Lara, Copper and I just finished another LA-Seattle run in our 2019 Tesla; just about 23 hours on the road including charging stops. I enjoy the drive — great scenery along most of the route, a good audiobook or two, a lot of snacks, and a quick overnight to explore a new town (OK, usually the same town — there are great donuts in Mount Shasta).
Plus, of course, Autopilot and Dog Mode and optimized routing through the remarkable Supercharger network. Five years in, this stuff just doesn’t get old.
But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. So from a place of love, and on the slim chance that tweeting non-crazy stuff at Elon still works, a few things that need fixing. From a guy who has spent a lot of highway miles thinking about it.
1. Routing & Charging Stops
Our car gets about 300 miles on a full charge, and there are a ton of Superchargers up and down the West Coast. Getting stranded is just not a real concern, unless you’re dumb — the same kind of dumb that runs out of gas in a “normal” car anyways. Just like in my “normal” car, I don’t like to push my range too low when I’m on a trip. I’m sure that different folks will have different tolerances for this kind of thing.
Tesla has a truly impressive routing system that takes charging into account. For example, when I start in Bellevue and want to drive south to Mount Shasta, it figures out where I’ll need to charge and adds those stops along the way: Kelso, Harrisburg, and Medford. It estimates the remaining charge at each stop, and how long I’ll have to stay before setting off again. It’s smart about charging time too — efficiency slows way down as you approach a full charge, so it usually arranges things so you only need to get to around 80% or even less before continuing.
And because many factors can impact range, it constantly re-assesses these stops as you drive. If the margin to reach a charger gets too slim, it will automatically find a closer option and rejigger the rest of the trip to match. It’s really fun to experience it in action — the kind of innovation that cloud-connected software makes possible.
Anyways, this is all great — BUT. As you can see, Tesla considers it safe to arrive at a stop with 9% charge remaining. At 9% I have about 25 miles left, the gauges are red and the car is disabling AC to conserve power. Sure it’s “fine,” but my blood pressure doesn’t concur.
Ask: Let me set a minimum charge level. I’d love to use 18% as the floor (about 55 miles for my car). Without this setting, I often feel compelled to mess around manually with my route to stop earlier and/or charge longer. Is it a huge deal? No — but it’d be nice to just not think about it. Help me out here.
2. Speed Limit Mistakes
When driving on Autopilot, the car automatically reduces speed when the effective speed limit drops (only slower, never faster). This is a fine feature, and certainly handy when you’re coming into a metro area or whatever and the limit is bopping up and down frequently. The problem is that, especially in the last few FSD iterations, the system gets confused by signs that set alternative limits — e.g., for trucks towing trailers or with more than two axles.
I actually didn’t realize that the car still tried to read signs at all; I just assumed it was using some published data source and GPS. But this happened at least ten times on our last drive; the sudden slowdown to 55 when you’re happily zipping along with traffic at 75 is jarring and annoying. I don’t think it’s strictly “dangerous” since braking is sensitive to traffic to the rear, but it still sucks.
Ask: Do better tracking the current speed limit.
3. Bogarting the Passing Lane
I like to drive consistently about five to eight miles over the speed limit; pretty safe from tickets while still moving along at a reasonable clip. This means I stay mostly in the travel lane, occasionally pulling over to pass folks on the left. Since I’m only going a few clicks faster than the folks I’m passing, maneuvers happen pretty slowly — so I keep an eye out for folks pulling up behind me in the fast lane and stay out of their way as much as possible.
FSD doesn’t deal super-well with this. When it notices that I’m going faster than a car ahead of me — even though that car is quite far ahead and I won’t approach it for some time — it moves into the fast lane. While I don’t love this, it would be OK except that the system is NOT sensitive to folks approaching from behind. So left to its own devices, at my preferred speed I’d be that a**hat squatting in the passing lane blocking people trying to pass.
The system does know generally that riding the passing lane is a bad idea and will sometimes move to the right. But something about this particular scenario screws up that behavior. Ask: Improve awareness of cars approaching from the rear and get out of their way.
4. Semi-Automated Lane Changes
Because of the behavior in #3, I will often put the car into “Minimal Lane Changes” mode. This setting limits automatic lane changes to safety reasons (e.g., to make room during a merge), or to follow an active route (e.g., to take a highway exit). Honestly I don’t mind this at all — it’s a nice compromise between letting the car do the work and being an active driver. But there are a couple of annoying things that need work.
First, the setting doesn’t stick. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they did it this way, but “Minimal Lane Changes” stays active only for the duration of the current drive. They take pains to tell you this every time you turn it on, so it’s not just a bug. I either have to remember myself, or wait for the car to attempt a lane change, cancel it, and catch the popup on the main console before it disappears. This is the only setting on the car that works this way! Ask: Make the “Minimal Lane Changes” setting sticky.
The other challenge here is that, just in the past few software iterations and only sometimes, the car is super-slow to respond to lane change requests. The way this works is the driver uses the turn signal to “request” a lane change, and the car automatically moves over when the target lane is clear. Typically this maneuver is very responsive and happens right away. But every few times now, the car just sits there. The blinker is on, the FSD display shows a clear path to the target lane, but nothing happens for 15-30 seconds. Eventually the car moves over, but only after somebody is annoyed — either me trying to pass, or somebody else trying to pass me!
Ask: Figure out why the car is (sometimes) sluggish to move into a clear lane.
5. Mid Speed Follow Distance
A few software iterations ago, Tesla removed the ability to fine-tune follow distance by number of car lengths. Instead, it’s managed by the FSD “profile” (Chill, Average, or Assertive) without direct control. As with some of the other issues I’ve brought up, “generally” it’s fine, but the inability to change the distance manually is a problem at speeds around 25-40mph, especially on a congested highway. In this range, the gap is too large and invites people to constantly cut in front of the car. Honestly it must be what it feels like to drive a semi.
I suspect this is going to be a tough one to get right automatically, because closing up the distance too much — even though it’s what almost all drivers do — certainly increases the risk of a fender bender. And there a ton of folks out there happy to hold FSD to a much higher standard that our fellow humans. So, my ask: At least for now, give me back fine-grained control of follow distance.
6. “Miles Remaining” Calculation
Maybe this is my blood pressure talking again, but one of the most important stats on the display is “Miles Remaining.” It basically takes the place of the gas gauge, giving me a sense of which destinations are in range and which are not. But unlike gas cars which have relatively consistent MPG, electric miles are super-variable. Elevation, speed, temperature and a host of other factors impact this — coming down out of the Oregon passes even turns the dial significantly backwards, gaining about twenty miles thanks to regenerative braking!
The value reported is clearly based on the last X miles of driving, for some unpublished value of X. That is, it’s pretty accurate if you keep driving in the same conditions. Which is fair if you think about it; the car can’t read your mind to know where you’ll be driving next. Or can it?
From what I can figure out, it seems that the “% remaining at next charge” value we talked about in #1 does predict the future, based on the active route. Those California-Oregon passes are my best recent example. Leaving Corning (CA) the Tesla told me I’d have about 15% charge remaining at my next stop in Medford (OR). By the time I’d climbed to the top of the passes, that expectation was down to 10%, but my “Miles Remaining” value was far, far lower — nowhere near enough to make Medford. But as I said earlier, as we dropped down the other side, “Miles Remaining” actually climbed about 20 miles and we cruised into Medford with just about exactly 10% remaining.
Now I don’t know what the software is really doing here. But somehow, even at the top of the pass, the routing system “knew” that I would use far less energy getting from there to Medford than I had so far. Maybe it did this using data from previous trips (my own and others’), or maybe it actually considers elevation. But one way or the other, the routing system consistently estimates residual charge better than the real-time system does.
Ask: When there is an active route, sync these systems up to show the same information!
There are other issues here and there: the automatic wipers are sadly useless, and I wish I could convince the falcon doors that the posts in my California garage are NOT in their way. But I don’t want to get greedy, and I don’t want to give the impression that these are anything but nits. To be clear, I love my Tesla. I’m turned off by some of Elon’s personal behavior, but I also believe he’s a straight-up genius whose ventures are having a remarkably positive impact on the future of our species. It’s adorable when folks claim (with all the confidence of a college freshman) that “anyone” could have done what he’s done. Spare me, please.
Lastly — I think it’s useful to note that all of the problems I’ve brought up are software issues. I can’t stress enough how important this is — what Tesla is building (and maybe Rivian and a few others) is fundamentally different than what the traditional automakers are building. They’re not just swapping out a gas motor for electric; they’re inventing a whole new kind of vehicle. It’s a lot less of a hassle to deal with a “recall” when it means your car updates overnight in your garage. The car just gets better and better day by day. That’s amazing, and super-fun.