 Every revolution begins with a hard pivot. You can't take a step forward without a leap of faith. No one can change the world without a wise investment. And you can't unironically use cliches like that without being kind of a horse's ass. And yet, like the Prius owners that came before them, Tesla enthusiasts brand themselves not as mere car buyers, but as sponsors of an electrified future. The next leap forward for the automotive industry and therefore the world. Which was fine when all Tesla needed to do was sell a handful of expensive sports cars to the aforementioned enthusiasts. But the thing is, the Model Y is Tesla's second crack at Phase 3 of their super secret master plan. And as everyone knows, Phase 3 is when you're supposed to make a profit. So have they done enough to attract the kinds of folks who buy cars rather than promises? The answer is, well, yes. Given the choice to have any car they wanted, my in-laws ultimately chose the Tesla Model Y. And they were kind enough to loan it to me to use as a daily driver for a few weeks so I could share my thoughts with you. So why don't we go for a ride? Oh, sometimes the key thing, you gotta touch it here. It's usually pretty good. Everything about the Tesla experience is different, starting with the dealership. Tesla can call it whatever they want, it's still a dealership. We booked our test drive, ultimately decided on the car, and then got a notification a whopping four weeks early that it was ready for pickup. So far, so good. Unfortunately, that's basically where the positive customer service experience ended. They've been very slow about communication and supposedly due to COVID, my poor boomer in-laws only got about 15 to 20 minutes of FaceTime with a Tesla representative. And were directed to watch a series of videos to learn how to drive the car on their own. Now, for a tech savvy Tesla buyer, that's probably not a problem. You wanted to play with it anyway. But given that most of our audience is the person who their parents or grandparents call up for questions about their tech, I'm sure you'd appreciate if that first hour or two was offloaded to the dealer. Another difference with the delivery compared to a normal car is inspecting your vehicle for obvious QC problems. This one had a cockeyed logo, some random red marks on it, a misaligned panel, and it came with a broken wall charger out of the box. To Tesla's credit, they did send a technician to my in-laws house to sort these problems out, twice due to a communication issue. But we're going to have to do it again because as I arrived on set, Alex actually pointed out that one of the rear lights has a seal problem and has condensation in it. So time for round three. Tesla makes it very easy to overlook these kinds of things though with one simple trick. By creating a product that looks and feels so futuristic compared to anything their target customers have ever seen that they will bend over backwards to ignore its flaws. And honestly, I'm not immune to it. Here's some of the things that really impressed me. The phone pairing is so easy that every other manufacturer should be embarrassed. It took me and my wife about 15 seconds and it repairs every time flawlessly. The quality of the backup camera on the huge screen means I basically never looked in my rearview mirror. The audio volume dips subtly when a door is opened to make it easier to greet a passenger. And the touchscreen is as responsive as a phone or a tablet. All these things coming together is how Tesla somehow manages to have both some of the lowest rated initial quality out of any auto manufacturer, according to JD Power, while also maintaining the highest owner satisfaction according to Consumer Reports. But maybe there's an even simpler reason people love this thing so much. Daily driving the Model Y was unlike any other car that I have ever driven. All the way from a Geo Metro 3 banger to a Ferrari something or other on a track in Vegas. Just map the accelerator, whoo! To go from 0 to 60 in just 4.6 seconds and the party keeps on going past the speeding ticket all the way to an instant impound. Whoo, we going fast boys. As someone who's not used to it though, having 384 horsepower and 376 twerks available made me immediately prefer Chill Mode, which smooths out the acceleration for a more chill, not to mention more economical driving experience. As for the handling, the low center of gravity and responsive steering made it feel less like operating a large heavy vehicle, and more like a small remote control toy one. Like with any new toy though, whoa slow down I need Chill Mode. Quickly turned into what can this baby do and I have to confess, the Model Y gave me an itch for performance in a car that I've never really felt before. And by far the lamest thing about going back to my Volt from this is the passing ability. You don't have to be going 0 to have it kick. Check this out, we're at 95 kilometers, hello! And this is the long-range model, it's not even the performance one. But if you're like me, Linus's opinion can only hold so much weight, like he kind of enjoys the vagueness of the Volt. So take it from me, someone that basically did a Masters in suspension design instead of actually doing my coursework. So this really unfortunate thing happened between shoot days one and two of this. A big rock chipped the windshield of Linus's in-laws car, so we have the fastest Model Y performance around. It's a rental, so how's the acceleration? Holy crap, that is very impressive, but at the same time, I don't know if it's worth the premium over the standard model. You still get the permanent magnet motors, so the electric wall of torque is still there in that. Like this is impressive, but the other one is too. As for the handling, on the surface things are promising. Up front you get a double A-arm sort of like suspension, and on the back you get a multi-link design that actually contains the rear powertrain to isolate all of the bumps and stuff from the chassis and the driver. All of this, along with a low center of gravity, translates into cornering speeds that are hard to believe with a 4,400 pound car. But the problem is that you can huck it into a corner, although you don't really feel what the steering's doing. The electronics just kind of come in and there's a bit of understeer. I don't know what's happening. I'm cornering really fast, but I feel like, you know, on a long twisty road, you could have a lot more fun in a car with half the power. Only car nerds care about handling on the track though. Most people just want a nice space to exist in for the duration of their commute, and it's quite a nice space to spend your time. I have my doubts about the upcoming 7-seater being comfortable for anyone over the age of about 13, but for the 5-seater option, the front seats are reasonably comfortable with all the adjustments I'd expect, and the rear seats have heaps of room. Tesla does benefit a little bit from the MacBook Pro effect as far as their interior goes though, where someone that's only ever owned a $500 Dell runs out, buys a $3,000 MacBook Pro, and is like, wow man, Apple's the best, but without ever trying a $3,000 Windows machine. I mean, in fairness though, that is Tesla's plan, right? Turn non-car people into car people with their sheer sex appeal, and then hopefully figure out how to get better at building cars before they end up needing an upgrade. Because I get it. Car guys are always harping on the interiors of Tesla and how much they suck for the price, and I was briefly converted to the car guy's side when I test drove an Audi Q5. The second I sat in it, I was like, oh, yeah, now I get it. Until minutes later, the Audi Q5 was disqualified by my non-technophile aunt and uncle, when the sales rep explained that it doesn't have a touchscreen, because you input text by drawing little letters on a touch pad, like you're in kindergarten learning to finger paint. It's like, what? Honestly, watching the sales rep try and sell that kind of oversight on a vehicle that costs more than the Model Y, was kind of pathetic. All right then. This is the part where I tell you the Tesla tech is mind-blowing, and the reason you should buy this car right now, right? Well, for the most part. I love the ability to use your phone as a key and for climate control. They've also managed to make most basic car controls work well on a touchscreen, something that pretty much every other car company has failed miserably at. But when it comes to entertainment and navigation, honestly, I'd rather just have Android Auto. Now, hold on, hold on, Tesla fans. I have a question for you. Have you actually used Android Auto? No? Didn't think so. Games from our team actually just upgraded to a Model 3, and has exactly the same feedback as me. While Spotify does work fine, if you have a premium account, everything else uses Bluetooth, where you can't browse content or scrub through podcasts, like there's not even a button or a voice command to skip ahead a minute, to get past an ad or go back a minute to repeat something that you missed. Why can't Tesla just let Android Auto run in a window or something? You know, the kind of thing they totally could do, because many other manufacturers have done it. The only answer I can come up with is that Tesla, like Apple, seems to believe that they know what's best for their customers, better than their customers do, and they like it this way. With that said, it's not like Tesla does everything wrong as far as software goes. Updating the OS on, say, a Ford? Sucks. Over-the-air updates remain one of Tesla's biggest advantages, although some traditional auto companies are matching it now, or at least offering some way to update the infotainment system, and we have to give Tesla credit for this shift in the industry. And it's a really important one, because as vehicles get smarter, there's going to be a lot more things that need updating, like driving assists. Tesla's adaptive cruise control is super intuitive to use, allowing easy one-touch activation, and it even works at low enough speeds that I can use it in school zones. Although, in practice, I actually found myself using it a lot less than I expected. One of the things I noticed often was that if I was on adaptive, approaching a stopped vehicle, like at a light, it wouldn't do a great job of accounting for the vehicles in front beginning to accelerate once the light changed, so the car would end up kind of like slamming on the brakes and then gradually increasing my speed again, even though that wasn't necessary. My most frequent passenger, my wife, is susceptible to motion sickness and found the lurchiness very unpleasant, so I just kind of couldn't use it. As for the other driver assists, well, I didn't opt for the full self-driving package, because, from my point of view, $8,000 is an awful lot of money to effectively beta test for Tesla, so my expectations were pretty low. But even then, I was still disappointed when the automatic lane departure started bouncing me back and forth between the left and right lanes at more and more extreme angles until finally I had to take over, since it was just going to drive right over the line. Now, there's a good reason that autopilot is basically banned in the EU. In North America, when a Tesla smashes into a stopped car or something, we will jump to blame the driver, like, oh, they were reading a book or playing a video game. In Europe, they've realized that these behaviors are just a symptom of telling people that their car has autopilot technology, when in reality, full self-driving, which is what autopilot sounds like, is years away from being safe enough to trust people's lives with it. And Tesla makes matters worse for themselves with their lack of transparency about the safety of autopilot. Forbes found autopilot to be about equal, if not a bit worse, than manually driving a car, when the numbers are properly represented. Speaking of safety, the automatic wipers straight up suck, and a German judge recently ruled that the method of manually adjusting the wipers on the touchscreen is classified as distracted driving. And, honestly, for good reason. What is this? I mean, I wouldn't even mind so much if the wipers could be easily controlled from behind the steering wheel, like most cars. But no, Tesla insists you do every damn thing with the touchscreen. They even have wiper controls on the stock, but only for cleaning or a single wipe, not for actually setting the wiper speed. Dinking around with my wipers in the dark, in the rain, on a touchscreen is not safe, and I should never have to do that, period. So now we're going to get into the real answer to the question I posed in my Chevy Volt video. Why didn't I buy a Tesla for myself? Not because of range anxiety, I feel like being able to charge the car at home and at work more than offsets that. Or the QC, since that's something that is bound to improve as they get more manufacturing experience. It's because liking a car, and I do, doesn't mean that I like the policies and the behavior of the company that produces it, and supporting Tesla's bad attitude could have negative consequences for the entire industry. Sure, they're doing lots of good things by aggressively pushing electrification. It is without a doubt better than sticking with gas. But then in other ways, they seem to be regressing. One of the anti-consumer things about the company, it's noisy squawking when things are going well, then utter lack of transparency when there's bad news or a data point that doesn't fit the narrative, is poised to take a nosedive moving forward. Elon wants to have the benefit of his disproportionate amount of media coverage and openly brags that his company doesn't even advertise, but can also alienate portions of his most loyal customers when things don't go his way. Without a PR department, how will the public get explanations for spontaneous glass shattering, bumpers disappearing after a ride through a puddle, or a roof that flies off a vehicle on the way home from the dealership? What about the arguably much bigger issues, like the actual safety record of Tesla's irresponsibly named autopilot? What about the inconsistent policies with respect to their handling of customer data? Their opposition to right to repair? And the fact that they don't follow through on promises, like saying that they would share their software and technology with other companies, except that never happened. Like there is so much to love about this car. Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into making the experience, like I said, unlike anything else on the market. But part of loving something is wanting what's best for it, which means being honest with it and honest with yourself. Moves like building rear heated seats into every vehicle and then charging you a micro transaction later are already being adopted by the rest of the industry because Tesla got away with it. So that's the question you should always be asking yourself. Would I still be okay with this if it was someone other than Tesla doing it? If the answer is no, you've got to send a message. As for how you would do that, well, they don't have a PR department anymore, so that's out. But I did hear that Mr. Musk is pretty into the whole Twitter thing, so you could try that. Massive shout out to DJI, by the way, for sponsoring this video. The DJI Mavic Air 2, which we used for all of our in-air footage for this video, has the ability to shoot video in HDR, take panoramas in HDR, and record photos with more dynamic range. Currently, no other DJI drone offers all three of those HDR features, particularly HDR video mode. It's got a 48 megapixel photo mode, allowing you to shoot with high dynamic range, of course, and up to 48 megapixels. It features hyperlapse, which enables you to capture the passing of time in a pretty unique way. And the latest firmware update now includes digital zoom in 1080p, 2.7K, and 4K. I'd also, by the way, love to shout out Mission Raceway, Stabilize Cinemas, and Rudeview Stables. What was the horse's name, Paloma? Paloma, she was awesome. She was amazing. What a trooper she was. And a couple more things. I couldn't find a spot for these in the script. The audio system is not very good, but I don't really have any constructive criticism, because I have no idea how they'd fix it. It seems to be a problem with just, like, glass surfaces everywhere causing reflections. Even having a conversation in that car, you can kind of hear your voice bouncing back at you. And thanks to you for watching. If you guys enjoy these kinds of car videos, leave a comment. Let us know what we did well. Let us know what we didn't do so well. It will actually help us out a lot moving forward. Oh yeah, and go watch the vault video if you haven't.