The experience of owning and driving a Model S

Overall

I would describe the overall feel of the Model S as "tight". As Tesla Motors has described, the battery pack slab at the bottom of the car lends a lot of rigidity to the frame. If you envision the Model S as being something like a Bentley with an electric drive, you would have the wrong idea: it's not a cushy ride. The Model S is more of a sports sedan. The Model S is somewhat lower, longer, and wider than my previous mid-range car. Because the roof profile is a curve, the windshield height is probably less than you may be used to, but not at all a visibility issue. Rear view mirror visibility is decent, adequate: if you need more, there is always the HD rear camera, which can be activated at any time (it's not just on when backing up, and unavailable thereafter, as in other cars).

Seating: Holds up to five adults. The floor is flat, which is most noticeable in the back. The front seats can be adjusted forward and back, as well as up-down and tilt, plus lumbar. The steering wheel fully adjusts. (The car will remember the profile of each driver, reinstating preferences.) Because of the sloping roof line, headroom is tighter in the back, and the seats there angle downward to compensate.

Cargo space is wonderful; and in the absence of a gasoline tank, there is a deep, high-capacity well back there. Additionally, the bench-style rear seat back effortlessly folds down in two, 60/40 sections to give you further length for carrying longer items — even an adult bicycle. (All this, and you have the frunk as well.) Coupled with the hatch back, it's rather like having a station wagon, but a car that looks and drives like a sedan. In contrast, there is almost no internal stowing space for passengers to put their things: there is the glove compartment and a small cubby under the touch display, but that's it. Where a center console would be in most cars, there is just an open tray-like containment area on the floor. This is one of the idiosyncracies of Elon Musk's car design inclinations, where he seems to be against clutter and excess. (You can order a center console insert from the Tesla website or third party to have real compartmented storage in that area.)

Interior noise level: Minimal. When the car is stationary, there is essentially silence, except for the HVAC fan. When the car is in motion you can whisper and be heard by your riders. Noise comes from road roughness against tires, some wind noise (minimal in this aerodynamic car), and slight whistle from the electic motors.

Recommended settings

• Turn off the Smart Preconditioning HVAC setting as this can grossly waste energy, heat your garage, and wet your floor.
• Turn off the fog lights, which for some reason are on by default.
• Consider disabling automatic high beams: while their automaticness is fine for traffic, on empty residential streets you can end up shining very bright lights into people's houses.
• Consider turning on Creep mode, to keep the car from rolling backwards on lesser inclines, and allow you to inch forward at red lights without having to take your foot off the brake and use the accelerator.

Specifics of the experience

• When you open the car door, you will notice the window retract slightly: This is because the glass goes up into an overhead recess. When you close the door, the glass goes up slightly, into that recess.
• The steering wheel is thicker than I've experienced on other cars. I like that a lot, every time I drive. It gives you a more solid feeling of control. The texture of the wheel is a matte finish rather than glossy as too many steering wheels are: the finish on the Tesla's gives you a more effortless grip.
• It's wonderful to never have to deal with a "key" again: just walk up to the driver side door with the fob on your person and the car unlocks itself and turns on its exterior lighting (if so optioned). Park and walk away and the car locks itself.
• When you put the car into reverse, the mirrors dip, giving you a better view of things (and possibly children and pets) on the ground behind you.
• Acceleration is, of course, amazing, even on the non-P models. Never again will you experience highway on-ramp anxiety in trying to merge into fast-moving traffic. The car can out-accelerate just about anything on the road: if you are the first car at a stop light, you can be up to speed and gone before the conventional cars are even through the intersection. There is no differential wheel slip due to computerized torque apportionment between the front and rear drive units. With quick acceleration, be prepared for objects in the front cubby to end up on the floor :-).
• Am loving the regenerative braking (which is actually energy reclamation). With an ICE car, it always grated on me that so much energy was being thrown away during braking, energy that I was paying for. Now, that energy is put back into the battery pack. With regen, you have to press the brake pedal much less often, which in turn makes your brakes last much longer, and means less brake dust to clean off the wheels. It also contributes to safety, because as soon as you take your foot off the accelerator, braking begins, before your foot can shift over to the brake pedal. That makes a big difference. An extreme but novel benefit: When you next take the auto road up Mount Washington or Pike's Peak, your return trip will not involve worries about overheating brakes or having to make several stops on the way down to cool the brakes.
• This is my first time having all-wheel drive, which is much more comforting for winter driving. My winter experience has been that you don't have to worry about traction, given that both axles are propelling the car, and independent control of the two axles via intelligent software. As with any car, always put on snow tires for the winter, to get best traction; and never forget that slippery conditions are bad for every car.
• It's wonderful not to have a transmission any more, with its annoying 1-second response time, inopportune shift points, etc. Not have to think about potential expensive transmission repairs is also comforting.
• Range anxiety? As other Tesla owners have explained, there really is none. With other electric vehicles, with their rather short range, there may be range anxiety, but not with the Model S because of its high capacity battery pack. With an 85D, you can charge to 240 miles of potential range — without going past the 85% normal charge limit. The range is so good that remembering to "re-fuel" is no different than with an ICE vehicle; and if you routinely plug-in at home overnight, once or twice a week, you never have to think about it, unlike an ICE car. (The Tesla owner's manual recommended keeping the car plugged when not in use, as the car can then condition itself as it does, without using battery charge.) After 16 months of usage, I can look back on my Model S ownership and say that I have not had any range anxiety over that period. That is further allayed by the availability of the Supercharger network for (free) charging during long-range driving. By contrast, with my previous ICE car there in fact was range anxiety, particularly where you were supposed to remember to refuel on the way home and forgot to, or not forgetting and hoping that the gasoline station was still open when you got closer to home in heavy traffic (and then have to wait your turn to get to the pumps).
• You will get some stares — even from other Tesla drivers. I pay attention to my driving, but occasionally notice other vehicle occupants looking over my Model S, sometimes animatedly. On one occasion, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw in the car behind me two excited people, with the passenger taking pictures of the car. (I see more Teslas on the road than any other EV brand, including Chevy Volt.)
• Cornering is remarkable in that there is almost no lean to the car.
• When you activate a turn signal, the headlight on that side of the car dims so that oncoming traffic can better see your intention to turn.
• Going to the grocery store, I like putting the bags into the frunk: when I get back home and front into the garage, the groceries are then right near the house entry door. It's also amusing to see people's reaction when you open the hood and put groceries into there.
• The retracting door handles are a nice security feature as well as aerodynamics feature, as a potential carjacker has nothing to grab to try to pull the door open.
• Tires: Mine came with Michelins. Tesla is always testing newly available tires for efficiency, and will equip their cars with the best currently available. One thing I've noticed with the tires is that on rough-surface pavement (as found on the Mass. Pike), there will be a kind of hum type vibration from the tiretread-road interaction.
• "Fuel econonmy": With my 10 year old mid-sized car I had been getting up to about 27 miles per gallon, paying about $72 per month on gasoline in driving about 10,000 miles per year. The window sticker on my 2015 85D specifies an EPA rating of 100 MPGe (e=equivalent) in combined city + highway driving. (That's a wow number.) There obviously isn't a separate meter on my garage's 220V receptacle, but my electric bill is roughly $30–$40 more per month than before I got the car. I'm definitely saving incremental money by driving electric. And, I never again have to jockey for a pump, stand out in the cold/rain, fumble with a credit card and reader, or deal with a dirty pump handle that who-knows-who used previously, nor the stink of gasoline.
• Charging design: This is super sophisticated and intelligently designed. Rather than having a conspicuous charge port panel interrupting the car surface as on a Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf, there is no panel on the Model S: the charge access point is invisible, being hidden behind the left rear side reflector. And rather than being a bulky handle with a round connector as on other electric cars, the handle on the Model S charging cable connector is narrow and triangular, much easier to deal with. Press the button on the connector handle while holding it near the back of the car and the charge port pops open and the circumference of the port starts glowing blue. Plug it in and it starts glowing green. If not properly seated, you get a yellow. While the car is locked, so is the charging connector: you can confidently walk away and know that it cannot be removed without your knowledge.
• Being able to use the smartphone app to turn on your car's HVAC some minutes before you get to it is wonderful for those hot summer day parking lots or cold winter night going to your car.
• Speaking of heat: It is so nice to pull into the garage on a hot summer day and not have the car outpouring a lot of heat into the garage. Likewise, not having to be concerned with fumes in the garage is a huge plus, where I don't have to keep the outer door open to let an ICE car out-gas before closing the garage door for the night.
• Cellular connected, free: All Teslas come with no-extra-charge cellular data connectivity, for its maps, Internet radio, updating, etc. As of mid 2015, the cellular is LTE (4G) rather than the former 3G. The 4G is quite fast. This service is reportedly via AT&T, invisible to you. Tesla says that the service is free for the first four years. What about after that? Given that the Model S has been around only since 2012, it doesn't seem to have been decided by Tesla what will happen thereafter.
• Maps: The touch screen is served by Google mapping, with the left-side dash near-distance navigation aid being a subset of Garmin. The main map is very useful in highlighting traffic issues, where the road ahead will be lined with red if there is a slow-down. You can have the map either with north being always upward, or upward being your direction of travel. The latter is excessively distracting because it means that the map is always repositioning, which also means some refresh delays over cellular. I prefer to leave it with north-up. You can input your destination via keyboard or voice and the map will give you a best route, and will verbally give you directions as you reach turn-offs. If you deviate from the map's directions, the routing will adapt. The voice recognition of your spoken destination can be frustratingly mistaken: blame Google for that.
• Is that big display a distraction? Actually, no: you simply ignore it as you drive; it's not clamoring for attention. But, at night, that must be a hugely annoying bright light, yes? No: there's an ambient light sensor which basically inverts the display such that it's mostly black, with white lettering.
• Keyboard: There is a virtual, on-screen keyboard for the Web browser and destination inputting. Sadly missing, however, is a "microphone" icon on the keyboard to allow dictation, as on an iPad.
• The GPS-aware air suspension is wonderful. Let's say you routinely go into or leave a parking garage that has a big bump of a sidewalk at its entry. You can avoid an underside scrape by simply raising the suspension the first time you approach the parking garage, and the car will remember that you did that, and automatically do it itself the next time you near that garage.
• Tesla has provided some voice controls for the car, but oddly they are very few: this is an area they need to fully exploit. When approaching a road construction area, for example, you'd like to be able to tell the car "Raise the suspension".
• It is so nice not having to keep track of when your next oil change will be needed, or having to regularly check the oil level for refilling between changes. (Yes, oil disappears between changes in an ICE car, and if it all goes away, you're in big trouble.) Generally not having to deal with all the repairs and maintenance attendant to engines and exhaust systems is wonderful, making life significantly simpler — and much less costly in terms of money and wasted time.
• The car's parking sensors tell you how close you are to any object that you're nudging up to, in inches, and will tell you on the dash and via chime when to stop.
• The car's various alerts are very well designed, with chime sounds that are intuitively obvious as to severity and intention by tone, from advisory to warning to all-clear.
• Am I locked out? I once inadvertenly left my key fob in my work bag when I went into a store. Returning to the car, I realized my error — with that bad feeling. Hoping for the best, I pressed on the door handle, and it opened. That is intelligent design! The car knew what I had done, and perpetrated a ruse to look like it was locked, but awaiting my return.
• Tire pressure: Tesla tires have pressure sensors which provide their number to the car, where the car then alerts you if the pressure is too low. (Standard pressure in the 2015 Model S is 45 psi.) One day in October I started driving, and was alarmed to see a warning pop up on the dash display reporting low pressure in the right rear tire: 37 psi. I wasn't in a position to do anything about it just then, and the pressure was acceptable, so I kept going. As road travel progressed, the pressure was then reported as 38 psi, so it wasn't the case of a leak. Upon reaching my destination I got out my 12V tire inflator and brought that tire up to proper pressure. Fine. When I returned to the car at the end of the day to drive home, a warning popped up on the dash about the left rear tire this time — same 37 psi situation. So, what's going on? All the preceding months, the weather had been in the 50s and 60s. This day it had dropped to around freezing. Aha: less energetic air molecules. Upon getting home I filled all the tires. Next morning, starting out, the dash reported low pressure in the left rear tire as it had yesterday, but this time with a pressure of "--"; then it reported a goodly 43 psi, then went away: the car seemed to have remembered the condition from the day before and was re-evaluating. Summary: Be prepared to refresh tire pressure at the onset of cold weather. (You can inspect the pressure in all tires from the dash: press down on the steering wheel right scroll wheel until a selection list appears, and choose Car Status, which will depict all four wheels.)