Welcome to Pragmatic.
Pragmatic is a show about technology and contemplating the finer details in their practical application.
By exploring the real-world trade-offs, we dive into how great ideas can be transformed into products and services that impact our lives.
Pragmatic is entirely supported by you, our listeners.
If you'd like to support us and keep the show ad-free,
you can by becoming a Premium Supporter.
Premium Support is available via Patreon
and through the Apple Podcasts channel subscription.
Premium Supporters have access to early release,
high quality versions of episodes,
as well as bonus material from all of our shows,
not available anywhere else.
Pragmatic is also a podcasting 2.0 enhanced show,
and with the right podcast player,
you can also stream Satoshis and boost with a message
as you listen.
Just visit engineer.network/pragmatic
to learn how you can help this show to continue to be made.
Thank you.
Pragmatic Electric has recently launched
as a video edition of this podcast.
You can watch in Podfriend, Curio Castar,
the Apple Podcasts app, Downcast, Podcast Guru,
or if you're into YouTube, it's there too.
Make sure you check it out today.
I'm your host, John Chidjy,
and today I'm joined by Russell Ivanovich.
How you doing, Russell?
- Hey, good, John.
How's things?
- Very, very good.
Thank you very much.
It's great to catch up with you again.
It's been a few years since we last spoke.
I think it was on episode 69,
we spoke about Apple Watch complications,
which was very complicated, but yes.
- I love it.
Also, I think Elon would definitely appreciate
the number of that podcast, well played.
- He absolutely would, yes.
So you chose well back then, that's true.
107, which is today is slightly less anyhow,
but nevermind, it's fine.
When we get to 420, I have to get you back on specifically,
but that's a long way off.
Anyway, that's okay.
That's an Elon joke that only, yeah, nevermind, it's fine.
All right, cool.
So as I mentioned, before we get too stuck in,
I just wanted to talk a little bit about,
'cause I, so I recently did invest in a Tesla Model 3,
SR, standard range plus,
and it kind of inspired me to have a crack at video.
And I talked about this briefly last episode,
but just to reiterate,
so I kind of did some videos, I've done five episodes.
I did an episode about a wind farm that was nearby.
I say nearby, two and a half hour drive away,
that's nearby in Australia.
I did it at country road,
I drive it on a country road just for something different.
But the three that are more relevant to today's topics,
you've got, I did initial impressions of my Tesla
and not the impressions of how it drive necessarily,
more about how it's perceived when you're driving it.
Challenges of driving in distances,
long distances in Australia in an electric car.
And then I reviewed a sunshade for my glass roof,
which I'm sure we'll talk about.
But in any case,
So anyone that's interested in having a watch of those,
then let me know what you think.
So far I've had some okay feedback.
I don't know if it's gonna become a regular thing or not,
but hey, you know, it's a little bit of fun.
And if people like it, I'm gonna make some more.
We'll see how we go.
I did talk about Tesla just, you know, in depth,
like in a ridiculous amount of depth,
as I sometimes am known to do, on episodes 82/83.
It was actually one massive four hour recording
with Caleb Elston from the Tesla show.
- Oh, wow.
That was back in October of 2017.
I split it into two episodes out of sympathy
for the listeners.
But anyway, so, but a lot of things have changed since then
'cause that was October, 2017.
So Model 3 wasn't even, I don't think even out then.
It was close. - No, it wasn't.
- No, it was, yeah, it was very close, but not quite.
And certainly not for Australia.
So the things that have changed are obviously,
now I own a Tesla Model 3 and I say, "I own, the bank owns."
We all understand how that works.
And Russell, now you, I saw that you have had two Teslas.
You're onto your second Tesla.
So walk me through a little bit about how that happened,
why you did it, and yeah, I'm just genuinely curious.
- Yeah, so it's interesting, I guess,
for those of you that don't know much about me,
I used to have a company, Shifty Jelly.
I ran it with a good mate of mine, Philip Simpson,
and we ran that for a good 10 years.
Like we had a lot of fun.
We made a bunch of decent sort of apps for the app store.
We did pretty well.
And we sold that to an American sort of public radio conglomerate in 2018.
Won't sort of bore you with the details, but I guess as part of that,
like I didn't become a billionaire overnight or anything, but
I did get some money from the sale.
And I kind of thought, what's the one thing, like, we've got a home loan,
we've got a house, we've got the house we've always wanted and stuff like that.
Nothing too extravagant, just like a family home.
And I'm like, there's a little bit of money left over,
what's something that I could potentially do that I've always wanted to do?
And the only, like you say, the only sort of electric car
that was decent back then was the Model S.
You couldn't get the Model 3.
I'm not even sure the Kona and sort of other cars like that.
I think that maybe the Nissan Leaf was the only other thing
that was in Australia back in 2018.
And so you end up taking the plunge.
I'm like, well, I want to try this.
Like, it's an experience, you know,
if I have to sell it in six months time,
'cause I hate it, 'cause charging it's too hard,
you know, I'm okay to live with that.
I think the resale value is pretty good.
So I went ahead and I pulled a trigger,
pulled the trigger on a Model S.
But then it was, I think two years later
when the Model 3 just had a revision.
I think they changed the trim,
they put it in a heat pump,
they changed a few other things.
And that I thought was the perfect time
to sort of scale down to a more reasonably sized car.
Because if you've never driven a Model S,
they are crazy wide.
Like trying to park them in car parks
and drive them around.
It's not, it's a lovely car to drive,
but it's not a super practical car
if you like going to shopping centers
and other sort of places like that.
And so I had a Golf before that, like a Volkswagen Golf, like a tiny little car.
And so, yeah, I can talk about that a bit later on if you want, but I traded in the Model S
for a Model 3. And so that was a, yeah, it was a really funny process.
Like a truck turned up, it took the Model S and it dropped off a Model 3 and then the guy left.
And that was it.
Wow. Because Adelaide doesn't have a Tesla
showroom, does it? I don't think.
No, no, there isn't anything in Adelaide.
So there is a service center.
So there's a Tonsley Innovation District
that used to be Mitsubishi,
basically is now Flinders University.
There is a Tesla service place there,
but yeah, there's no showroom where you can actually go
and sort of see them or pick them up.
- Wow.
Well, that's interesting 'cause I did know
that they had that option if you were,
I think, I'm trying to remember the distance.
It was 250 kilometers or 300 kilometers
from the nearest actual delivery center.
In Brisbane, my experience was somewhat different
because I'm only, well, I say only in air quotes,
50 kilometers, I guess that's pretty close,
but you know, it's still a long way to walk
to get to the delivery center.
So the delivery center in Brisbane was more of a,
kind of like a, I think it's fair to call it
a little bit of a, somewhat of a rusty rundown
kind of warehouse in the middle of Hendra.
And you're sort of like wandering in there
and trying to find this place.
There's one sign out on the roadside
that's hidden behind some trees.
It's like, oh, that says Tesla on it, great.
So I know there's some expensive electric cars somewhere
in one of these dodgy looking warehouses.
And you're walking around trying to find the entrance.
And the only thing that gives it away
that it might be classy is that
they got a few red ropes out the front.
And that's pretty much the only sign.
So it was kind of crazy.
But I mean, having a car delivered to your door,
just that on its own is kind of cool.
I mean, when you think about it.
'Cause I can't think of too many other places to do that.
- No, so we should talk briefly about that.
So the ordering process for a Tesla,
for those of you that haven't tried it,
is you literally go on the website, you fill in a form and I think you pay around $150,
maybe $300 deposit and that's it.
There's nothing else to do.
From that point on, the car is ordered and it goes into eventually production and gets
put on a boat and sent to Australia.
But it's a really weird way of kind of ordering a car because I'm sure I'm like most people
who are used to going to a dealer whether you're buying sort of new or used or you're
going private and you'll do some haggling and you got to talk to people and you got
to find the right price and you got to figure out stock.
It's a different way of buying,
and I don't know that it's universally better.
Like I wouldn't say everything
about the experience is better.
For example, when I ordered the Model S,
they were super friendly.
It was basically white glove service.
You know, a phone call every two weeks
from my designated rep who was telling me
about all this different stuff.
And he was keeping me appraised of the dates
and helping me with the charger install.
They used to give you a charger,
sort of send that to you beforehand, ahead of time.
And then it's funny ordering the Model 3,
like even though it was a trade-in,
it was still like a normal order through Tesla.
And that was a completely different experience.
Like I had to call them and find out, you know, where's the car,
when's it arriving, how's it all going to happen or whatever.
And it felt like, I don't know whether things had changed in those two years or
whether just buying a model three,
you don't get the same level of service or anything,
but it really felt like a disjointed sort of thing until,
until I got a phone call to say, Hey, your car's going to be, you know,
just arrived in Victoria. We're going to ship it to Adelaide next week. Um,
you know, can, can you organize the money and everything else?
So that's, it's there ready to go.
- Yeah, I'm really glad you sort of have,
'cause you're able to give both sides of that
over that two year period.
I don't know if something changed.
I do know that you can't buy a Model S now for,
you know, through Tesla because they've basically
stopped producing them for export at this point
while they ramp up the model plaid,
the next generation and the refresh and so on
that include the plaid.
So, you know, you can't even order one right now,
even if you wanted to via Tesla, I don't think.
So, I don't know if it's a Model 3 thing,
I don't know if it's a scale thing.
I guess I kind of told myself that,
no, no, no, Tesla were always like this.
They were always terrible, but apparently not.
So I mean, back in when you got the Model S,
it was white glove.
It's like, wow.
- Yeah, the Model S was amazing service.
It was from day one, I knew exactly what was happening.
There was so many emails, there was so many phone calls
and I'd only paid, I think back then
it was like a hundred dollar deposit.
It was a really small amount of money
compared to, you know, obviously what the car costs.
And they sent me a charger,
which was worth more than that,
like to my house to get installed and everything else.
And I'm like, okay, that's a good level
service. Yeah, that's really impressive. That is really, really good. I mean,
cause my, my experience reflects,
aligns more with what you experienced with the model three. Yeah. And I,
and I was so, I really didn't want to be that guy, you know,
but I guess like the guy who's just like a really needy, really impatient,
and so on. And I tried really hard not to, to pester them too often.
And I think I called them like three or four times in the space of like six
weeks. I didn't think that was excessive, but in the end I stopped calling them because I just
realized that they didn't know or they wouldn't tell me.
Yeah. So I started keeping notes and I ended up being a very, very long blog
post. It's 24 minutes to read it from start to finish.
If you really want to lose half an hour of your life, you're welcome to do that.
But my biggest frustration was simply the lack of information.
I mean, I got to the point where the only way I could tell was I joined this particular
guys, he has a Patreon called Vida Prime and he tracks all the ships. You're familiar with
this guy? Yeah, I've just learned about him recently. I didn't know about him back in the day.
Yeah, okay. So, I joined up for a couple months and jumped on the Discord and
that was actually the best part of the whole thing actually, was the Discord because there's
all these other people out there in exactly the same position that you're in. And so, there was
a lot of commiseration about, "Yeah, this sucks and my goodness and yada, yada, yada." Well, you can
imagine. But anyway, so in the end, my biggest frustration was it might mind took like the 12,
13 weeks, something or whatever to arrive, which is the longest I've ever had to wait for a car.
But of course, you know, with the global chip shortage, which I talked about a couple episodes
ago on pragmatic, I mean, I understand why that is the way it is. And it's affecting other
manufacturers, different models in different ways. So there's no question that it's a problem across
the board. But having said that in a microcosm, you know, no
information, no updates from Tesla was just very, very
frustrating. So I think the ordering process was good. I
really enjoyed not having to haggle like because I've
actually bought, you know, like three cars in the last year and
dealing with Tesla versus dealing with regular car
dealers. I mean, regular car dealers just irritate the crap
out of me because, you know, there's this the lady that
comes in and she says, right, how much do you care about your paint?
And I'm like, no, I'm near as much as you think I do.
Yeah, we had all that as well when we bought the Volkswagen.
Yeah. It's like windows, paint, seat treatment.
And they call you like once every two weeks.
It's like a regime of like, how much more money can we mine out of your wallet before this car
arrives? And you're like, oh, my goodness, just stop.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
No, I found that to be so, so frustrating and irritating.
And I got to the point where I walk into the office to have the talk with that
represented trying to flog off all the extras. And I basically said,
one of us is going to be walking out of this room very disappointed.
I'm terribly sorry about that. Um, because honestly, I just like,
I want to get in early.
I don't want to make them think they have a chance because they don't,
but it's just frustrating to deal with it.
Yeah. And that's literally the only good experience I've ever had with a car
dealer is I met him and he's like, Oh, Hey, I run this place.
It was like a Subaru dealership. And I said, look,
like I've been to a lot of car dealers and I've done the thing where, you know,
we agree on a price. And then you go to your manager and your manager's like, Oh,
I can't possibly do that price.
And then, you know, you spend like three hours trying to buy a car for like a decent price.
I'm like, I don't want to do that.
Like, this is the car I'm interested in.
You know, I want to know a bit more about it.
I want to know if you can do it for this price.
And if you can't, like, I'm not going to waste your time.
And I hope you're not going to waste mine.
And he ended up just being like really nice.
It's literally the only nice car dealer like I've ever dealt with.
And I think, I don't know, I'm trying to think in my lifetime, probably bought like five, six cars.
I mean, I only had like one good experience.
Yeah. Well, the thing is, I, and I can understand that being the case,
like if he's actually the dealer principal, the owner and so on and so forth,
it's a very different kind of conversation to someone who's got a commission they're trying to meet.
And it's, yeah, and it's, it's, it's rough.
And I do like that part of the Tesla process, but then the delivery part for me was just, yeah,
was where it all got let down. But you know what?
You forget all that once you jump in the driver's seat and drive out.
Oh, you do, don't you?
So it's like, right, good.
Thank God that's over and I love this car.
I just wanted to add one more thing that was pressing,
pressing me at the time is I had promised that I'd take my daughter to her grade
12 formal in a red Tesla. Yeah. And I was,
I was about five or six days too late to do that. So I almost,
almost made it. But in any case, she went in my wife's car,
which is also red. So that counts as far as I'm concerned, but oh well.
No, I was going to say it was interesting.
the actual delivery day experience of the two vehicles.
So the Model S, there was a guy that actually,
he came with the delivery.
So he actually came, I believe on the truck,
all the way to Adelaide, like from Melbourne.
- Wow.
- And he gave me a full one hour tour.
He's like, "Here's how the buttons work on the touchscreen.
"Here's how to register your key fob.
"Here's how to do anything.
"Do you have any questions?"
He literally sat in the car with me for half an hour
just explaining every minute detail of the car
and assuring me that this is where you go for this,
this is where you go for that.
But like I say, I don't know if it was the same for you,
but when the Model 3 arrived,
the guy that dropped it off
wasn't even a Tesla representative.
He was literally just like a car truck driver.
And he's like, "Look, mate, I'm really glad
you're not asking me any questions about the car
'cause I don't work for Tesla
and I don't know anything about this vehicle.
Just sign here, please."
And I'm like, "Wow, what a different experience."
- Wow, yeah, so when I actually went in and picked it up,
I was early because, well, first of all, I was impatient.
I'm a cop to that.
But at the same time, I wasn't that early.
I was like 30, maybe 40 minutes early, but in any case, so there's a lot of people that were there for the 10 AM time slot
would have been, but I was the first one to show up. So I walk in there and there's like this two guys
shuffling cars around, you know, doing the detailing at one end and then shuffling them around, I guess,
you know, to a different stage in the production line of getting them ready for people to pick them up.
And there was one lady there running point with the clipboard saying, or iPad, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Saying, oh, yeah, what's your name? Who are you? What are you doing? Yada, yada, yada.
And so, I was the first one in and she basically said, "Oh, you look like you know what you're doing.
Your car's over there and just let me know when you want any photos and yeah,
I've got a few more things to do." And that was it.
Wow.
And I'm like, in fairness, I did actually know what I was doing and I had actually done all my research.
I had watched all the videos because, you know, like, yeah, this is the first time I've actually bought a car
that I really, really, really wanted in nearly 20 years.
You better bet your ass I did my research hell out of the damn thing.
So I already knew what I was doing before I sat in the car, but it's not necessarily the point.
And it was like after I've been there for like five, six, 10 minutes, I'm on that.
She said, came over, took some photos and she said, all right, all good.
Bye. See you later.
And that was it.
It was quite possibly the worst handover experience of any car I've ever had in my whole life.
And, you know, yeah.
And recent ones included, like we got better treatment from the Mitsubishi dealership, you know, for example.
Yeah.
But anyway, it's it's just interesting.
I find it interesting how it's evolved and and so on.
So maybe it's a scale problem. I don't know.
Yeah, it could be. But I just get the impression that Tesla doesn't invest enough in their
their sort of sales.
And maybe you could say on one hand, oh, they don't have to like they're selling every single
car they make. But I think there is something important about that first sort of experience
with a company that you've let's face it, these cars aren't cheap, right?
So whether the bank's paid for it or you paid for it, it's still amount of money that you're liable for.
And it's not a small amount, like you're talking premium sort of BMW, Mercedes type money.
It's like you expect some level of service.
I'm not trying to be snooty or anything.
It's more just like, you know, I bought this thing from you.
There's a certain level of service I expect to just be like, hey, here's all the things.
Do you have any questions?
You know, this is what you do and blah and have a good day type thing.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
And the conclusion of the article that I wrote,
my massive half hour long blog post
that I wrote about my experience buying it.
The conclusion I reached was that there needs to be
some kind of better balance.
They've simply gone too far the other way.
Unbeknownst to me, they used to be too far the other way
with a white glove service, as opposed to now,
which they are not.
No gloves, no hands, nothing.
I don't know what you'd had to describe it,
but there has to be a better balance
between that and a more traditional kind of
a meet in the middle somewhere.
So I don't know, hopefully they get better at that.
Time will tell, I suppose,
but I might be buying another one for a while
'cause I need my bank account to recover first.
- Yeah, I feel that pain as well.
I mean, I got lucky 'cause I guess,
lucky is a weird way to put it,
but I managed to trade in my S for a three.
So there was no sort of money changing hands on that one.
So it felt really easy.
Like I got the car that I actually wanted in the end.
I know I lost a lot of money,
but I felt like I didn't pay any money to get it.
So it was good.
- Yeah, I understand.
We did a trade in for a Toyota Fortuna
and we got a Suzuki Ignis out of it.
So again, it was like a, it was a pure swap.
I could have made more selling it privately
but it just felt like I was getting a new car
for free from my door.
So it was kind of like, you know,
big bulky four-wheel drive,
which was still narrower than a Model S.
Just want to point that out.
Yes, they are a bloody wide car, but anyhow.
So yeah, I understand that one.
So, okay, I wanna talk more about like,
like touchscreen interfaces and all sorts of different things
experience of driving model three,
but there is one thing that you've been blogging
a little bit about that I really want to talk about.
And it's mainly because you've gone above and beyond
what I've tried to do.
And that's about your solar setup.
For me, I don't have a battery.
I've just got 5.8 kilowatts worth of panels.
I've got a 4.8 kilowatt, you know, grid connect inverter.
It's basically stock standard basic,
nothing to flash. I've since upgraded to three phase power.
You know, so my system hasn't, I could go up much more,
I'd go up to 15 kilowatts if I wanted to. But I haven't,
and I don't have a battery, but you on the other hand, different story.
So just love to walk through what you've,
what you've currently gotten, how it's grown over the years.
And yeah, so it's interesting.
Like I've always had a passion for renewable energy and sort of, you know,
seeing our grids convert to that type of thing.
But then I kind of got myself thinking is, is,
can you do that kind of thing at home?
So when we built this new house, I think back in sort of 2017, 2018 type frame,
I was very purposeful in not connecting gas to it, making sort of every single
appliance electric and trying to pick, you know, really efficient appliances as well.
And at that time, I got a solar system.
There's I think was six kilowatts at the time.
And for those of you that might not be in Australia or at least not in South
Australia, like that's it's not heavily subsidized, but it is subsidized.
So you might get two or three thousand dollars
from the South Australian government for the solar install.
So it felt like a no brainer when you look at the power prices,
it was back then in South Australia versus how much you can generate, um,
on a six kilowatt system. I'm like, well,
that's two or three years that pays for itself like that. That one's easy. Um,
and then later on the South Australian government introduced an initiative where
they would actually subsidize batteries.
And so the subsidy back then was $6,000 for, for a home battery.
And that at the time was half the cost of a power wall. And I'm like, Ooh,
that's, that's, that's almost too good to ignore.
Like I've always wanted a battery. They're a bit expensive,
But that rebate sort of brought it within reach.
So yeah, I did the same thing,
went to the Tesla website, ordered a Powerwall.
That process was pretty funny
because I don't know how they do it now,
but back then basically like a local installer called me
and organized the date and sort of came
and did a whole bunch of tests
and took some photos that he had to send back to Tesla.
And I think they also here in South Australia
had to get grid approval,
but long story short, six kilowatts, one Powerwall.
And for those that don't know,
they're about 13 and a half kilowatt hours
in terms of storage.
So that's how much storage you can put in a Powerwall
until it's full.
And with a six kilowatt system on a sunny day, no worries.
Like you can fill that up by midday.
But what I really quickly found is that I'd misunderstood,
I guess, how we use power in my home.
So during the day back then,
none of us were working from home.
No one's at home, no one's using power all day.
Like my wife's at the office, I'm at the office.
So literally we're collecting all the solar,
we're putting it to the power wall,
and then we're both at work.
Then we come home and 6 p.m. is when we slam the power.
The kids are watching TV, the stuff streaming,
we're cooking on our electrical appliances,
you know, maybe we're running the dishwasher, you know,
maybe the washing machine and the other stuff.
And then I realized that there was quite a few days
where we could stay sort of off grid,
but there were some days where we just didn't make it.
Like the 13 and a half kilowatts that it stored
just wasn't enough for all those nighttime activities.
And the other thing I really misjudged
was we had a solar hot water system.
So I'm like, solar hot water, that seems like a great idea.
You know, you've got these tubes that heat up,
you're using magic gas or whatever,
and you know, you don't need to use power
because yes, it's electric boosted when it gets too cold,
but in theory you never have to use that.
And then that's the one thing
the Powerwall showed me instantly.
So that comes with an app from Tesla,
the same one you use for your car,
but it shows you live instantaneous power use.
Like I'm clicking on it now,
and right now there's 3.1 kilowatts coming down off my roof.
There's 0.3 going to my house, 2.8 going to the grid.
And my wife and I just found
that we were fascinated by that graph.
We're just watching this little animated graph all day,
and we're flicking the kettle on,
we're turning on some other appliance,
and you instantly see it change.
And I think for me at least,
that really changed something about our power use is when you could see the
instantaneous impact that you were having, you know, on,
on the local sort of power generation. Um, it just changed something in my thinking.
And I just, at that point I decided like at some point, you know,
when we have the means, I'm going to get more solar, um,
and I'm going to get a second power.
Well not because it starts to pay itself off in two or three years.
Cause I think the deeper you go into that, um, the less, you know,
it might take you 10 years or more to sort of pay it off,
but it was more about can we actually live off greed?
And I don't mean disconnect ourselves from the physical grid,
like we're still connected to it,
but can we basically use no grid power at all?
So yeah, I ended up getting a second power wall.
I ended up getting another,
I think five or six kilowatts of solar.
And I found that you actually can, like it's amazing.
Like even in winter, like you can pull down enough power,
to sort of power the whole house and everything that we do.
And the other sort of big thing I did,
and this again, complete waste of money,
but I replaced the solar hot water system.
I sold it on Gumtree to someone who really wanted one.
And I bought a heat pump, you know, hot water system
because I heard, you know, amazing things about them.
Everyone was like, they're so efficient.
They use hardly any power.
And it almost seems like magic.
Like I know the science behind it.
I know it's heating a gas from, you know,
one temperature to another using the outside air
but it does feel a little bit like magic.
And I was a tiny bit skeptical
but I had one of those installed,
I think three or four months ago.
And the power use difference between that
and a solar hot water system is absolutely amazing.
So the whole solar hot water system,
you could see it in the Tesla app.
It would use the electric boost to sort of recharge itself twice a day.
And that would instantly slam, you know,
three kilowatts for maybe an hour and then three kilowatts for another hour.
You know, the other six kilowatts just going into the heating water.
That's also being heated by the sun.
So I can't imagine how much a standard electric one uses. It's crazy.
But this heat pump is amazing.
Like it's just hardly any power and it just it keeps itself hot.
And I've just set it to the setting where, you know,
whenever you think you need to charge, don't worry about if it's day or not.
just charge yourself.
And it's, yeah, it's literally using
like hardly any power at all.
And it comes back down to,
it used to be the number one sort of use in a house.
And now it's just, it's down there
with all the other appliances, you know,
it doesn't stand out on its own.
And so we've gone completely off grid in essence.
Like I charge my Tesla,
everything we do in the house
is sort of powered off this system.
It's just, yeah, it's been a real eye opener.
And I know that's an expensive setup.
Like I don't expect most people
will be able to install that in the house,
but there is something really to be said
for getting enough solar on the roof because that's fairly cheap in Australia at least.
And maybe at least one battery. And if you have to use some grid power, I think that
works out because our grid is pretty clean here in SA as well. But I just wanted to go
that extra mile if that makes sense.
Yeah. That's very cool. I mean, there's no question in my mind that that's definitely
the right way to go if you have the means. And I was sort of looking at doing that myself,
But the master of coin, she said, "Well, not really."
And I'm like, "Yeah, okay, fine. Let's pay off the cars first, and then we'll talk again."
So, in a few years, I can see myself doing that maybe.
Because I've got plenty of roof space. I've got a shed that's got roof space.
And I've only got half of my roof covered in solar panels.
So, there's a whole other half there. I know that's not the ideal angle, but there's ways and means around that.
But yeah, we used to have a solar hot water system as well.
And honestly, it was quite an unreliable thing in the end,
which is another story altogether.
I don't wanna go there.
But the heat pump, I'm curious about the heat pump.
So what sort of damage was the heat pump to the wallet?
I'm just curious.
- So again, all things South Australia,
there was a rebate for that one as well.
So I think it worked out to about five grand
sort of fully installed.
But I think the actual cost was about seven.
So I'm pretty sure the SA government
covered sort of about two grand of it,
which is a lot of, to be fair,
that's a lot of money to pay for a whole water system.
So instantaneous gas would have cost about 900 bucks
for the unit.
I don't know what installation is these days.
An electric one would have been like at least half the price
of the heat pump.
But I think that one is really like a no brainer.
That one will pay for itself in the end.
Like even if I didn't have the setup that I did,
I think that's definitely worth installing.
And it's, the other thing I was worried about
is the noise factor.
So, you know, I read on some forums, you know,
this one's 65 DB and this one's 58 DB.
but literally the unit I have is there's a 300 liter tank
where obviously the hot water goes
and there's a little air conditioner looking unit next to it
and that thing just spins a fan.
Like you can stand next to it
and you can't hear anything.
Like I was really worried about that
'cause that goes outside one of my kids' bedrooms,
like right next to his window.
And my wife had a bit of a freak out.
She's like, "Oh no, you've put like an air conditioner thing
"right next to his window.
"Like he's gonna hear that all day."
But it's honestly, it's silent, it's power efficient.
Like the cost is pretty much the only prohibitive
sort of thing about it.
It's been amazing.
- Yeah, 'cause I did look at though, the heat pump as well.
And yeah, that was about that kind of price range.
I think I've got like eight and a half thousand,
whatever I was quoted at the time.
But I mean, it depends on the size of the system
and the installer, I imagine.
And there weren't any rebates.
Queensland Energy rebates,
and yeah, you don't normally get the two of those together
in Queensland, but oh well.
Joys of Queensland, but still.
But no, it's definitely the best technology
that's available.
And for the moment, it's just, it's yeah,
It's the high entry price, but if you can do it, then yeah.
The other thing that's interesting
is the whole connect to the grid
and not connect to the grid thing.
So I've thought about that a lot
because a lot of, with everyone migrating away,
not everyone, but with a lot of people
now migrating to renewable,
whether that's wind or far more likely in Australia, solar,
once you put that in together with a battery
and an inverter and so on and so forth,
and of course the inverter's all built into the power wall,
so you don't have to worry about that, which is nice.
If you do actually connect to the grid,
then that's that daily rate that they charge you
is how they get you. And that daily rate keeps going up and up and up to compensate for the number of people
that aren't drawing the same amount of power off the grid as they used to.
And the thing that worries me is that they're going to keep putting up that daily usage
tariff number.
And it's going to become they're going to reach a point.
I don't know when this is going to happen, but I think it is inevitable that it's going to reach a point where it then becomes
cost effective for you just to buy.
I don't want to say a diesel generator because diesel is nasty.
but if you've got an actual blackout situation and you cannot get enough,
like you have a week of solid rain, you know,
and you just cannot get enough power,
even if you've got a let 15 kilowatts of solar panels on your house, you know,
you still need a backup for the backup for the backup. Right.
So you want to go off the grid.
It's going to become cheaper to own, operate and maintain a diesel generator.
You fire up once every two years, just in case, um,
then it is to connect to the grid.
And that day is going to come at some point.
And some people have already made that choice already.
Yeah, I think our local sort of wholesaler is thinking about that already.
So here in South Australia, we have an organization called SA Power Networks.
I'm not really sure on their structure, whether they're fully government owned
or partly privatized or what, but it doesn't matter.
They're the sort of wholesaler that runs all the grid and the lines.
And they're already starting to think about what happens
because we're already at crazy levels of solar adoption and tariffs are dropping.
So I remember, you know, used to be able to get 18 cents a kilowatt
and then it was 16 now mines down to 12 cents a kilowatt in terms of export.
when you export power out to the grid.
And the power price is dropping as well.
But for someone like me, I'm not actually,
like in a typical year,
I might use like three kilowatts of power.
I'm not using power.
I'm just paying for the supply charge
and I'm hoping to monetize the power
going back out the other way.
So I can definitely see a point where, I don't know,
either the local government has to step in
or they have to figure out how to set up
more advanced sort of local grids
and try and figure out some different finance model.
'Cause you do still need to pay for the grid,
like at the end of the day.
It's a weird situation where you can't, like someone has to pay for it.
Or like that, we kind of have to figure that out as, I guess, as a community and as a
sort of state and as a country.
Yeah. I don't necessarily want to tackle that one, but that is definitely a problem
because, yeah, as you say, it does still needs to be paid for by somebody because
everything's all interconnected.
Someone has to own, operate and maintain it.
So, you know, unless you want to run extension leads in a big crisscross network around
your neighborhood, which you could do, but you shouldn't do.
not with the extension leads from Big W anyway,
but you know what I'm saying.
So anyway, but yeah,
whole nother conversation, but fascinating.
So look, thanks for that.
I was also curious about the,
you have a link in here about Flinders University
and the 6,000 panel solar installation.
What's that about?
- Yeah, so this is the thing.
So when I drive a lot,
like I drive about 15,000 kilometers a year,
which I think is a decent amount
compared to sort of most people.
And so there's a lot of kilowatts
that need to go into the car.
So in summer, I've got no problems.
Like the sun shines all day.
I can charge, I can literally charge from 20% to like 90%
and not even feel it.
Like it's just the solar panels cover that.
But in winter, if you have, let's say like in Adelaide,
we had a really rainy winter
and maybe have four days straight of just, you know,
really thick clouds.
'Cause it's not really the rain that gets you,
it's just the super thick clouds
that actually cut out the sun coming to the panel.
And then I found, okay, now I can charge my car,
but I will need to use grid power.
And I hit this really weird mental block.
I'm like, I don't want to pay $10 on my power bill
to charge my car.
And then literally what happened is Flinders University.
So that's where my wife works.
They installed years and years ago,
they installed a massive, massive solar array.
I think 6,000 panels.
I don't know how many gigawatts of power,
but crazy amounts of power that they generate on site.
And then just recently they've opened up,
they installed a bunch of chargers in all the car parks.
And they said, hey, look, if you're staff or student,
like you get to charge here for free,
we just use our local renewable power.
Like it's just, it's all like an integrated system.
And I mean, one, that's really cool.
But two, because my wife works there,
I'm like, "Hey, you're your stuff.
Can you just drive my car once a week?"
And at first she was like, "What the hell, like why?"
But I think then she kind of realized it's kind of cool.
You get a guaranteed parking spot, you plug your car in,
you leave with basically full battery at the end of the day.
And it's all just renewable powered
there at the university.
And I think there's just something really cool
about that story is that they didn't do that
just because they want it to be renewable.
Like they're actually,
they'll make the money back on that installation in terms of, you know,
power costs saved and power exported,
but it's just that cool little microcosm of like, you know,
there's this little energy grid here and there's,
there's charges here and we can just make the whole thing run.
That is cool. And you forgot one other really important benefit.
She gets to drive a Tesla once a week. So, you know, that's,
that's definitely a plus.
Yes. I think she's desperate for the Model Y. Yeah. So we've been looking, um,
yeah, she's got a slightly older car, but the weird part is, as you know,
the situation with used cars,
like her used cars been going up in value.
So we're like, this keeps going,
like if we sell at the right time,
I'll be able to make this work.
- These trends continue.
But yes, I mean, honestly, I, yeah,
it's kind of funny how that works.
If I had a choice with the model, a three or a model Y,
I would have spent the extra money and got a model Y.
- Yeah.
- But I would have liked a higher driving position
in a slightly more room, the boot and so on and so forth
would have been much better.
It wasn't even that much more money,
but they still haven't got them in Australia yet.
They haven't released them here.
So what can you do?
You just got to keep waiting.
And I'm like, I want my car now, please.
Like nicely.
- Yeah, exactly.
- But anyway, what can you do?
All right, let's, so a bit of a tangent,
but still very interesting.
So I want to circle back now to talk a little bit
about some of the foibles of having a Tesla,
not specifically, not necessarily an EV in general,
but just like specifically the Tesla,
'cause Tesla have made interesting choices.
Some of them, most of them good,
but not all of them necessarily.
So I think the single biggest thing that strikes you
when you sit in a Tesla and you go for a drive
is the fact that there's practically no controls
and it's essentially a massive touchscreen.
And I know this has sort of been discussed and everything,
and I wanted to give it a bit of time, you know,
for me to use it.
And I've had four months of driving this thing and using it.
And I've just written a long article,
I haven't published it yet,
going out live with the episode about some of my thoughts on it.
But I mean, the truth is that you've been driving one now for
several years. So just some of the things that I find, I'm sure
you can add to is, I do find it to be a much cleaner interface
as a massive pro. And I say that because one time I had to move,
and I just mean like, you know, in a car park situation, like,
Oh, can you move this car, whatever, whatever, here are the
keys, like, yeah, sure, why not jump into Mercedes, SLK,
whatever the hell it was. And it had something like 60 buttons.
I didn't sit there and count them, but I got a photo later of an equivalent
model and someone else had done the duty of counting the buttons, like 60 buttons.
And that was just the centre console. And on another occasion,
someone, say my owner of the car said, oh, can you help me pair my Bluetooth phone?
It took me an hour to figure out how to do that.
Yeah. I mean, it's like there was so- there was a sea of buttons.
it was a user interface nightmare.
And I'm sure that once you learn where everything is,
maybe it makes sense, but I mean, it's insane.
The amount of switch gear.
Whereas when you get into a Model 3, you got a screen,
obviously you got the steering wheel, pedals and the brake,
and then you got two indicator stalks,
an indicator stalk and a drive stalk.
That's it.
Oh yeah, and the little wheel, wheelie click buttons
for your thumbs on the wheel and the steering wheel.
And it is so much cleaner and simpler.
And to be honest, I think it's easier to find things
because of the way they've implemented on the touchscreen.
So I think that's definitely a positive.
Yeah. I'd agree with that as well, especially because a lot of their interface,
they've taken hints from the way, you know, iOS and Android work,
which pretty much everyone is carrying around these days.
So your Bluetooth example, you see a little Bluetooth icon, do you tap on it?
That's how you pair a phone. Like it's very similar to how it works. Um, you know,
same icon as your phone, like everything sort of makes sense. I think,
I know I've had some people have a hesitation about that. Like, Oh,
it's a touch screen and doesn't that make things harder?
But I think some things it makes easier because everything is laid out nicely.
You know exactly what the icons mean.
You tap it, that's how you do stuff.
So in general, I think, yeah, the cleaner interface
and having most things on a touchscreen is, I think,
is, yeah, a big win.
- Yeah, I agree.
I think that the interesting thing that I found
with the touchscreen,
and this is where I'd love your thoughts as well
between the Model S and the Model 3,
is that there is, in the Model 3 and Model Y,
there is no binnacle.
There's no instrument gauge cluster,
you know, whatever, behind the steering wheel.
And I hear a lot of complaining from people
that generally haven't driven a Model 3 very much,
where, "Oh, I can't just glance down
and have a look at the speed, how fast I'm going,
'cause there's no binnacle."
Equally, you could argue there's no heads up display either,
which is another thing entirely, but you know,
they're right, you have to drop your head slightly
or your gaze slightly and across to the left,
obviously, or the right,
depending on if you're a left-hand drive,
right-hand drive country, but you know what I mean?
You gotta drop and go to the side
to see the speed.
And I do that semi-regularly simply because I'm,
generally speaking, I'd like to think of myself
as a law-abiding citizen and I don't like speeding fines.
So there's a carrot and a stick part there, but anyway.
The point is that I thought initially
that might be problematic, but it turns out
I don't really think it is that bad.
And one of the things with the Binnacle that always annoyed
me, and this is only some cars and I can't speak
for Model 3, Model S or a Model X,
but I would sometimes get to a position
where I couldn't move the seat forward or backwards,
up or down, or the steering column,
in or out or up or down on the car in question
to get an unobstructed view of the binnacle.
Because sometimes from some angles,
'cause I'm not stupidly tall,
you know, like I'm just under six foot,
but I mean, you know, I could still,
sometimes I would get in some cars
that you couldn't see the top of the speedo.
And, you know, I'd find myself doing a little duck down
with my head and my eyes just to see what the speed was.
And it was usually a problem between like 80 to 120,
or freeway sort of speeds.
And you don't have that problem with a Model 3
because you've always got a direct line of sight
'cause there's nothing between your eyes and that screen.
So funnily enough, I actually think that
that is in some ways better.
But I'm curious about what your Model S experiences
were like with the binnacle.
- Yeah, it's interesting
'cause I really thought I'd missed that.
So the Model S for those that aren't familiar
has the binnacle as John calls it,
like right in the center console, where most cars have it.
It's another digital screen that shows speed.
Also when you're navigating, it'll show you navigation.
But I found in the Model S that was really useful for speed.
Like you, I'm a loyal, brighting citizen.
I wanna know how fast I'm going.
But the navigation was almost confusing
'cause you've also got navigation.
Back then the Model S was a giant vertical portrait screen
sort of in the center console.
And it was far easier to follow on there.
So I kind of found myself glancing left anyway
to do navigation and then right to do speed,
which is a little bit of a weird disconnect.
So the second I jumped into Model 3,
I'm like, "Oh, this is weird."
like the speed is now in the center.
Like that does feel weird, I think for the first few days.
And I know this sounds like such a fanboy thing to say
and I promise I'm not a Tesla fanboy.
There's lots of things wrong with it.
But I do think that's something you just get used to
and then it becomes a complete non-issue.
And it's not even less convenient.
It's just like, it's a different place to look
and you end up looking there and you just,
you get used to it and then that's how it is.
- Yeah, exactly right.
And I find that for me, it took all of about
maybe a couple of hours of driving it
before I didn't even have to think. It just became
instinctive where to find the speed on the
screen. And it was a non-issue, really.
I do accept the fact that it is ever so slightly longer,
but the ever so slightly part is measured in milliseconds, not
more than that. And I don't think that that takes any
substantially or statistically significantly more time
making it any more dangerous by not having it on a binnacle or a heads-up display in my opinion.
Having said that, I wouldn't say no to a heads-up display because I had a Prius at one point that
had a heads-up display. It wasn't the most advanced for the time but it was certainly very,
very nice. But for some reason, I don't know why they haven't got a heads-up display in there.
That'd be nice but interesting. Anyway. Yeah, I mean that'd be good just to have the speed,
you know, right there as you're driving. I will say one other difference between the S
and the three that I think is actually a negative
is the S or at least the model that I bought at the time.
It had a windscreen wiper stalk.
And I know that sounds like the stupidest thing
in the world, but I really don't like,
that's the one touchscreen thing I don't like
on the Tesla is that if you wanna operate,
if you wanna change the windscreen wiper,
so you wanna change the duration
or you wanna set it to auto, you wanna turn them off,
you either have to tap the touchscreen
or you tap a little thing on the stalk
that will wipe your windscreen
and then bring up the touchscreen controls.
And I just think that's less convenient
than a stalk that you can just reach for with your fingers
and you can move in and out.
So you're like, oh, it's going a bit fast.
I'm going to slow it down.
Oh, I don't need it.
I'm going to turn it off.
Like I do find that a bit of a weird step backwards.
And I know they're going for the minimal look
and you know, one less stalk, isn't that amazing?
But I don't know that that stalk ever bothered me.
I wasn't hitting it with my hands.
Like it didn't obstruct anything.
It was just, you know, they removed one thing
that I kind of feel like it needed.
- Well, I actually, I wholeheartedly agree with you
on that one because that was one of my two big
sticking point, I've got a few of them,
but on the user interface side.
So I kind of thought about,
well, how do you categorize these things?
You've got glanceable information.
So things like your speedo,
which we've just sort of talked about.
And I think for the most part,
at Tesla get it pretty well right
in terms of what's glanceable and key.
But it's really the things like glanceless control.
So you don't have to look.
So you know exactly where they are instinctively.
They're always in the same place.
And the only way you can do that,
if you've got a touchscreen,
is to not have it on a touchscreen.
It needs to be something you can feel and touch.
So you know where the stalk is,
you know where the buttons are on the steering wheel.
It needs to be a physical button of some kind
so you don't have to take your eyes off the road.
And I guess you could go into things like light touch
and heavy touch.
So things that are like, you know,
really quickly tap, tap to a favorite on the screen
and heavy touch might be,
I'm gonna mess with my stereo settings
while I'm driving at 110, 'cause why not?
It's probably not a good idea, but nevermind.
So, you know, but yeah,
so that falls under the whole glanceless control.
And if you think about the glanceless controls,
the two ones that really irritate me,
you touched on the first one, which is the wipers.
And so to talk a little bit about that,
what I would like to see is I'd like to see,
'cause you can do a shallow press,
single shallow press and release.
You could actually use that to cycle through the modes
if you wanted to.
So you could go, you know,
a single press would take you from off to intermittent slow,
another one, intermittent fast, continuous slow,
continuous fast, and then back off again.
And all just by pressing a bit on the end.
If you still wanted to do a full depth press,
You could do a full depth press and release to do a wipe,
a single wipe, and then a full depth press
and hold it for two seconds to do a clean.
And you wouldn't have to add a button.
And that'd solve, in my opinion,
that would solve the problem.
Might take people a bit to get their head around,
but you know, it would work.
- Yeah, I think so.
- But then, you know, other car manufacturers
have solved the problem by having extra switches and knobs.
You know, it's not...
(laughs)
They cut that one just a little too far,
in my opinion, on the wipers for sure.
- Yeah, and I think there's the other thing going
from the Model S to the Model 3 that really surprised me
is the Model S comes with a key fob.
So it works pretty much like most other car key fobs.
If you're within range of the car, the car's unlocked.
You know, you just, the door handles come out,
you pull open the door handles.
That's the Model S.
And I was really worried with the Model 3
because they're like, no, you don't get a key fob here.
It's just on your phone.
And I've done a lot of Bluetooth stuff,
both as a developer and just as a user.
And I'm like, oh, this is not gonna end well,
having some kind of Bluetooth thing on my phone
that unlocks my car.
But I think in the, touch wood,
but in the year that I've had the Model 3,
there's only been once where I've had to whip out the app
and then it seemed to register that it was there.
All the other times I walk up to the car,
I push the stupid little door handle in
and the car's unlocked.
Like I don't know whether they've done that
as a Bluetooth beacon or something,
but for me at least it seems ultra reliable
and that's one thing I was really worried about.
- I do share your concern with that
and my experience hasn't been quite so good.
I've actually had many times where it's failed
and I've learned that it seems to be,
well, okay, I've learned.
I've through many attempts and failed attempts and trial and error
I've done everything from I leave the phone in my pocket. I don't touch my phone.
So it's in my hip pocket. I keep walking along. I tried the door. Door doesn't work.
Okay. The next time I walk up to the car, I'll pull the phone out and I'll wake the screen
up and then I'll try. Generally it works, but not always.
And then other times I'll walk up to the car and I'll be like, right, I'm going to unlock my
phone, bit of face ID, whatever, whatever it unlocks.
Then I go to open the car and it works almost every time, maybe one time it won't.
And then if I unlock the phone and fire up the app, I don't have to do anything in the app.
And then I go and reach the car door.
It works every single time.
So there's probably some kind of a sleep or low power mode or
something like that, that Bluetooth is going into, such that if you don't wake
you up, I mean, okay, so I've got an iPhone 12, whatever it is, you know, and
maybe it's the case I've got on it.
I don't know, I mean, it's an Apple bloody make safe case thing.
But honestly, I don't know.
I haven't dug into the details.
All I know is that it has not been as reliable as I would have thought.
And I've actually was thinking about investing in a key fob so that I wouldn't have to deal with that crap,
to be honest. Yeah, because you can't buy them from Tesla.
I think they're not cheap. Like most key fobs is like 300 bucks or something.
But yes, I do have them. Yeah.
Yeah. Weird. I haven't. And I've got a nice phone 13.
I think I had a 12 before that.
I haven't had many issues and I don't, like you say,
it's one of those technology things.
Like it's like, it works for me, it doesn't work for you.
Like it--
- Somewhere in the stack.
- Yeah, I kind of assume,
I kind of put my developer brain on it.
I'm like, how would they have done it?
I assume it's like a Bluetooth beacon style thing
where the car's actually scanning for the Bluetooth
and it can tell the distance to the phone,
which I would have thought would be an always on,
but I don't know enough about those frameworks.
Like it could be, yeah, that it doesn't work reliably
if you've got certain settings or something like who knows.
- Yeah, I don't know.
It's probably a multitude of different things.
And there's also the other option.
And that is that, you know, I'm trying to find a pattern where there is no pattern.
It could just be that I've walked up to that car.
And for some reason the car was like sleeping or glitched out or something when I went to reach for the handle.
And I did it enough times for me to connect those two together.
I mean, I don't know.
But in any case, it mostly works.
I've always been able to get into my car.
So that's important. And drive off, which is also important.
So that's that's something.
Yeah. But just getting back to the user interface, though, just for one second,
is the other thing that I think is personally is quite annoying is the headlights.
Yeah. OK. Yeah. And the reason I say that is because I have this habit where I
can't take the kids to swimming training and it's early in the morning and
particularly when it's when it's dark outside, I'll pull into my driveway.
It's a decent link driveway.
I'll turn the lights off out of consideration to my wife, who's still asleep inside.
And, you know, I want to turn off those headlights.
And it's like, it's not even that dark, you know, twilight,
even a few hours before, well, maybe a few hours, maybe about 30 minutes before
twilight, you don't legally have to have your headlights on, but the Tesla is going to
make sure you have those headlights on.
And so there's no way I can actually turn the headlights off without going into
one of the menus on the touch screen.
So it's like that's really frustrating.
And I feel like you like, well, you push forward at the moment,
it toggles between high and high and low beam.
Well, I mean, you could always use the pull forward and hold for that.
And you could always push back to toggle the lights on or off if you wanted to.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of other options that you could do.
I had a couple of suggestions, but in the end, I feel like that's another,
it's a little thing, but it's an annoying thing.
And when you do set them to off, it resets when you get back in the car.
So you get back, you stop, you get out.
So let's say you turn the lights off, you get out, go and do whatever you want to do,
go back to the car, jump on in, drive off again.
Your lights are back to automatically turning on when Tesla light sensor says they turn on,
which is annoying.
Yeah, it's which is a common theme with the Tesla, I think it's like if if the all the
automatic stuff that it does for you, if it's convenient, it's great.
But when you need to do something different, you definitely feel like you're fighting against
the car. I think I've had that with quite a few things where if you stick to their defaults,
you know, great. You're having a great time.
you jump in the car, you drive off, you don't do anything.
But the second you need to do something like you're saying,
I want to turn off the lights before I come down my driveway. Um, you know,
now you're doing things the hard way.
Like that really doesn't cater for that sort of thing.
Yeah. It's it, that is very true. And I feel like, um,
there's some of the things that are like the automatic,
but they're not so auto like all the auto. Yeah. Okay. Yes, they're automatic,
but I mean, they don't work that well. So, and to me,
if you've got something that's automatic,
if it doesn't work like 90, 95% of the time,
then where's my manual override, please?
So like auto high beam,
I didn't really talk too much about it,
but I mean, honestly, the auto high beam,
if the car's coming around a slight bend,
doesn't even have to be much of a bend,
just a little bit of a bend,
if it's not coming straight on,
you're gonna be blaring high beams into them
well and truly before they even get to you,
and it won't dip them until they're almost
right on front of you.
And I've been flashed multiple times
because auto high beam did not dip when it should have,
and so I just turned that off.
- Yeah, I did exactly the same thing.
I tried it once, I'm like, oh, this is a cool feature.
Had exactly the same issue you had it.
I'm like, well, I'm a decent human being.
I don't want to hype people.
I just turn that off.
And you can still pull back on the stalk to do it manually.
But it's funny.
It's a feature that you think they would have tested
something like, I mean, it's pretty obvious, right?
This is how a human being operates this control.
And the car is just not smart enough
for whatever reason to do the same thing.
So you end up turning that off.
You're like, yep, that's not good.
- Yeah, exactly.
So that's that one.
How do you find the auto wipers?
(laughing)
You know what, again, this is like a typical Elon thing
for those that don't know the history behind this.
Apparently there's some super cheap component
you can fit to a car that, you know, some company sells.
It's like, I don't know, $2 or something
and it detects rain and it's really good.
The Volkswagen had it, amazing.
Like that's the first car I've ever had
that had automatic wipers.
This is the greatest thing known to man.
Like it's wiping it at the exact frequency I would have.
And Tesla has been tweaking this for years now.
You know, they do some stupid neural net thing
to the incoming camera.
And it's not good.
Like it's been slowly getting better.
I will say that about it.
Like it's not as frustrating as it was, you know
a year and a half ago, it definitely is getting better
but it's still not as good as that cheap component
like I had in the Volkswagen.
Like sometimes there'll just be a bit of dirt on the screen
and it'll start wiping.
It's like wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe.
And I'm like, I don't know what you think you see
but it's not raining.
It's dead dry.
Like, I don't know what you're doing.
So then again, you have to dig through the menu
and like turn it off.
Like, has it been the same for you or?
- Yeah, well, it's been, it's failed for me
in a different kind of way. I liken it to a game of-
game of chicken, but with drops of water. So like drop chicken or drip chicken or something
like- So how many drops need to accumulate on that windscreen before it starts its first
automatic wipe? And I'm playing chicken because I'm like, well, I can still mostly see out
the front windscreen. I can still mostly see. And I'm like- And my finger is like just-
I'm waiting any- I'm inching close to that little single wipe button. I'm like, I'm going
I'm going to do it.
Are you going to do it?
Am I going to do it?
Seriously, it is, it'd almost be funny
if it wasn't dangerous.
And I mean, I regularly will just lose the game of chicken
because I want to see where I'm going.
Thank you very much.
So, you know, anyway, I don't know.
I know they've been messing with it for years,
more work needed.
- All right, believe me, it's getting better.
But the fact that it's still not to the level of that,
you know, cheap off the shelf component
that you could have just bought and like stuck in your car
is a bit of a funny thing.
Like, especially if you work in tech, you're like, yep,
I can see what the engineers were thinking.
They're like, we have a camera.
we can just machine learning the image of the camera.
It'll be better than any sensor and it's built in.
It's one less component, but it just hasn't worked out
like that.
And I feel like there's a lot of things about Teslas
that are just like that.
It's like they went the hard way
and they just cause themselves a lot of anguish.
- Yeah, they tried to be clever, too clever.
But I mean, another one that I found interesting was the,
maybe this is more of a feature request,
but like auto steer, when you've got autopilot on
And auto steer is engaged and it sees a speed sign coming up.
And let's say you're dropping from, let's say going up from 80 to 100.
So if you were previously at 100 previously as your set speed, it'll automatically jump up to 100 after you hit the
sign and you'll gracefully accelerate up to 100.
Like two thumbs up. That's beautiful.
But when it's the other way around, that's not what happens because you hit that 80 sign.
Yes. And it's like, oh, I should be going 80 at this point.
I will start slowing down.
And after you've got your cruise control lag, you could be going a hundred metres, maybe more
before you actually reached 80.
And I know many, many, many police who would love to sit in that zone and give you a
speeding ticket. Yeah, especially if you're in the country.
They love that sort of thing. They're just like, it says 80 and you pass the sign, like, tough luck.
And that's fair enough. Like, that's what the law is.
That's right. And it's like the fix for that is really super simple.
It's really basic physics.
You know, we figured this out a long time ago.
You know, you have depth perception in a Tesla.
And so you know how far away you've got GPS as well, even if you didn't.
But you could figure out your distance to the sign.
So you know how long it's going to take to decelerate.
You know, it's 80 up in front of you.
So start decelerating 100 meters before that or whatever the distance is
so that I get to 80 when I hit the 80 sign.
It's not shouldn't be that hard.
I would have thought. But anyway, so it's just annoying.
Yeah, I find that that annoying as well.
That's a real problem. I know I'm hearing myself as I'm saying it.
But anyway, still.
Yeah. I can hear some people listening to us and they're like, you too.
Like it's incredible. You got one of the most advanced cars in the world and here you are.
You know, you can read street signs, but it can't slow down properly.
Like, oh, it sucks to be you.
Yeah. Well, you know, nothing is so perfect that it can't be complained about.
So I heard once in a podcast.
Another one. Oh no, right.
Another one. Emergency lane departure avoidance.
This one. Has this ever got you?
Because I was driving my own business, you know, three lane each way,
divided freeway, and I was just changing lanes.
Like just changing lanes and it's like,
"No, steering you back into the lane you're coming from."
I'm like, "No, I wanna go into that lane."
"No, you go back where you were."
What are you doing to me?
I'm fighting with the car to change lanes.
God knows what the other drivers thought behind me
seeing this carry on, this Tesla doing this weird dance
between lanes.
Has that ever happened to you?
- I haven't had that one.
I have had a beep at me.
I haven't had it try to yank me back in.
I don't know if that's a setting that I changed maybe,
'cause you can tweak some of that stuff in the settings.
Maybe I have changed it.
But the one that gets me all the time
is there's a forward collision warning.
- Yes. - And the way that works
is the car in front of you on the touchscreen goes red
and the car starts beeping at you.
And I've set mine to medium,
'cause I'm like, well, I do wanna know
if we're gonna hit someone,
but I don't need to know, like.
But the problem I have is every time
there's a car either parked on the side of the road
or turning, let's say, left, like off the street
that I'm in.
So it's kind of slowing down,
but you can see there's nothing in front of it.
It's just gonna turn into the street
and it's gonna keep going.
The Tesla would just consistently beep at me.
It's like, "You're gonna hit this thing.
You're going to hit it?
Oh, no, wait, nevermind.
You're not going to hit it, he's turned.
I'm like, well, obviously he's turned.
He's got momentum.
Like you can see how fast he's going.
Like it's weird that it can't, you know,
calculate simple things like that.
I don't think I've ever had the emergency brakes go off
or anything like that, but it just beeps at you
and it's kind of annoying.
- Phantom braking, I think a lot of people call
some of that stuff and some of it's not so phantom.
That's, that would fall in the category
of not phantom, I guess.
But I've had similar experiences on roads
that have got the, that are very undulating.
So it's like up and down and up and down.
and yeah, without too cheap to get a bulldozer
and let make it level, you know, like those sorts of roads.
And some people call that a feature, but anyway,
the thing is that as you're going down towards the bottom,
it'll sometimes do a phantom break
because it can't see above the dip out the other side.
And it's not all the dips.
Yeah, it's not all of them.
It's only some of them.
And I think it's also different times of the day,
like in lower light conditions.
So there's probably a whole bunch of factors
that lead up to that,
But it's just, yeah, little things like that
just shake your confidence and you realize
that full self-driving is a long way off, but nevermind.
It's, yeah.
One more thing on the automatic stuff
and then we'll get back to the user interface
a little bit more, but that just annoys me
is the mirror auto-dimming.
And I realized that this was not previously something
that it was either you had it and it was on
or you didn't have it installed in your car
or something like that.
And they made it configurable only a couple months ago,
like you can now turn it off if you don't want it.
The auto dim feature on,
so the rear view mirror and the side mirrors.
- Oh, I haven't seen this.
- Have you?
No, haven't you?
Okay.
So, what it is is they've got a,
like a lot of car manufacturers these days,
they've gone away from the traditional,
you know, two position prism.
So the prism and the mirror,
kind of the toggle lever in the, yeah.
So they now apply electrochromatic coat,
which, you know, it basically,
kind of like an LCD in a sense,
when you apply a voltage to it,
It basically goes, turns darker
and that provides some reduction of the light intensity.
So that's all very cool.
But the user interface, like there's no manual switch.
So if I say, yes, auto dim my mirrors,
when the light sensor says it's time to auto dim,
it'll tell you when it dims.
In fact, now it won't tell you,
you'll just look up and notice that the dimming's on.
There's no way to actually say,
I'd like my auto dimming on please right now.
And it's like, yeah, but it's not dark enough.
So you don't wanna do that.
Yeah. No, no, I'm driving.
I'll tell you I want to dim my mirrors, please.
Like I had a switch before I could just flick it in my traditional old car.
So don't. And because why that's annoying is it's because, well, if it's twilight again, if it's twilight and you've got a big four wheel
drive behind you, it would be just so lovely to be able to just go right.
Dim my mirrors, please. But you can't do that.
It's a little thing, but it's just annoying.
So anyway, yeah.
Auto stuff that's not auto enough.
Okay. I feel like we've complained enough there, but I mean,
one of the things that's about the user interface as a whole,
all of these things that we've talked about are absolutely solvable just with a
software update.
And that's one of the things where Tesla's got them beat because I had a Toyota
Fortuna previously and it had a traditional, um,
like a center console. I mean, it was touchscreen, but it was resistive touch.
It was rubbish, but it had the maps and you wanted to get an upgrade to those
maps for your sat nav. That was going to cost you two and a half thousand dollars.
if you wanted it.
And it was a little car you had to bring into the dealer
and do a download to it.
Whereas the Tesla, hook it up to your wifi
and you get updates whenever they're available from Tesla.
And it's the only car I can think of
where you can wake up in the morning
and the control's on the other side of the screen.
And it's like,
"Could've swore that that was on the other side last night."
But you know.
- Yeah, this one's interesting.
'Cause I think I've been,
I think the original version I started on was version nine.
So this was in the Model S
back when it was all 3D looking and stuff.
And one of the first times I noticed this
is my car, so the way it works is that the car will say,
"Hey, look, there's a software update.
"Do you wanna install that?"
And you can say, "Yeah, do it now."
And it takes about, back then it used to take 45 minutes.
It's like, or you can set it to go at 2 a.m.
or you can just completely ignore it if you want to.
But one of the first ones I got actually,
I think, shaved like 0.5 of a second
off the zero to 100 time.
So it actually tuned something inside
of like one of the electric motors.
And I'm just like, that's kind of crazy.
And then the next one I got was,
the car never used to have a dash cam feature.
So it's got all these cameras on it,
but it didn't have any sort of feature
where it would record the output of those cameras
onto a USB stick like they all do now.
And then literally one day an update come out
and it's like, hey, if you stick a USB stick
in the center console,
you'll get this brand new dash cam feature
and it'll record the last 10 minutes of driving
and you can press a button to save it.
And I'm like, that's cool.
Like this is the first car I've ever owned
that like things are actually improving.
And the interface was improving.
Like everything was kind of getting better.
And I always had at the back of my mind,
and I think this is where you're going with this,
is like, what if one day they roll out something
and you don't like it?
And I'd never had that before.
Like version nine to version 10 was amazing.
Like literally I think everything about it was better
and I had no complaints at all.
And I didn't see many in the community either.
And then we've recently just had a,
I believe it's a version 11 update
where they've kind of gone minimalist,
I think in the user interface
and moved a lot of things around.
And yeah, maybe it's cleaner and things are more organized,
but I find that all the, just like you say,
all the buttons that you'd learned where they were
and exactly how they worked and where to look.
They'd all just moved and you're like, what on earth is going on?
And some of them weren't there anymore. And some of them were in menus.
And I think that's the first time I kind of sat back and gone like, Ooh, like,
is this an upgrade? Like, I don't know.
Yeah, exactly. It's like, you, you don't know what you're getting until you get it.
Which is, you know, and there's no way back once you upgrade, there's no downgrade.
As far as I'm aware. Yeah, there is. So it's kind of,
I believe there's a way to do it.
It's kind of like an Apple watch. You can't go back.
You better be sure you want to upgrade that anyway.
But yeah, so I found I was only using V10 for two months
before I got the V11.
So it really wasn't that painful for me in terms of relearning.
I mean, it would have been much harder like for people have been
using it for several years like yourself.
I imagine it would be more irritating maybe.
But the thing that stands out to me is the thing that's annoying
is the black strip across the bottom.
It's just little things like tapping the air conditioner
temperature buttons.
It's nearly impossible. You can't see them.
There are these tiny little angle bracket Chevron looking things.
That's just terrible.
Sentry, I guess, also used to be available and now it isn't.
I know you can like I know you can put it back like you can permanently put a spot
on the bottom dock now because it.
OK, so in V11, they gave us the ability to customize some of the spots
on the bottom bar as a shortcut.
And I think, yeah, that was your point.
You can actually do that.
Yeah, you can put it back. I think it's a more recent software,
but then they only give you four spots and it's a pretty wide touch screen.
It's like all the four spots there's room for them.
Yeah. What do they save in that space for a rainy day? I mean, I don't,
I mean there's rumors that they're making their own app store and maybe,
but even so like give me eight spots, give me like whatever there's,
there's room and there's, you don't need the padding between the other things.
Like, and so I had to pick like which four icons do you want to put there?
And if you really like the, the, um, the dash cam,
and then you gotta get rid of something else.
Like that's just, yeah, it's weird.
- Yeah, and that was exactly my frustration
'cause it used to be on the long top, always there.
- Yeah.
- There's a few other things that you mentioned as well
about that's missing from V11 that you got used to.
- Yeah, I got used to like, for example, the seat heaters.
So in winter, I know Adelaide's not crazy cold,
but it was nice.
Like you didn't wanna turn on the heater
that blew hot air into the cabin.
You just wanted it to be a little bit warm.
You just one tap, you could tap the,
there was two little seat icons
and you can get the ones for both side.
And now they're sort of in between the,
they're underneath the air conditioning menus.
You have to tap on the temperature and then you get that as options.
But the annoying thing is,
is if you've got your air conditioner off or your heater off and you tap that
button to get to the seat heaters, it turns it on. Yeah. Cause it's like, Oh,
Oh, you're going to the, I can help you with that. Like,
let me turn all this on for you. Like, no, I just want to, I just want to touch.
So you got to tap that.
Then you got to tap on the seat heater and then you got to turn the heater off.
It's like, ah, just things that used to be easier that are, that are now harder.
- It's an interesting point that I hadn't actually thought
about that because I haven't actually used
the seat heaters yet, except for my son playing
a practical joke. - Well, you live in Queensland.
- Yes, I know, I live in Queensland.
So yeah, there's that.
So maybe I'll go to drive up to Stanthorpe or Applethorpe,
maybe I might need it barely, but apart from that.
But yeah, and I haven't had mine through winter,
so I don't really know what that's gonna be like.
But in any case, yeah, so it's been a little bit,
yeah, a bit like that.
And I find also the whole inability to go back
and the lack of choice.
I think people should have the option
and I know they're probably not gonna do this,
but it's like, if I wanna live without dated maps,
I wanna live without dated maps.
I'm not gonna go in and pay $2,500 to Toyota
to get updated maps in my six year old four wheel drive.
But with Tesla, it's like,
I'm trying to think if you can opt out of all software updates.
I mean, I guess technically you could cancel it, but eventually just trying to think,
I don't think it's possible to fully opt out. Is it?
I don't think you can opt out. You can just not install them. So I do,
I know some people on a Tesla forum that haven't installed updates for years.
They're just like, don't want to, I like my car. And I'm like, well, fair enough.
But I think eventually Tesla get onto you because sometimes they're rolling out
firmware updates to things like the battery management system or like other
systems. And there's no way to get one without the other.
Like you can't get the firmware for all the bits and keep the old operating system.
So yeah, I think eventually they kind of encourage you to basically say, look,
we're going to cancel your warranty unless, unless you install the latest update.
Yeah, exactly. I mean,
I guess we could sort of carry on a bit about some of the things that aren't
quite right with V11, but I feel like it's, um,
I'm hopeful that they're going to fix a few things and, and make it a bit better,
but yeah,
Tesla need to find a better way of,
of describing and letting people know what they're in for when they do upgrade.
Because there's just nothing saying, this is what you're going to get.
It's just like, yep, there's an update.
Okay, good.
And if it's got things you want, that's great.
And sometimes they will listen.
So both in good and bad ways.
So like, for example, the little driver profile, because me and my wife both drive the one car.
And so when she drives it, she switches to hers.
And when I drive it, it switches to mine.
That used to be on the main status bar.
And they moved that down into a menu, which is very minor.
You got to tap twice.
But still, it's like, it's annoying.
And they've actually moved that back in the latest update.
So it's back up in the top when you're in park,
which I actually think is a smart decision.
If your car's parked, you get access to it.
If you're driving,
you're obviously not going to be changing profiles.
So no need for it to be there.
Like I think that's the right kind of compromise.
It's just weird that they didn't get there the first time.
Like they had to have community feedback
to actually fix that.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's kind of a shame, but at least I got the message.
But so we talked about it briefly before
and I just want to circle back to full self-driving.
No, it isn't.
I've never, I test drove a Model 3 that had full self driving,
but I didn't actually, um, I didn't actually,
it wasn't navigate on autopilot and I didn't have a chance to actually test any
of the features that it, well, okay, that's not fair. I had a chance,
but my rationale was this. If I try it and I like it,
then I want it and I don't have 10 grand.
So I'm not going to try it on principle. So I didn't do anything. Now on,
On the other hand, you did have full self-driving
in your Model S.
So tell me a little bit about that.
What was it like?
Was it worth it, I guess is the key thing.
- Well, that's the other interesting thing about Tesla
is full self-driving used to be $2,000.
So that's still a lot of money,
but it's a lot less money than $10,000.
So I actually, 'cause it was new, it was shiny,
I wanted to play with it.
I'm like, you know what, for Christmas,
like I'm gonna get myself, you know, full self-driving.
So I bought that for the Model S
and it comes down as a software update.
And then I think they rolled out navigate on autopilot.
So I tried that on the freeway where you basically,
you get on a freeway, you push down twice on the stalk.
And literally the only thing that changes
is if there's a slow car in front of you
and it knows there's other lanes available,
it'll indicate and then switch in and out
of those lanes for you,
which is, that's actually a nice feature.
Like you don't have to do it,
but it's not the end of the world.
And the other one is you can manually indicate
if you want it to change lanes
while it's on full self-driving and it'll do that.
And then the other two features that came with auto park.
So I had that on the golf,
like the system where you could say,
I want to park in a car park
and it would detect reverse parallel park spots.
And you'd press the accelerator and the brake,
but it would do all the steering.
And that was amazing.
Like I used to pull up outside cafes
and think I was the greatest thing ever.
You know, everyone's staring at you,
they're having their coffee
and you put your hand on the steering wheel
and you pretend like you're driving
and you kind of reverse in.
So the Tesla has a system similar to that,
but it does everything.
Like it'll see the car park, it'll park it.
And it's, I tried it many times.
It's one of the worst parking experiences I've ever had.
The only way I can describe it is if,
let's say you have a 10 year old kid
and you give them your keys and you're like,
"Here, can you park my car?"
And they probably can with enough trial and error.
Like the car will literally,
so let's say you've got the one where you pull in sort of,
I don't know what you call it, just standard car park.
They're not sort of tilted at an angle,
they're just straight.
And I just tested on them.
I'm like, "Okay, you pull in."
So it would half pull in,
it would realize that it's not quite centered,
it would pull all the way back out of the car park
and then back in and then it's like,
oh, I'm not quite in the right spot and pull back out.
And meanwhile, there's like,
I'm in a multi-rise car park thing.
There's other people waiting to park.
Like I don't have the time to sit there
and wait for the car, like for three minutes
to pull into the easiest spot in the world.
And it just makes you really nervous as well.
Like I've tried to reverse parallel parking as well
and it's just not that good at it.
And it gave me such a bad experience that I'm like,
I'm never, you know, using that feature again.
And then someone was slightly different.
So for those that don't know,
there's a feature of fully self-driving
we can go into the Tesla app,
and as long as you're not on a public road,
so you're in a shopping center car park,
or you're on sort of private land,
you can say, and you're within a certain distance
of the car, I think it's 30 or 50 meters
or something like that,
you can say basically come and get me,
which sounds like a really cool feature,
the way they advertise it is like,
you're in a shopping center car park
and it's raining really heavily,
wouldn't it be amazing if your car could come and get you?
And I'm like, yeah, it would be, but again,
it's literally like giving you keys to a 10 year old,
like watching the car navigate like a car park,
it's honestly just scary,
It's like, it's going to hit someone like any second and you have to hold your
finger down on the button. So they've,
they've thought of that when it looks like it's doing something stupid,
you let go and the car stops immediately. And it's not going that fast,
but as a feature, it just feels like this is a cool party trick.
Like I was at a winery once and we were parked in your typical sort of gravel,
you know, winery style car park. And you know,
I had some sort of family with me and they were asking about the car and I'm
like, well, check this out.
Like I'm going to stand here and I'll get the car to come over to me.
And it was like a hot day and you just watch the car kind of pull out and then
come over and then literally this old guy was traveling back to his car and he
kind of has a look at my car and he looks at it again.
He realizes that there's no one like in the driver's seat and he's like, mate,
is that thing driving itself? Oi Barry, come and have a look at this.
This car is driving itself. Like how good is this? Like, and it was,
it was one of those like moments. It's like a cool party trick, but there is,
unless someone's like blocked you in, let's say they've parked tight on both
sides, which I don't know how often that happens.
Like it's a pretty useless feature. Like, like overall, I don't know that. Yeah.
I don't know that I'd recommend buying it at $2,000 and at $10,000,
I feel like unless they actually figure out fully self-driving,
which I don't think they're anywhere near,
like I don't know that it's worth it really.
No, I will see. I, um, that's pretty cool. I mean, you, you, you're right.
It falls into the category of party trick. Um, and I, yeah,
I can see the use case. Like if you've got a really narrow garage,
you've got to get into and out of regularly. Um, first of all, you know,
originally I think the feature shipped with a Model S which I can understand
because it's so clicking and wide you know it's not gonna fit in a normal
garage so you're gonna need this feature and it's like maybe you shouldn't have
made the car that wide and then you wouldn't have needed this feature but
anyway I can see that being a regularly useful thing but beyond that I can
figure the number of times that I've been parked in the situation where
someone would have helped get the car out without having to pry yourself
between a partially open door and the and the B pillar or whatever the heck it
is. You know, it's like I can probably a dozen times in 20
years is really not worth it for that use case.
And yeah, 10 grand is a lot of money.
And I mean, it's not.
Yeah, anyway. So no, I think you're right.
Like for that amount of money, you'd want to do a heck of a lot more.
And I know Tesla keeps promising that they're going to do actual full
strength driving, and I just don't think they're close.
So I think if if you're an Australian and you really desperately want this
feature, just because it's, you know, it's a cool party trick.
The only tip I'll give you is buy it after delivery because it costs exactly the same amount
and then you're not paying all the taxes on top of it.
So, it actually costs you more to order it from the Tesla website than it will just to go into the app and buy
afterwards.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's good old Australian luxury car tax rules and so on and so forth.
So, go Australia.
Taxation, that's anyway, don't get me started.
All right. So, one of the things that, you know,
There are some really cool things. Anyone who's listening to this by this point in this episode,
you might think, well, geez, we must hate our Teslas because we're complaining a lot.
No, no.
I love my Tesla models.
Right. It is a fantastic car.
It is the best car I have ever driven in my life.
Certainly the best car I've ever owned.
Having said that, I have never driven like a Bentley, a Ferrari or any of those other cars, but
then I can't afford them. So that's no good.
So it's like that's that hand on my heart.
It is the absolute best car I've ever driven.
It is comfortable, it's fast, it's fun.
It's just a very, very nice handling car.
So having said that, it's all the little things
that you can do with it that you can't do with other cars.
And I know you listed a couple, but I particularly enjoy,
and this is not saying that's unique to the Tesla,
I'll admit, but I mean, 'cause the Nissan LEAF could do this.
I can fire up the air conditioning
five minutes before I'm ready to go in the middle of summer.
- Yeah, that's awesome.
And you come out, it's nice and cool inside, no problem.
And there's another time, I kid you not, I had a full charge, I'd driven downtown, I was parked in an
underground car park. It was really, really hot.
I bought my wife for Christmas a beautiful box of nice chocolates.
I didn't want them to melt, so I ran the air conditioner for nine hours straight while I was at work.
Oh, wow. It's like, yeah, it's all the things you can do in an electric car that you can't do in a petrol one
because you can't be sitting in a car park running an engine.
No, exactly.
So I mean, just, yeah, so I love that.
But what's some of yours?
- I mean, firstly, yes, 100% agree.
It's the best car I've ever owned.
Like, I love it.
It's pretty much the only car I've ever owned
where I'm like, you know what, every time I get in this,
it kind of makes me happy.
And I know that sounds consumerist or whatever,
but screw it, like it does.
Like it actually genuinely makes me happy
to drive it around.
And then there's little things,
like I think you touched on it with the app integration.
It actually works.
It's reliable.
Yes, it sometimes takes, you know,
30 seconds to wake up the car and, you know,
and get to talk to it.
But I've never had it fail on me like you can turn on the air conditioner
You can look at the current temperature. You can do all sorts of things. I'm in the app
You can see the charge rate you can change the charge rate if you want to sort of keep up with your solar cable
Like it's all these nice little
Modern tech features that I think as someone who's really into tech like I just I love that stuff
Like it feels like a really really expensive like tech toy like sometimes and then
One small thing that I just want to highlight because I got this one recently. I didn't even know this was a feature
I took my kids to this place called bounce. It's like a trampoline sort of fun type thing
And I got this notification on my phone.
It says, "Hey, you left your back window open."
I'm like, "What? Is that a thing?"
And sure enough, I walked out, my back window's open.
I'm like, "That's cool." Like, it's a tiny little thing.
But it's like a cool feature just to know that,
"Hey, maybe you didn't mean to actually leave the window open.
We're just going to let you know."
That is very cool.
Because I remember one time I came home
and I got a notification like that.
And I'm like, of course, it's always a kid, right?
Because I would never leave the window down like that.
Exactly. It's always the kids.
It's always the kids. Anyway.
And so, yeah, and that was unexpected, but pleasant.
So one of the things that I thought was interesting about Tesla's from the very
beginning, like particularly, okay, not the very beginning,
model S is where they started with the damn door handles.
It's like, I know, and honestly,
I do think that on a scale of why did they have to like
the extreme is the Falcon wing doors on the model X.
That's the extreme, but certainly the door handles. So you tell me your beef.
I'll tell you mine.
- So with the Model S ones,
like for those that haven't seen them,
they come in and out.
So they weren't too bad.
It's like, okay, you've made the door handle different
and now I have to wait for it to pop out,
but okay, like it's more aerodynamic, I understand you.
And then I got a Model 3 and I'm like,
what the heck is with this door handle?
It's like they've just reinvented the door handle
such that it's flush with the door
and you have to push your finger into the left part,
like your thumb basically,
and then pull it out with the other part of your hand.
And you do get used to it.
You're like, oh cool.
Like I understand now how to open a door,
but it's a problem that didn't need solving.
Like now I have people who are trying to hop into my car
and they're like, oh, excuse me,
I don't know how to open the door.
Like that's pretty embarrassing.
Like for a problem we solved years ago
to sort of reinvent the entire system.
And yeah, I honestly don't know why they did it.
I understand their core goal was to have it flush,
but you can make flush door handles.
Like that is also a solved problem, I feel like.
- So I do remember another car.
I cannot for the life of me remember what it was,
but it had a small spring loaded flap,
if you want to have a better way of describing it,
that folded inwards.
So you'd put your fingertips on the bottom part of it
and it would just tuck under slightly,
revealing the part where you could then pull
on the door handle to open it.
And if you were to do that on the Model 3 door handle,
if you don't push that larger paddle section
closer to the front,
you wouldn't even know that it would go in.
And that's what I've watched people do
that have not used these door handles,
is that they'll go to the door handle
And they'll start like- They'll first, they'll swipe on it, trying to like get their finger
into- Okay, that didn't work.
Then they'll push on it in different points to try and see what it does.
Like the first time some people have tried that door handle, you say it's embarrassing.
Yeah, it kind of is, because you're sitting there and you have to explain to this person that
they're usually like, you know, a friend or, you know, extended family member.
And they're just trying to open the car door and they've opened, you know, hey,
Yeah, car doors. I used to have a car door.
Probably thousands of car doors.
I mean, it was working yesterday, and I walked up to your car, and now it doesn't work anymore.
Why?
So that was my experience as well, is that you feel
it's bad that you have to explain it.
Here's how you do it. Anyway.
Anyway.
All right. So, a couple of things, and then we can wrap it up real quick.
Basically, I do personally hope that we don't strip out more and more
from the next generations of Teslas, because I look at the plan
and what they've done with it, and it's a bit of a worry.
Yeah, and I think Elon is kind of my worry there.
He's pushing for full self-driving and he's trying to make the car more full self-driving friendly,
but I'm like, maybe just keep the car as it is until you've actually figured out that problem.
Like, one thing at a time.
Yeah, exactly right.
If you want to talk more about this, you can reach me on the Fetaverse at chigi@engineered.space,
on Twitter at JohnChigi or the network at engineered_net.
If you're enjoying Pragmatic and you'd like to support us and keep the show ad free,
you can by becoming a Premium Supporter.
Premium Support is available via Patreon and through the Apple Podcasts channel subscription.
Just visit engineered.network/pragmatic to learn how you can help this show to continue
to be made.
Thank you.
A big thank you to all of our supporters.
A special thank you to our Silver Producers Mitch Bilger, John Whitlow, Kevin Kosch, Shane
O'Neill, Oliver Steele, Lesley Law Chan, Hafthor, Jared, Bill, Joel Marr and Katerina
Will.
And an extra special thank you to our Gold Producer Stephen Bridle and to our Gold Producer
known only as R. Pragmatic is a podcasting 2.0 enhanced show
and with the right podcast player you'll have episode locations, enhanced chapters
and real-time subtitles on selected episodes and you can also stream Satoshis and boost
with a message if you like.
There's details on how along with a booster gram leaderboard on our website.
Pragmatic Electric has recently launched as a video edition of this podcast.
You can watch in Podfriend, CurioCaster, the Apple Podcasts app,
Downcast, Podcast Guru, or if you're into YouTube, it's there too.
Make sure you check it out today.
So so if you'd like to get in touch with Russell,
what's the best way for them to get in touch with you, mate?
You can hit me up on Twitter.
So just Rusty Shelf is my Twitter handle.
So yeah, like a corridor shelf, if that's what you want to imagine.
And that's probably the best place to get me.
Like if you want to read about some of my Tesla
Powerwall stuff, you can also go to rustyshelf.org,
which is my blog.
I haven't posted there in quite a long time,
but so you don't have to scroll very far.
You'll find the Powerwall post like pretty quick.
- There's also links in the show notes
for all of that stuff.
So awesome.
Thank you very much.
And a special thank you to all of our supporters
and a big thank you to everyone for listening.
And thanks for coming back on the show, Russell.
It's been fantastic.
- Oh, awesome.
Thanks for having me on.
- No worries.
(upbeat music)
[Music]
(upbeat music)
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ ♪
[Music]
you