What are the disadvantages of driving an electric car over a normal combustion engine car (besides the limited range)?

[ltr]I’ve had my Tesla for a couple of months now, and while I like it for the reasons I thought I would, it’s not all roses. To be clear, I like it, I’m happy I bought it.[/ltr]

[ltr]The main problem I have is with the touchscreen… as a user interface in a moving car.[/ltr]

• I think it’s good for the configuration stuff handled while parked. I put on my reading glasses and read the menus and everything is fine. But I’m not wearing those glasses while driving… I need to see at distance.
  
  
• The fonts are ludicrously small. They should be literally twice as big to be read while driving. The speedometer, which they are serious about you reading while driving, is placed closest to the driver and the font is over 3x the size of the usual screen font. That’s how everything should be.
  
  
• I’m supposed to touch the screen while driving. How can this possibly work? I’m trying to touch targets that are separated by an inch, at the end of my unbraced outstretched hand, while going down a road with inevitable bumps, while momentarily glancing at the screen rather that looking at it and judging both distance from finger to screen and also judging when my hand is steady enough to hit the target.
  
  
• There is no haptic feedback on the controls: everything is just pushing buttons on the screen. This is the exact opposite of what the military discovered about flight controls in airplanes. They make every control input feel different specifically to avoid pilot confusion. Ugly? Yes. Safe? Yes.
  
  

[ltr]What I’ve learned is that the only safe way to manage the several systems while driving is by voice command. Which works pretty well. However, discoverability is not great, and there’s no documentation, they suggest (in the manual, which I read) that you just try stuff.[/ltr]

[ltr]The only thing stupider would be to put an interface like this into a space capsule. Oh, wait, oh no….[/ltr]

• Air conditioning: I’m using voice commands. Nothing else is safe.
  
  
• Audio system: volume and skip forward/back are on the steering wheel. I can tell Google to play Spotify and it works well, even with the phone in my pocket. But I don’t even try to select between Spotify options while driving, if it doesn’t understand spoken commands I give up.
  
  
• Wipers: You can trigger a single wipe or windshield wash with a button on the left stalk. I haven’t figured out voice commands yet. The screen controls are a joke.
  
  
• Navigation: I’ll say “Navigate to Michael’s Crafts”, and it’ll list four nearby craft shops, in the tiny inscrutable font. I can’t read any of that while driving, so typically I set up navigation before I start a trip. If I have to navigate while driving, I say “Okay Google, take me to Michael’s Crafts” and it gets it right every time.
  
  

[ltr]The autopilot stuff is good but not perfect. I like having it hold the lane for me most of the time, it’s like driving a horse. I bias the car away from danger like erratic drivers and large trucks. Autopilot does that too — it will actually shy away from cars driving erratically. But it only adds margin laterally. If I’m going to pass someone erratic on the freeway, I speed past them in at most two seconds and I time it so the lane to my other side is clear. Autopilot doesn’t do either of those, and it has tried to maintain speed with a car on either side at times. So, I drop out of Autopilot pretty frequently. I still like it and use it though.[/ltr]

[ltr]The autopilot display has only served to convince me that the Autopilot does not see the things that I think are most important. Would I buy or trust Full Self-Driving? No. In a few years if it gets better? Maybe. Note to folks who think I’m heavily criticizing Tesla here: I got my 81-year-old Mom to buy a Tesla, and one of the reasons was safety. In particular, my guess is that in five years, the Tesla will be better at driving than Mom. My guess is that it’s going to help her keep autonomy that she’d otherwise lose when she can’t drive at night, or can’t drive at all. We got the Tesla now because I want her comfortable with it when it comes time to switch to self driving.[/ltr]

[ltr]I would have preferred leather seats. The shape is okay, and the headrests are a nice break from the horribly forward rests in most cars. Combined with the good headroom, I can actually have good posture in this car.[/ltr]

[ltr]All that said, I bought the car for the drivetrain and I love it. It’s fast, quiet, corners well, no range issues, gobs of headroom, and feels well put together (like most new cars would). It warms up and cools down quickly.[/ltr]

[ltr][Update: I found another interesting downside to electric cars![/ltr]

[ltr]In a Tesla, or a Bolt, or a Mustang Mach E (and probably many other EVs), the battery is under the floor. That means, overnight, the floor of the car will be warmer than the inside of the windscreen, and the temperature difference will be significantly larger than an ICE car (after the ICE exhaust system cools off).[/ltr]

[ltr]So, if it’s been raining, and you’ve gotten in and out of the car a bunch of times, you’ve dragged water in on your shoes which is now on the mats. Overnight, the temperature difference will cause that water to migrate to the cold trap — the inside of the windshield. And so, compared to the ICE (actually PHEV) car parked next to it, the Tesla needs a few more minutes to defrost the front windshield before I get going![/ltr]

[ltr]I can also defrost the thing from my phone before going outside, of course, so it’s not really a big deal.][/ltr]

[ltr][Second update: I’d like to address the issue of “electric cars” wearing out their tires early.[/ltr]

[ltr]The meme going around is that EVs wear out their tires earlier than ICE cars because “the EVs are heavier”. This shows up in Bridgestone’s media push for their new EV-targeted tires. The odd thing is that other vehicles that are heavy don’t wear out their tires earlier. And EVs generally use higher pressure tires which should reduce tire wear a little.[/ltr]

[ltr]I think I know what’s actually going on: EVs are mostly Teslas. These are, by far, the highest-performance mass-produced car ever made. The sum of everything even comparable in performance are sold in numbers an order of magnitude smaller.[/ltr]

[ltr]For instance, most BWMs are actually 325 variants, with 0–60 times of 6.1–7.0 seconds. Very respectable, but not comparable to the most common Tesla, which is the Model Y Long Range at 4.8 seconds. How many dads have bought themselves the $2000 software acceleration boost to 4.3 seconds? That’s a better improvement than most aftermarket mods you can make to a BMW, it’s cheaper, it’s completely reliable, and you get to keep the warrantee, no issues with smog, etc.[/ltr]

[ltr]So what we’ve got is a very large population of drivers who managed to talk themselves into buying high-end sportscars who have just discovered the thrill of zooming around. For someone who has moved from a Camry or a Accord, they’re like teenagers who have just discovered sex. And they are shredding their tires.[/ltr]

[ltr]I’ve now had two taxi rides in Teslas, and in both cases the drivers told me they have to put it in “Chill” mode, otherwise they get worse reviews.][/ltr]



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