Tonight I provide you with an update on the adventure that is Tesla ownership. Almost 3 months ago, we purchased and brought home a Tesla Model 3, the most affordable of the Tesla line. I had given an account of the purchase and the initial rush of Tesla ownership in a previous TC post. I thought an update would be appropriate at this point.
The thrill does not dissipate because one discovers ever more aspects of the car one didn’t know about as one continues to use it. Hubby keeps learning more things it can do. (He’s taken to listening to Tesla podcasts, which I find excruciatingly boring—please don’t tell him that—which talk about various minutiae about the car’s capabilities, and speculations about what Elon might do next.)
One cute item is the Tesla app. Once you have it on your phone with the blue tooth on, it acts as your key. It is capable of telling you where the car is at any moment, and allows you to do stuff with the car remotely. For example, I could honk the horn or open the trunk from a thousand miles away.
At Thanksgiving, our travel plans are pretty much set: he flies to San Diego to celebrate with his family while I drive down to Baltimore to celebrate with my family. We decided that I should drive the Tesla so as to determine what it’s like to drive it on a long trip, which would require stops to recharge the battery. As it turns out, the stops are not so cumbersome, particularly if you time them to coincide with meals. Charging the battery to the very top may take an hour, but the last bit of charging takes the longest amount of time. You can easily get ¾ of the way there in half that time or less. Then you just tell the car to navigate from supercharger to supercharger. It was interesting to discover just how many Teslas are on the road. You discover this because, of course, they all have to stop at the same places to charge up.
We timed my return so that I would pick up hubby at the airport on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I was a little late—about a half hour—but he kept himself entertained by keeping track of my location as I traveled.
The next morning, I went to get something out of the car, and the screen lit up stating that we could try out autopilot for a month. When hubby roused himself, I told him to go to the car because there was a surprise waiting for him. When he saw the offer, he reacted just about you would expect a three-year-old would when meeting Elmo in person. Of course he immediately accepted the offer. He checked to see if this was some kind of widespread offer, but apparently it wasn’t. However, we figured the offer was probably invoked by the 700 miles I had driven in the previous 4 days. (Elon is watching us.) So he’s been driving around using the autopilot (essentially a self-driving feature), even in inclement weather, which I don’t think is such a great idea, but nothing bad has happened yet.
In the meantime, hubby keeps finding various holiday-themed Easter eggs (helped by the podcasts of course). For example, if you say “Ho ho ho” to the navigator, the image of the car on the screen turns into a sleigh. I suppose this is fun for the engineers, but don’t they have better things to do?
I have yet to drive the car on autopilot, but my trip back to Baltimore for Christmas is coming up before the trial month runs out. We won’t purchase it because it’s impossible to justify the expense, but it’s fun while it lasts.
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Mark Sumner’s front page post on the ongoing Q-Anon meltdown spawned many entertaining comments.Among my favorites were the thread started by mstep with this comment. Also good is Mark Sumner’s response to kkjohnson’s comment regarding the death of James Comey’s dog.
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