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So, here it is… The car we've been waiting for, for quite a long time actually.
The Tesla Model 3. It was first unveiled almost three years ago, and although
there have been various teething problems, and production bottlenecks
along the way. The car has actually been on sale for about 18 months now over in
the States. It's only now though that the first cars are finally arriving in
Europe. At the moment it's just left-hand drive models, which is why we're out in
Madrid today, but right-hand drive cars are expected to appear in the UK before
the end of 2019. Now some of you Tesla fans will doubtless know plenty about
this car already, like my cameraman for today Dan, who actually has a deposit
down on one of these, and is so excited to be filming it today that he's wearing
his Model 3 t-shirt. Let me just take a quick video on my phone of that for you.
But for those of you who aren't that clued up about the Model 3, what exactly
is it? Well it's an electric car, Tesla doesn't do petrels, diesels, or even
hybrids, and it's the company's entry-level model. So it sits below the
Model X SUV and the Model S, which is a fairly big luxury saloon. It's about the
same size as a BMW 3-Series and Tesla quotes a maximum range of up to 310
miles between charges. We’ll talk about that in a little bit more in detail later
on. As for how much it will cost you in the UK, well Tesla is still being a bit
cagey about that. But if you convert the cost from Euros, you're looking at
roughly £50,000 for the All Wheel Drive Long Range model, rising to about
£60,000 for the Performance version that we've got here
today. In other words, it's priced roughly somewhere between a Kia e-Niro and a
Jaguar I-Pace. Now we did get a brief go in the Model 3 out in San Francisco
last year, but this time we have the best part of two days to really get to know
the car properly. So we've put together a bit of a plan, today we'll be heading
out of Madrid and a couple of hours north to the city of Burgos. On the motorway up
there we'll try out some of the Autopilot autonomous driving tech, and
we'll see what the Model 3 is like as a high speed cruiser. When we get to
our hotel – which I'm reliably informed has a Supercharger on site – which is one
of Tesla's own really quick charging points, we'll have a proper look around
the Model 3, and have a good play with it’s enormous
touchscreen infotainment system. Then tomorrow we'll head out into the countryside to
find out what the Model 3 is like to drive on some twisty mountain roads.
Then finally, we'll be finding out roughly how many miles you can expect
from a full charge in the real world, but before we head off it's worth mentioning
that although you probably know us best for our car reviews – we've been doing
them for more than 40 years now – these days we can also help you buy and
potentially save you quite a lot of money in the process. So if you are in
the market for any new car make sure you head over to our website whatcar.com or
click the link up there in the top right to find out how much you could save.
Okay so we’re on the motorway and we're going to try out some of the Autopilot features.
Firstly you've got Adaptive Cruise Control (TACC). To activate it, what you do is
pull once on this stalk here, on the right hand side of the steering wheel,
now that will set you to the speed limit of the road, and it will automatically
maintain a set distance from the car in front by accelerating and braking
accordingly. Now you can change that distance if you’d rather be a bit further
away from the car in front, then you just move this control backwards, and if you
knock it to the right then that brings you up closer to the car in front. Now on
top of that you've also got something called Auto Steer. As the name would
suggest, this is a function that really takes care of the steering for you, as
well as the cruise control. Now to activate that, you double tap on the
stalk, and in the most part it actually works really well. It steers you in the
centre of the lane, it does so smoothly so you're not bouncing off one side of
the lane and then the other. The only time that it can get a little bit
confused is if there are some quite severe corners on the motorway, and what it will
do then is warn you before disconnecting, and on top of that you
must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, because if it senses you
haven't after a short period of time then it deactivates the system as well.
But there's more! Because if you've got Auto Steer enabled, you can actually
perform a lane change as well. What you do to do that, is you just indicate and the
car will check there's nothing around before steering you out
into the next lane, and turning the indicator off. If you
want to go back in the lane, again all you do is you indicate back the other
way, it checks there's nothing that's come
along on the inside and then it steers you over to that lane as well. So it's
pretty clever, and actually in the US the Autopilot system will work with the
navigation systems, so you can effectively just plug-in the destination
and the car can pretty much take care of the driving for you while you're on the
motorway. It will take you off at the junction it thinks you need to come off at and
then hand things back over to you. But at the moment, there's no word on
when, or if at all this will be available in Europe. In other respects on the
motorway, the Model 3 is very good as well.
It feels really stable at speed, and the steering – when you are choosing to steer
yourself that is – is nicely weighted and it's very precise so it allows you to
place the car exactly where you want in your lane. The one downside is that
this is not the quietest cruiser in the world… There's quite a lot of wind noise
from around these frameless doors here, and there's quite a lot of road roar as
well which is no doubt partly caused by the 20inch wheels that come as standard
on this Performance Model 3. Cheaper versions that come on 18 and 19 inch
wheels will no doubt be quite a bit better in that respect. Now there’s one more
thing that's a complete gimmick really, it's called Rainbow Road, and how to
activate that? You tap the stalk four times,
and the road goes rainbow-coloured, and it plays a tune for you while it's
activating a Auto Steer.
[Music]
So we’ve arrived at our hotel, and we found the Tesla Superchargers, but these aren't
just any old Superchargers. They are Model 3 ready. Now that's because the
usual Tesla connector, which is one of these and you use that to charge a Model
S or a Model X, doesn't work with the Model 3. So you have to use one of
these, which is called a CCS connector. This is a bit of a pain because it means
that until Tesla updates all of its Superchargers, some aren't compatible
with the Model 3 at all. On the plus side, the car does know which locations
are and aren’t Model 3 ready so it isn't as though you're gonna have to take any
gambles. Plus the Model 3 can charge at the same speed as other Tesla’s,
around 120 kilowatts, which is much much faster than a Jaguar
I-Pace or a Kia e-Niro. The new CCS connector also means you can charge
reasonably briskly at about 50 kilowatts at some regular public charging points
that would previously have been incompatible with Tesla models, and of
course you can still use a regular Type 2 connector to charge your Model 3 at
home. So what about the rest of the car? Well, let's start with how you get into
it, because there's no conventional key. You just get one of these, a smart card,
and you touch it on the side pillar here, and the doors unlock. If you're thinking
it's a bit rubbish that there's no keyless entry in a car costing this much
money then fear not, because as long as you're logged into the Tesla Smartphone app
that Tesla provides, then the doors will automatically unlock when
you approach the car. The door handles are flush with the bodywork just like
they are in a Model S, but here they don't automatically pop out for you to
grab, you have to push here. To get out again you just press this button,
although there is an emergency release in the unlikely event you get stuck
inside the car without power… Now driving positions tend to be quite personal
things, they work for some people and not quite so well for others. But most of the
fundamentals are really good here, there is a lot of adjustment in the seat, and
once you’ve finally figured out how to do it, in the steering wheel as well. Now the
only downside really is that the drivers seat, it doesn't have a great deal of
support and even with the adjustable lumbar support in its most extreme
setting I did still get a bit of backache on the two-hour journey up here.
Now we could spend more than an hour talking you through the finer detail of
this touchscreen, but we’ll just run through the basics.
The screen measures 15inches across, so it's slightly smaller than what you'll find
in a Model S or a Model X, and it's also in landscape orientation rather than the
portrait layout that Tesla usually favours. But the basic interface is very
similar. Let's start with this icon here, which brings up a lot of the cars’
functions. You can adjust the mirrors and the steering wheel, we talked about that
a minute ago, here you've got the light controls, this is the locks so that's
where you set up your phone to unlock the doors automatically, and you can also
set child locks, and things like that. This just allows you to play about with the
display brightness, these are the driving modes so you can adjust the
aggressiveness of the acceleration, you can change the steering weight, and you can
play about with the regenerative braking. This is the Autopilot stuff and that’s
what we talked about on the way up here – you can play about with those settings.
This is the sat-nav controls, so you can do things like avoiding toll roads, and here is
safety and security, so you can set speed limits, and you can also turn off the alarm.
Now finally, you'll see here, this is how you open the glovebox, but you can also
open the bonnet, the boot, and the charge port flap from the touch screen as
well. This menu here, as you probably guessed, is the music side of things.
You've got various options along the bottom here. This icon here brings up
a lot of the cars apps, you can see your energy consumption over a period of time
for example, and you can also see all the charging information. So you can set the
charging limit to preserve the life of the battery, can change the current at
which the battery is charging, you can schedule charging, and you can also see
how much you're being charged. Press this icon here and you get a reversing
camera, and you can keep that on any speed you like, unlike pretty much every
other car on sale which will automatically switch the camera off when
you go above crawling speeds. If you swipe left, you get trip information. Here
is what we did earlier, and finally there is the wiper switch. The air-con is
also rather fancy because there are no adjustable vents on the dashboard,
you adjust the airflow by playing around with the touchscreen here…
Remember we showed you that silly rainbow-road function on the way up here?
That’s a fun feature that Tesla calls an Easter Egg, and there are a few more… You can
turn your Model 3 into Santa's sleigh, change the sat-nav maps to the surface
of Mars, turn the screen into a giant drawing pad, play some classic Atari
games, turn up the heat with romance mode, or even try to embarrass your passengers
with some fart noises. The touchscreen even displays the speedo and all the
other bits of info that you'd usually expect to find on a screen behind the
steering wheel, and that's helped create this incredibly clean looking dashboard
with no buttons, switches, or dials on it at all. Interior quality isn't going to
worry the likes of Audi, but it's certainly something Tesla has improved
on a lot over the years, and nice touches like this ceramic face on the dashboard
help make the Model 3 feel reasonably premium inside. The Model 3 also feels
really light and airy in the front, and there's a huge amount of storage space
dotted around the interior. Things aren't bad in the back, but I'm 6 foot
and I'm sitting behind my imaginary self and I don't have a huge amount of knee room, I
can't really move my feet at all, but the fact there's no hump in the floor like
you usually expect to find in a petrol or diesel car should make it pretty easy
to fit three people across here. Now the Model 3 is a saloon, so the boot opening
isn't as big as a Jaguar I-Paces but there is loads of room for luggage in
there, and it’ll actually hold even more if you lift up the boot floor. There’s
even space for a couple of soft bags under the bonnet.
[Music]
Now it's our second day with the Model 3, and we're heading out into the
mountains to find some good driving roads, this is the Performance version after all.
It has stiffer sports suspension and really sticky Michelin
tires to help it go around corners better, and compared with other electric
cars even the Jaguar I-Pace for example, it handles really quite well. I mean it is
obviously quite a heavy car still, there are a lot of batteries it needs to carry
around, so it doesn’t turn into corners quite like an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio,
for example. But once you’re settled into a corner you can carry a surprising amount
of speed through it and out the other side again. It steers surprisingly well too
- it's something Tesla's worked really hard on since the early days of the
Model S, and we reckon it's something the company is now better at than any other
electric manufacturer to date. Most impressive of all though is undoubtedly
the acceleration, even the regular Long Range model can do 0-60mph in 4.5
seconds, whereas this Performance version that I'm driving today can do that (0-60mph) in a
scarcely believable 3.3 seconds. That's quicker than Porsche 911, let
alone a Jaguar I-Pace. Now the other thing I really like about the Model 3 are the
brakes. The regenerative side of things is taken care of when you lift off the
accelerator, so the effect doesn't increase unpredictably when you press
the brake pedal like it does in many electric cars. Now that not only makes it
easier to slow down smoothly, it just generally makes the car more enjoyable
to drive. As for the ride, well this Performance version is undoubtedly quite
firm, and that's hardly surprising when you consider it has stiffer sport
suspension and massive 20inch alloys. We'd still say it's no firmer than
M Sport versions of the latest BMW 3-Series for example, but there's no
doubt if comfort is a priority we would recommend you look at the regular
Long Range Model 3 instead. Now before we give the car back to Tesla, there's one last
thing we need to do, and that's to find out roughly how many miles you can expect
from a full charge. Tesla quotes a range of 310 miles based on an official
government test carried out over in the US, but the European WLTP figures have
just been published and they say the Performance version
that we're driving here can do 330 miles, and the less powerful regular Long Range
model can manage 338 miles on a charge. So we're charging the car back up again,
and then we're going to drive it relatively gently all the way back to
Madrid, which is about 150 miles away to see how much charge we use up. A bit of
maths and that should give you a rough idea of the mileage you can expect in
the real world. Although we will of course be putting the Model 3
through our much more scientific Real Range tests when we get the car back in
the UK. To find out more about our Real Range tests, including how many miles
other electric cars can manage on a full charge,
just click the link up there in the top right. Okay so we're coming towards
Madrid now, we've done around 130 miles and the car is saying we've used up 55%
of the battery. So assuming that’s all correct, that gives us a potential
maximum range of around about 235 miles. Which is very good when you consider
that pretty much the whole way we've been doing 70 miles an hour on quite a
hilly motorway. We reckon if you're driving on slower roads you should be
able to get well over 250 miles. As well as having a long range the Model 3
is actually a really good car in other respects, it's fun to drive, it's packed
full of tech, it's ridiculously fast, and it's even reasonably practical. The
problem is we don't know how much it will cost in the UK yet, and until we do
it's impossible to say where the Model 3 will rank in our Electric car league
table. Tesla also needs to get a bit of a move on with deliveries in the UK,
because there are plenty of other electric cars on the horizon from more
established manufacturers that could potentially snap up would-be Model 3
buyers who just can't be bothered to wait any longer.
Hopefully that won't happen because, assuming the prices aren't too
optimistic, this is a car that really does deserve to succeed. Watch out for our
full UK video review of the Model 3 in the coming months, and in the meantime
head over to whatcar.com to read our full written review of the car. Thanks
for watching and if you've enjoyed this video give us a like and hit the
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it's published. [Music]