Tesla One-Pedal Driving Update — In A Word, Perfecter
Credit to Author: Paul Fosse| Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2019 17:27:23 +0000
Published on November 2nd, 2019 | by Paul Fosse
November 2nd, 2019 by Paul Fosse
Last night before going to bed I noticed one of my friends on Twitter (Sofiaan) was getting a new software update (2019.36.1). I read a little about it and then I noticed I got it too! I set it to install and went to sleep. When I woke up, I took Henry for a spin to try out the new features. Before I give you my impressions, I’ll go over the 4 enhancements.
I didn’t have anything on my calendar (and I don’t drive to work on Saturday), so I don’t have anything to say on automatic navigation other than that it is enabled by default (but you can turn it off) and I think this will be very useful. I don’t plug my car in every day to charge (only every few days, since I only have a 6 mile commute to work), so I also don’t have any comments yet on the scheduled departure feature. I will use it when I take a long trip. Previously, you had to do some math to schedule your charging if you didn’t want your battery to sit full for several hours, which is not good for battery longevity.
You have to adjust your stopping mode from Roll or Creep to Hold to try out the one-pedal driving. I changed the setting and immediately loved it! I noticed it doesn’t just work going forward, but even stops the car when backing out of my garage! It seems like regenerative braking is stronger now, but it could be that I’m just paying more attention to it. I drove around for a few minutes and I loved having the car come to a complete stop when I took my foot off the accelerator without the drudgery of applying the brakes (if this isn’t a first-world problem, I don’t know what is). One nice side effect is that when you are using Autopilot, if you time when you take it off Autopilot perfectly, you don’t have to press the brake pedal or accelerator. This makes it even more obvious that they need to ship stop sign and stop light recognition, since that is the last thing I need to do manually. I have to watch for FSD (Full Self Driving) mistakes (of course) and take it off Autopilot for signs, stop lights, and turns in the city.
Another thing I have noticed that is a disadvantage when using standard regen mode instead of low regen mode (I call it coast mode) is you have to be careful to drive smoothly if you have passengers and don’t use Autopilot. It is easy to be a little jerky since if you lift your foot off the accelerator abruptly, the car will slow down abruptly and this can upset passengers.
What can you say about a 5% increase in power? It is noticeable, but the car was so fun to drive before the power increase, I can’t be sure. I’m not really set up with a VBOX to test acceleration and I don’t find the iPhone applications I’ve tried work very well, so I’m going to leave it to others to tell us if it cuts a tenth or more off of the 0 to 60 time.
As you can tell from the title to this article, I thought this small update was “perfecter,” meaning that before this update I thought the driving experience was perfect and I now realize it wasn’t. I don’t think the car is perfect, just the greatest I’ve ever owned. It has a few annoying things, like the door handles. Tesla is doing an excellent job of delighting its customers, delivering improvements far in excess of their expectations, with one major exception. That exception is full self driving. While the progress toward Tesla’s goal of full self driving has been amazing and fast, it has not met the lofty expectations I developed after listening to Elon Musk’s predictions of the last few years.
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Paul Fosse A Software engineer for over 30 years, first developing EDI software, then developing data warehouse systems. Along the way, I’ve also had the chance to help start a software consulting firm and do portfolio management. In 2010, I took an interest in electric cars because gas was getting expensive. In 2015, I started reading CleanTechnica and took an interest in solar, mainly because it was a threat to my oil and gas investments. Follow me on Twitter @atj721 Tesla investor. Tesla referral code: https://ts.la/paul92237