I rented a Tesla for a month. It was a giant pain in the a*

... is why I hate renting cars these days. So many pings and you don’t even know why. You try to shut them off through layers of menus and then they go back to defaults the next time you start the car.

Worst is the LDW dinging at you and jerking the wheel. Hyundai and Kia are egregious. F-off!

And the map, reverting to zoomed-in-3D-direction-you’re-headed view after 30 seconds. Excuse me, Chrysler, but some of us understand maps better when they are flat, north is up, and there’s context.

A memorable BMW shouting at me every time I exceeded the speed limit, in Dutch.

The engine eco-shutting-off just when you’re about to dash across an intersection and a truck is coming. NDE.

It used to be fun to try new things, now it’s just a headache.

- agree, rent it for a few days after the test drive, EVs have a different style of driving that might not suit you

- pings in modern cars are everywhere, it's not just Teslas - the way I drive, I very rarely (<2 times/month) get a ping from Forward Collision Warnings, but just because I keep it to "Early", which is the longest triggering distance; otherwise the car is silent (you may be constantly driving too close to other cars?), my father's ID.4 is just as annoying, if not worse

- people call Tesla interior "cheap", when in reality it's just simple and plain but durable, most of the costs of the car are in the battery and powertrain

- Am 1.85m tall at 110kg, steering wheel feels appropriate in size

- On my M3 2019, there's two buttons that have 2 axes (up/down/left/right) and a push

- Overspeed indication can be configured: none/speed limit icon animation/super-annoying bell that scares you every time (I keep it to icon animation)

And, replying to final point, the speed limiter IS the adaptive cruise control, which is perfectly working in cities, esp. in traffic jams. The way it works is to pick the speed limit as ceiling, and adapt the cruise to the traffic and the follow the vehicle in front at the distance that you've set (right wheel button left/right). The distance is adaptive (dist. 7 @ 50 km/h << dist. 7 @ 130 km/h). I usually keep 7 because it reduces the amount of slowdowns when people cut in front, resulting in a smoother ride. I've often seen the complaint that follow distance 7 in US cities is impossible, because everyone would jump in front of you - I'd still not recommend setting 2, it makes for a super-annoying stop-and-go drive.

I have the "bad luck" of living in Switzerland, where speed limits change every 50m: my routine is to use TACC as much as possible, and disengaging it with ample margin (using only regen to break) when coming up to traffic lights/roundabouts/crossings. I don't have to think about speed limits anymore, because TACC does it for me. Only exception is highway drives, where I need to change the speed limit beforehand with the right steering wheel button (or tap on the limit icon).

Hint: you can disengage TACC and/or AP without breaking, just do a quick soft tap-up on the right stalk (like soft-blinker tap).

There are a couple important points about the driving style of an EV, that I feel are not stressed enough:

- you try to regen as much as possible and avoid using breaks to get some energy back (extend the driving range), and you wear down break pads way less than ICE cars

- you don't floor it after every stop, because torque is instant and the engine needs no revving up - if you do this, I guarantee you'll always be running up to the bumper of the vehicle in front of you and having the car scream at you (regardless of the brand)

From my point of view, after 4y, looking also at all the other EVs that followed after Teslas (father has ID.4, mother Peugeot e-208), Tesla has managed to automate mostly-well many aspects of driving while reducing UI complexity (and removing "I have used it once in the lifetime of the car" buttons).

- AC does a good job of keeping the temperature in relation to the outside temp, also selecting the appropriate air flow outlets

- Automated lights off/on/high-beams well enough, that honestly I can't remember the last time I touched the setting, possibly never

- Voice control works decently enough that I can select songs or playlists just by pressing the wheel button (in addition to controlling pretty much all the car features)

- Auto-wipers works well enough for me in >90% conditions, except perhaps hurricane-level thunderstorms in a pitch-black area

- TACC/AP do an excellent job at keeping distance and lane on highways, and they're years better in terms of quality compared to competitors (I wanted for a long time Enhanced AP with lane changes, but after having tested it, I'd rather not; never used FSD, also: Europe)

Considerations about the UI: people keep claiming that they want 200 physical buttons, and that it's dangerous to take your eyes off the road, but:

- the Tesla UI is done well enough that I can adjust my AC faster than my ICE-powered friend can (not that I need it that much, it does a good job)

- my friend still also needs to either look at the AC temp/flow selectors or press a -/+/... button until a display shows what he wants, so it's not like the ICE version is safer than the Tesla in this regard

- I feel the "muscle memory" everybody talks about works for 1/2 HUGE tactible features at most if you only have 1 car available to drive, the rest of stuff you'll still need to look what you're doing regardless (unless you regularly spend >15s counting X buttons from the left of the second row of buttons from the bottom)

- TACC and AP (and safety features worst case) fill in the attention void created by these actions, while the ICEs have none of these available unless they are in the same price range

- VW ID.4 and Peugeot e-208 have archaic OSes that have huge input latency and were designed with automotive in mind BUT NOT REALLY TESTED FOR IT (in general UI interactions are NOT well thought out), while Tesla has a simple settings panel with everything in it, automates most regulations, and it's super-responsive

- VW ID.4 has so many buttons to activate the TACC/AP equivalents, in different modes, that my father after >2y of daily driving still hasn't mastered them, and the steering wheel looks like an Formula 1 steering wheel; compare that to: "single-tap" -> TACC engaged + "double-tap" -> AP engaged

In general, driving for me has become fun again: I don't need to worry about a ton of stuff, and operating the car is WAY easier than manual or even auto transmission.

Like having a leaver on doors, which in ALL cars open the doors, but in Tesla it might also break the window glass, because some utter genius decided to make this "Emergency release" and normal opening is via button...

Eschew obfuscation!

That already exists. It's called "tap to pass." Tap down the left stalk but don't let it indent, and then it'll flash three to five times (depending on manufacturer) before resetting. Even then most modern steering wheels have speed sensitive systems that let you just bip the wheel right or left to turn off the turn signal at highway speeds without a full quarter rotation of the wheel.

What does this even mean?

We used to have physical cassette and CD players in every car that required - you won't believe it! - taking your eyes off the road.

Also, the start/stop (or w/e it's called whereby the engine turns off when you stop) was such a jerky experience and sometimes it would turn off before I even came to a complete stop.

The infotainment system was terribly slow and would take almost a minute after starting for it to become responsive. Typing into the nav was especially sluggish and unintuitive. One time the AC crashed (not the HVAC unit, the computer module) and I had to take it in for a software update to fix.

The luxury, look and feel, and comfort were fabulous! The drivetrain and tech were trash!