've all been wondering if the car itself
was actually going to live up to the promise.
And I think there's a good chance
that the car is going to do what it needs
to do, and satisfy those people that waited in line
and put down their deposit.
I'm pretty impressed with the Model 3 sedan.
So much so, that I'm going to hang onto a second reservation
I put in for myself.
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