With the work-week behind me, today I got to take the new Model 3 on a small road trip to really see what this is all about.
My roommate and I hopped into the car at about 0930 this morning and I said “Hey Grok, take me to Buc’ees.”
And moments later the car glided out of the garage and we were on our way to Berthoud Colorado.
I decided to try and let FSD (Full Self Drive) do the grunt work for the entire trip… This is still hard for me as I’m the kind of guy who sits in the passenger seat and stomps on imaginary brake pedals and keeps nervously glancing at the mirrors all the time.
Anyway, while FSD did pretty well – I have a few complaints:
- It waits entirely too long to get into the lane it needs to exit or enter the roadway. For example – it knows it needs to merge right miles before the event happens, then when the exit from Parker on to I-225 is in less than a mile it’s still in the middle lane and now has to fight through a line of bumper-to-bumper cars.
- In today’s instance of this it simply wasn’t able to take the exit on to I- 225 north and was forced on to I-225 south – so it had to drive an extra ten miles to get on to I-25 north which is a construction hellhole currently.
- It loves to follow semis… The problem with this is your average semi these days is a road-going cannon filled with grapeshot and the windshield costs over a thousand dollars to replace.
- The fix for this seems to be to put FSD into “hurry” mode, and then the car won’t be afraid to pass random semis.
- On the way back on C-470 it decided to just camp out in the left lane even though there were no cars anywhere around us – which is not only annoying, it’s illegal.
- I did discover that tapping the turn signal like you would for a lane change in a regular car will prompt the Tesla to change lanes. So I was able to break its left-lane habit easily enough.
Outside of those few quibbles though, I’m getting used to it and it made the entire trip feel far shorter than it really was – about an hour each way.
The Tesla left the house at 80% charge and arrived at Buc’ees at 66% charge – a distance of about 60 miles at between 70 and 80 mph.
At Buc’ees I put the car on one of the superchargers and added 15.6511 kWh in 14 minutes, which was free as I have 2000 miles of free supercharger access, and then I went and wandered around the illicit love-child of a Gas-a-mat and a Walmart to buy beaver-branded munchies and a brisket sammich for dinner.
I returned home by way of the Long John Silver’s at 136th and I-25 for lunch, then asked the car to “take me home via 470” – which it happily did.
The stint down 470 was done at between 80 and 85 as the car was in ‘hurry’ mode now and I guess because everyone else was going that speed, it was going to as well.
At those speeds the car guzzled electrons at an alarming rate, arriving home at 55% charge… so 80% to 55% in roughly 60 miles.
All in all the drive was nice and the car didn’t do anything truly boneheaded – and all I had to do was sit there and supervise…
Living in the future is pretty cool.
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