I was off this weekend to visit my brother in Starbuck, MN. Had a great visit there.
It was a good opportunity to take a shakedown trip with my new Tesla 3. I took mostly rural secondary roads on the way there and mostly I94 freeway home.
I was able to drive lots of secondary roads using the trick Tesla Autosteer capability. That, combined with its adaptive cruise control makes driving really easy and relaxing. It really will steer itself in almost all conditions, around curves, up and down hills, even through small towns. It automatically obeys speed limits (I set it for 5 over). The only thing it won't do is stop for red lites or stop signs. Gotta do that myself, but it hardly ever requires touching the brakes, the regenerative braking slows you down very quickly to an almost stop if you just lift off the go pedal all the way. As long as you keep a hand on the steering wheel firm enough that it knows you are there, you can even take a bit of time to look around at the scenery without needing to worry about running off the road. It won't let that happen Of course if you are not holding the wheel firmly enough it will flash the screen at you and scold you a bit. If you overlook that then it flashes a red screen at you and then chews you out and tells you that you cannot use Autosteer until you stop the car again. It behaves like a rather strict schoolteacher.
Driving home on the freeway was actually much more of a hassle. The traffic was very heavy and moving very fast (everybody coming home from their lake cabins after the long 4th weekend). Bumper to bumper at 80 MPH with both lanes full of cars is not my way of relaxing. Setting the adaptive cruise control to 3 seconds spacing just did not work as everyone just cut in front of me and the Tesla system would then try and back off to get that 3 second space cushion back again to no avail. I did take a break at the Clearwater, MN Tesla Supercharge station. Added 150 miles of range in about 20 minutes. Just enough time to stop at the nearby bakery for a cinnamon roll and a cuppa kauphy.
So first impressions on a reasonable road trip is that the Tesla is an outstanding go anywhere vehicle. Exceeding my expectations.
Frank
