My wife really disliked the Model Y we took for a test drive, especially the road visualization that you can't turn off for some reason. Can't fully blame her, the thing looked unstable/distracting, and making it impossible to turn off is a bizarre UX decision.

But yes, I'm aware that Tesla has the charger situation handled much better.

Does anyone know what that visualisation is about? It doesn’t bother me, but it also doesn’t help me or give me any useful information.

If it showed me the road behind me, for example, that would be super useful for lane changing. But it doesn’t.

I have never once been able to work out what it does, and would love to see the map take up the whole screen, or maybe a list of route instructions could go there.

I also noticed that the “full self driving preview” option seems to have disappeared (it never worked anyway, guessing it’s because we drive on the left)

My assumption was that it was to help build confidence in their self-driving by always showing you what it sees no matter if it is control or not. It does have some effect in that you start to get a feeling of what situations the car has a good idea about the surroundings and when it struggles.

There is probably a "it looks cool" factor that doesn't hurt.

As far as UX options. Providing customization is old-school thinking these days :/

In my car it doesn't even look particularly cool. The visualisation from FSD that I've seen people post on the internet does look nice, but that's not what I see - I get a very low detail representation of the lines on the road, and occasionally the vehicles ahead of me. I think that's what it used to look like before FSD, but it seems like the FSD preview hasn't arrived in Australia yet.

It does show some indicators form proximity sensors.

Pretty much though what the other commentor said - to give a visualization into the self driving for the user.

When traffic cones and street signs were added to Autopilot - you can bet that visualization was updated to show it off.

Same when they added stop light detection.

It makes sense to me. For some, that visualization literally _is_ the AI, for all they know.

I (almost) never use that. I expected it to be more distracting than it is though.

I have the screen dimmed right down. You can also choose dark mode.

I think Tesla needs better salespeople, there's a lot of things that I found out after purchase that makes me like it more.

Dark mode was on. She hated that more than light mode actually, said it looked like a horror thing (she's not wrong).

It might sound minor, but that visualization is on the part of the screen close to the steering wheel 100% of the time you're driving. If it's distracting to you, it'll be distracting any time you're driving, and you can't turn it off.

It's like a running shoe that comes with a pebble permanently stuck inside.

Isn’t the supercharger network now open to everyone? Or is that an EU only thing?

I checked and no. It seems to only be some a relative few stations.

Most OEMs have signed deals with Tesla to use their network in the US, but I don’t believe these have yet to go into effect.

Tesla built the US superchargers first, so they used a proprietary plug that only just got standardized as NACS / SAE J3400, whereas non-Tesla US EVs were selling with standard CCS (or J1772) ports.

Different from the EU Superchargers, which I believe do offer standard CCS?

There are two parts to this:

1) Tesla needs to open up superchargers to other cars. They're doing this at scale now, but generally only the less popular ones, or if they're required to do so by government grants. So many key sites are still off limits to others.

2) In the US only, other car manufacturers need to adopt Tesla's NACS charging standard, so they can physically connect to superchargers. (In the rest of world, everybody including Tesla is already standardized on CCS2.)

Agree. I did an 6-hour/500km drive last week in my model 3, we had to charge once. Found a supercharger in the car park of the local golf course.

The anxious feeling about “will the charger work/will there be a space” is real, but the more EVs are out there, the less this is going to be a problem.

My petrol car could have done the trip without refuelling, but it would also have cost, literally, 5x the cost of charging in fuel.

Road trips in the winter suck in a Tesla, despite the Supercharger network. Batteries perform worse, you have to charge frequently, and you have to drive slower than during normal weather. That pretty much writes off the entire Midwest where people travel a lot during the holidays. My FIL used to live one state away, roughly a 4.5 hour drive in an ICE. The same drive in a Model 3 would require 3 stops, and then we'd arrive at his house with less than 20% charge. And since he doesn't have a charger, we'd be stuck using 110v, which would add basically nothing. So the return trip would require a long long stop just to get on the Interstate.