In response to yesterday's bit about Scoble and me lusting after a Tesla, I got a wonderful email from John Naughton about his love of Tesla. Even better, he told me which one to get! 💥#
I saw Scoble’s post, which I thought was perceptive. I was receptive to it because last year I took the plunge and bought a Tesla — a Model 3 — and it’s been a transforming experience. What makes that remarkable is that I’m a recovering petrolhead — I had a 3.8 litre Mk II Jaguar towards the end of my grad student days — and believe me that was a big deal in those days. So I’ve always been interested in cars, and over the years have owned lots of good and interesting ones.#
But the Tesla is something else. It’s basically software with wheels. Every week or so it gets a software update — mostly bug fixes or minor features added. For example, it used to be quite a palaver to open the glove box: you had to go to the touchscreen, go down a level, find glove box and tap on the icon. Now you have voice control and you just say “Open Glove Box”. That came in a software update. Every so often there are more consequential updates — there’s one coming soon to the Autopilot and, eventually, to the (optional) Full Self Drive software which, theoretically, enables a measure of autonomous driving. So it’s a car that improves steadily the longer you have it.#
I’m not interested in FSD because I rather like driving. But also I’m getting older and I wanted a car that could look ahead and take avoiding action if I missed seeing something — which it already does when Autopilot (which is basically just smart cruise-control) is on.#
The Model 3 is a delight to drive — it’s as nimble as a Porsche (and indeed seems quicker — zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds — than even a Porsche 911). And it’s soooo quiet. My wife and I can whisper and hear one another at 70mph on a freeway.#
The other big deal is that Tesla starting building a supercharger network almost as soon as they started building cars. This was smart because the non-Tesla charging networks are still chaotic and often unreliable — which is why people with non-Tesla EVs continue to find long journeys sometimes erratic and problematic.#
If you do decide to go for one, I suggest you go for the long-range, dual-motor version of the Model 3. That has all-wheel drive, which I reckon is necessary in the winter for where you live.#
And get a home charger, so that whenever you leave the house the car is fully charged.#
In a way, after I got the car I thought of you. Tesla is what the automobile industry ought to have been doing when the tech arrived, just as you think the journalism/media business ought to have pivoted when the Internet and the Web arrived.#
Last update: Wednesday February 24, 2021; 10:51 AM EST.
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