#but it is also obviously causes some anxiety to lose control and really full ownership of something that is yours | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smoothshift · 5 years

Text

Tesla Model 3 AWD vs C7 Grand Sport Road Trip Review via /r/cars

Tesla Model 3 AWD vs C7 Grand Sport Road Trip Review

I recently took a trip from Los Angeles up to San Francisco in my Tesla Model 3 AWD. It was my first time road tripping in an electric vehicle and I did a similar trip in my old C7 Corvette Grand Sport so I figured it would be worth sharing my experiences.

Routes:

My trip in the Model 3 was straight up I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

On the C7 I took a more scenic PCH/101 route up to San Francisco and then took the I-5 home.

Though not exactly an apples to apples comparison on the way up, I think each route played to the car’s strengths.

The C7 route was made more for of an enjoyable/scenic driving experience, whereas the Model 3 route was made to be very safe with Tesla supercharger infrastructure in mind.

Driving Experience:

C7: To be honest my road trip experience in the C7 left a little to be desired. On the way up I picked a fairly enjoyable route along the California coast with enough beautiful views to make for a memorable experience, and with enough fun road for the car to stretch its legs. Here’s what I ran into.

-It was a little harsh. Though my car did have magnetic ride shocks and we traveled primarily in “tour” mode the C7 did beat me up after a little while. For reference I’m a 27 year old so it’s not like this is some old guy complaining who’s expecting Cadillac ride quality in his track-focused sports car. This also isn’t to say that the car is too stiff to be enjoyable on road trips…it’s just that the sporty setup does wear on you after a few hours.

-The car was a little hard to enjoy in the spirited sections of the trip. This isn’t to say that the C7 handled bad, wasn’t fast in delivering power, etc. It’s just that the C7 Grand Sports’ limits are so high that street legal and street safe speeds don’t really excite it. So driving some of the spirited sections on this trip was a bit of let down because it felt like I was only using a fraction of the car’s potential.

-The car and the people around you edge you to go over the speedlimit on the highway. As noted above the C7 does have really high limits. When you’re cruising at 80mph the cars is always speaking to you “come-on you can be doing 90…100…you’re in a Corvette! Live a little! I was built to do at least 180” Like-wise, on a two lane high way you get Honda Civics and Priuses coming up on you at 90-100mph because they think you’ll get ticketed first if you’re going over the speedlimit. Of course the second they pass you though they start going safe speeds because there’s no sports car to blame for being reckless. Needless to say there’s a lot of pressure to speed in the C7 and it’s not a good formula for 6 hour road trip!

-The C7 felt like it was falling apart a bit. On my way back the car developed some super funky exhaust drone at around 2.5K RPM that I had never heard in my years of ownership. I played around with the exhaust settings, when stopped took a look to make sure everything was okay and there was no plausible explanation for it. After the trip was done the drone never really appeared again, but it was a very strange occurrence. Likewise the C7 inherently has some creaks and rattles due to its targa roof. The targa roof is a Corvette thing and the creaks and rattles are to be expected, but they also start to wear on you after several hours. It is kind of a hard feeling to describe but in general…the more I drove the C7 on this trip the more it felt like I was breaking it or wearing it down.

-It’s a bit stressful in the rain. There were some portions of the trip where it was rainy and a bit damp and a lot of portions that were sunny and beautiful. In the damp portions you do have to give the C7 a lot of respect with the throttle. GM does do a good job torque managing the vehicle, and the car is 10X better to drive in the rain than say an old C5 Corvette. Just knowing that you’re in a light weight rear wheel drive vehicle with tons of torque and a really twisty road in front of you, makes you more nervous than excited to be driving.

Tesla: I’ve been enjoying daily driving my Tesla and felt like it would make for a good road-trip car. Though my route wasn’t nearly the handpicked driving experience that my C7 route offered, I actually had a really great time going up and down I-5 in the Tesla. Here are my thoughts:

-Autopilot is great for long distances. I don’t have the advanced full self-driving auto pilot functionality on my Model 3 but I do have basic, single lane-keeping autopilot and it worked incredibly well. I drove for several hours without really having to intervene for the vehicle. Being able to take your hands off the wheel for a few seconds, adjust your foot position, etc. without fear of the car losing control was just awesome. It also made it very easy to travel at safe speeds. If cars were driving aggressively it just didn’t matter to me, my car would adjust itself based on whatever they were doing. Likewise traffic jams, though annoying, were completely tolerable because of the car auto starting and stopping itself. In any other vehicles traffic jams would make a trip completely miserable. The only thing that is annoying with the basic autopilot is that you do have to dis-engage and re-engage every time you want to change lanes. Right now the full self driving functionality offers that…but it’s seriously not worth an extra $6,000 at the moment.

-Autopilot needs help in windy roads. Northern California has roads that are twistier than the ones found in Southern California and I felt like autopilot really struggled in these environments. It’s not so much that it couldn’t hold a lane or keep the speed properly, but the car would go a little too far to the left edge of the lane making you feel like it might mess up and run into the shoulder at any moment. Likewise the car just always feels a little too slow to react. Things that I would do when driving to keep things safe, the car seems to do a second or two too late. In reality the way the car is driving is probably perfectly safe…but to the driver it feels very close to the edge and that causes some anxiety. So on straight highways, autopilot is great. When things get more technical autopilot can work but it can also cause more worry.

-Great ride quality. I don’t know what Tesla did with the Model 3 suspension but its ride quality is phenomenal. It feels sporty and communicative when you get on it a little bit, but is very comfortable and compliant the rest of the time. The car never beats you up and it absorbs bumps and road imperfections much better than the C7 Corvette’s suspension does. This made for a very comfy road trip all things considered.

-Perfect throttle control. The car does have a lot of precision with the throttle input thanks to its electric motors and the regen braking. I had no problem comfortably navigating the tight roads and congestion of San Francisco. Not only was the car’s speed very easy to manage, but it also has an excellent “hold” function where if you press down on the brake a bit at a stop the car will engage a “hold” and it will not inch forward or backward. This was especially helpful for holding position on San Francisco’s steep hills. Of course on the highway the car surges immediately into open slots thanks to the instantaneous response of the electric motors. The big point to make here is that the C7 can sometimes feel like a bull in a china shop in city driving, and even on the highway it sometimes feels like it would rather be on a track. The C7 is still very dayliable around town and such…but you just get a much broader and more precise power characteristic with an electric motor for each driving situation you can find yourself in.

-The car felt solid afterwards. With all of the Tesla build quality woes I was kind of expecting something to go wrong or for some random rattle to develop that would make me regret the trip to no end. However the car was completely solid after the 700-mile or so round trip. If anything my C7 felt a little tired after its road-trip and the Tesla feels like nothing has happened to it at all.

-The silence makes for a zen-like experience. I’m not going to complain that the C7 makes noise and the Tesla doesn’t. But what I will say is that the whole trip did feel very peaceful in the Tesla thanks to how quiet it was. It felt very easy to take in the surroundings and just appreciate being in the moment. Likewise it made for better clarity when listening to podcasts and music on the ride.

-It was nice being undercover. When in the C7 it’s all eyes on you all the time. There were portions of this ride where I was admittedly going faster in the Tesla than I maybe would have been going in the C7 and that’s simply because the C7 draws a lot of attention to it, while the Tesla is just another sedan. This also made it less of an ordeal when going to eat in the small towns along I-5 (where a C7 would draw a bit of attention) and I had no worries about the car in San Francisco. Ironically…despite how common Teslas are nowadays the car does feel very exciting, unique, and compelling to be in. It’s not going to draw sports car attention, but it’s not like you feel like you’re in some soulless Camry either, the Model 3 just has kind of a delightful, fun personality to it.

Here are my thoughts on some things inherent to having an electric vehicle on a road-trip.

-Range Anxiety: I didn’t really have any with the Model 3. There was a supercharger at pretty much every exit on I-5 between LA and San Francisco so where I would have had to stop for gas I could stop to charge if I wanted to. This obviously isn’t the case along every route or anything like that, but it was great along this very common trip for people who live in California.

One thing that I thought was interesting was that the Tesla navigation system seemed to prioritize travel time over “range safety” So for instance along my route the nav system would read “Charge at supercharger X for 15 minutes” and then it would have me arriving at my destination with like a 4% charge left, whereas if I charged for 40 minutes, I would arrive with a much safer 30% left. I guess for a computer algorithm prioritizing travel time like this makes complete sense, but when traveling with an electric vehicle you obviously always want some more margin for error. Fortunately all I did was nav to each of the superchargers I wanted to hit along the route, charged as long as I thought I needed to, and then I punched in my final destination after I hit my last super charger. So this wasn’t anything that couldn’t be figured out or defeated easily.

Superchargers VS. Gas Stations: Without being an electric or Tesla fanboy…I think superchargers are way better to stop at than gas stations.

First off, most superchargers are in “nicer” areas along a given route. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten off of an exit in an ICE car only to find out that I got off on the crappy exit with the creepy town and the “good” one is up a few more miles. With superchargers you have less of a chance of that.

I also found that my car charged way faster than I expected it to. On this trip, we stopped to eat when charging, and each time the car was done charging well before we were done eating. In general I was rolling into the superchargers with around 100 miles of range left and it seemed like I could get to a decent range level within 20 minutes if I wanted to move on in a bit more of a hurry.

On the way back down to Los Angeles we stopped at the Kettleman City supercharger…which is kind of Tesla’s flagship supercharger. It has 24 stalls (the largest in the world currently) and a nice Tesla only lounge that has a super nice design to it and is complete with barista, super clean bathrooms, wifi, and vending machines. It was so much nicer hanging out in that lounge for a few minutes than the alternative of running into a gas station convenience store.

I might just have bad luck, but in the Vette I would always get people coming up to me asking me for money at a gas station or trying to have me buy them a tank of gas. I’m usually very gracious in such situations and help those folks out…but it was always kind of annoying seeing them target me primarily because of the Vette. With superchargers all you’re interacting with is other Tesla owners.

Now I will say there are some problems with the superchargers.

For one…there are a lot of Tesla owners who are hipster douchebags who think that having a handlebar moustache, a cup of Americano and a Tesla makes them an artisan. Likewise there are also a lot of folks who have a “hoard” mentality. They’re the people who did the math and realized that owning a Tesla would save them X amount of dollars over 10 years compared to say their old Prius. So there are some weird overtones at the superchargers due to how extreme some of the owners can be. If I solely supercharged my car I wouldn’t enjoy Tesla ownership because both mentalities annoy the crap out of me. That being said they are…still better than dealing with folks asking for money at the gas station.

I also find that there are always one or two superchargers that tend to be broken at given locations. On the way out of LA I charged at the SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, which also houses the Tesla Design center, and they ironically had a stall that was down and was causing a bit of a backup at the supercharger there because of it. So the maintenance can be better…and if you’re on the last few miles of a charge and the only stall open is broken I can see that being a very frustrating experience while you wait 20+minutes for other folks to finish up.

Cost (round trip):

Tesla: $45

Corvette: $200.

To be honest… with how cheap it is to get the Tesla to and from San Francisco it’s almost not even worth buying plane tickets to get to San Francisco from LA. This trip in the Tesla is something that my wife and I are looking forward to doing more frequently because of how cheap and easy it is.

Final Thoughts (TLDR):

I will forever argue that if you are going to take a road trip in a sports car that you’re not going to find a better one to do it in than a Corvette. There’s ample luggage space, the cabin is roomy, and the car is fun to drive. I was just expecting the trip in the Corvette to very much be a “ah yes…this is why I own a Corvette” type of experience and instead I walked away worrying about the car a bit more than I wanted to, got a little bit too fatigued for a car claiming to be a Grand Tourer, and the fun level was about two notches below what I was hoping it would be.

The Tesla on the other hand felt like a revelation. It was fun, comfortable, and just absolutely delightful to be in. I felt like I had fewer things to worry about and the whole trip was done for less than the cost of a tank of gas in the C7. It honestly felt like I stumbled across some new found freedom where one can travel in a car for long hours and not feel uncomfortable, or overly tired, or beat up. If you’re someone who likes to road-trip and adventure drives a Tesla might honestly be your best car yet. It heightens all of the things that make a trip fun and enjoyable, while minimizing a lot of the things that could cause discomfort or issue.

#reddit #autonews #auto #cars

0 notes