Monthly Archives: July 2016

Mass Pike now reads EZ-Pass transponder successfully

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Odometer: 1745 miles

Remember all those problems I was having with my EZ-Pass transponder?

I’ve now had successful reads on 5 different locations on the Mass Pike, so I think I have to declare my new EZ-Pass transponder a success. As you can see in the photo, it’s mounted in the obvious place (the blacked out area of the windshield to the right of the rear view mirror), and I haven’t positioned it upside down or sideways.

I’ll get more opportunities to test its readability when we go to Maine at the end of August, but for now, I have to say that my problem appears to have been more directly related to my 11 year old FastLane transponder than to transponder positioning.

Driving, autopark, and summoning

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Odometer: 1,668

I’m now roughly 6 weeks into my Tesla ownership. I’ve been in Chicago the last week, so I haven’t had much time to drive or blog. However, I have recorded a few observations that I thought would be worth passing on.

  • Turning off “Creep”. When I first started driving the car, I used the default driving settings which make the car creep forward when your foot isn’t on the gas. This emulates the behavior of an ICE car, so it’s familiar to most folks. However, I’ve never really liked this feature, I suspect because I originally learned to drive on a standard transmission where this was not the default. I now have disabled the creep behavior, and the car only moves when I push on the gas pedal. My wife disagrees with me on this (she likes creep), but for me, it makes more sense.
  • Dialing down Summon. The ability to summon Lightning into and out of our garage is one of Tesla’s unique driving features. However, the default settings look for a clearance of around 12 inches from all obstacles, and our garage opening is only about 4 inches wider than the Tesla itself with the mirrors folded out. I’ve now dialed down the sensor clearance to the minimum value (about 8 inches), and I can always successfully summon Lightning out of the garage (as you can see in this video. Getting Lightning to park inside the garage is a little trickier because we have a lip between our driveway and the garage entrance. When we first started, Lightning would abort the maneuver about 50% of the time because of the lip, but nowadays we’re seeing about a 90% success rate, assuming we get it lined up properly to begin.
  • Using Autopark. We spend an afternoon up at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, MA. Autopark indicator It was there that for the first time, I saw a big square P show up on my dash, indicating that Lightning saw an opportunity to autopark perpendicularly. It was pretty freaky at first, especially because you have to have cars on either side of the space for it to enable the function, but once we got the hang of it, we did it three times more. What I found most interesting is that it doesn’t have to get it right the first time; autopark will attempt to cut the wheel to make it into the space, but if it can’t make enough of a turn, it will do exactly what a human would do: it will stop, pull forward, and then back into the space a second time. It’s pretty awesome.

While July has been kind of a bust for Lightning driving, we’ve now planned a couple trips for August:

  1. A trip to Bar Harbor, Maine at the end of August as we drop off David at University of Maine, and
  2. A trip to Montreal, Canada to drop off Robert at the Montreal airport.

While our Maine trip could be a bit challenging (as we noted on our prior trip to UMaine, Maine has but one Supercharger in Augusta, which is more than 100 miles from Bar Harbor), we’re staying overnight at the Seawall Motel on the other side of Mount Desert Island. The Seawall has had the foresight to install 4 EV charging stations including two Tesla chargers and outfitted the lot with 100 amp, 240 volt service. So while we will be staying about 100 miles from the Augusta Supercharger and plan to do some touring around Acadia National Park, we will be able to charge overnight while we sleep and eliminate any concerns about running out of electrons.

Our other trip we’re planning is a quick jaunt up to Montreal, Quebec. While one might think an international trip like this might be more challenging, it’s actually a lot simpler logistically than the Maine trip. Unlike on the Maine trip where we have to plan around a single Supercharging site, we will pass no fewer than 3 Supercharging stations on the Montreal trip: Hookset, NH, West Lebanon, NH, and Burlington, VT. Further, Montreal itself has not one, but two Superchargers in the city itself. So driving to and from Montreal will be a lot like driving an ICE car: we just jump in the car, plan to stop for food and electrons in West Lebanon, and then drive to our destination. It should be a piece of cake.

First trip to the service center

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Odometer: 1,503

As I had planned last week, I brought Lightning to the Dedham, MA service center on Monday to have the rear seat looked at. They took one look and said, “Let us fix that”. So they did repaired the leather while I waited, and Lightning is back to being flawless again. The cost was covered under warranty.

While I was there, I got to watch several other customers come in with other problems. One fellow had a flat tire down on Cape Cod during July 4 weekend and was in the process of getting a new tire and wheel to replace one that the service center loaned him late one night after it had closed. Another woman came in to return the model S that had been loaned her when she had encountered a problem. Despite the fact that they were slammed with new car deliveries (the lot was full of newly delivered cars), the service folks were smiling and bending over backwards to help folks.

One other thing that I observed while waiting for my car was that there didn’t seem to be the wall most dealerships create between the customer and the people who actually work on the cars. Several times, I observed mechanics coming out to talk to customers about what they saw and on occasion, just to chat with the people who had brought their cars in.

I believe that some of this difference in service “feel” is that Tesla’s goal is to build cars that don’t really need service. Electric cars have fewer moving parts than internal combustion cars, so they should be intrinsically more reliable. While that may not yet be the case compared to best-in-class brands such as Lexus and Toyota, Tesla has set itself a lofty goal to eventually better their reliability by about an order of magnitude.

As Tesla’s cars actually approach this goal, then the role of the service center has to be fundamentally different from that of a ICE service center. With traditional ICE cars, the car is sold with a very thin margin, and sometimes at a loss to the dealer. Why do they do that? Because the service center makes up for that loss with highly profitable maintenance visits. That’s why that 15,000 mile checkup at your local car dealer runs $500-$600 instead of the roughly $200 you might spend at a local service station.

Tesla is different because 1) assuming it achieves its reliability goals, Tesla can’t rely on its cars needing service regularly, and 2) because of #1, service appointments have to be great experiences for its customers, which will make them want to bring their cars in whenever something goes amiss. Now, I know some Tesla service centers struggle to achieve this level of service, but based on my sample of one visit to Dedham, it does appear Tesla tries to treat customers more as people than as captive revenue sources. I, for one, appreciate the difference. I’m not the only one either; even though Consumer Reports doesn’t recommend Teslas, Tesla model Ss continue to rate as having the highest consumer satisfaction rating on Consumer Reports.

Autopilot in stop and go traffic

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Photo taken by my son while I was driving on autopilot
Odometer: 1,503

I went to Worcester Airport last Sunday night to pick up my son and got stuck in rainy, construction traffic on the way home last night. While that would have been normally been a frustrating delay, Lightning’s autopilot took a lot of the stress out of it.

I think this situation is a bit non-intuitive for a lot of non-Tesla drivers. Most people think of radar-based cruise control as a tool that helps the driver most during highway driving, and it certainly does that. But I find that where it really shines is in stop-and-go traffic. You simply set cruise control and auto-steer to on, and autopilot takes care of all the starting, stopping, and adapting to cars cutting into your lane.

One issue that you as the driver-in-command have to to watch out for, though, is a situation that resulted in a minor crash in Europe: a car pulling out of your lane could expose a stopped car. The resulting gap in traffic will cause the Tesla to accelerate to close the gap, but then the autopilot sensors can’t detect the stopped car until it is quite close.

This situation arises because the long-range radar system is doppler-based, so non-moving objects don’t raise an alarm. The ultrasonic sensors are short-range and don’t detect objects more than a few feet away. That leaves the forward-looking camera as the only sensor able to see and detect the stationary object. The current autopilot system only has one forward-looking camera, so you don’t get any stereoscopic ranging. The result: the Tesla accelerates and suddenly brakes when the stationary object comes into range. If your setting for cruise control is for a high speed (and remember, Teslas accelerate to speed quite quickly), you can end up hitting the stationary car.

I haven’t run into this problem personally, but it’s a great example of the trade-offs involved in autopilot use. Autopilot means that I don’t have to be constantly accelerating and braking in stop-and-go traffic; the autopilot is much better at repeating that process over and over than I am. On the other hand, while I don’t have to do all the routine starting and stopping, I do have to constantly watch for exceptional situations that may require my intervention. Pilots do this all the time, and it’s part of their training on how to properly use autopilots. For automotive drivers, though, this may take a bit of getting used to.