![]() ![]() There really isn’t much to speak of throughout the Model S Plaid’s interior outside of the massive screens in front of our faces. And don’t worry, we tried out the silly sound effect “Boom Box” horn, too. We resorted to manually swapping between drive and reverse most of the time. ![]() The touchscreen shifter worked well enough, but the “auto shifting” feature where the car is just meant to magically know which direction you want to head did not. Operating the windshield wipers in a similar manner - no stalk - wasn’t problematic either, mostly because you can just set the wipers to auto, and they’ll smartly do their thing. Without fail, the car would automatically turn off the signal right after completing a lane change, so a duplicate press was never necessary. The Model S is smart enough to realize when you’ve put the indicator on in a merging situation versus signaling for a turn at a traffic signal. We’ve rented other cars in the past year-plus with similar mileage that didn’t look anywhere close to this bad.Īs for the digitized Ferrari-like turn indicators on the steering wheel, those worked better than expected. And sure, perhaps that’s due to heavy hand sanitizer/Clorox use throughout this rental’s life in a pandemic, but it was a sad sight to see after just a year of use. We found ourselves gripping the yoke tighter and with a greater sense of self-preservation - a nagging fear that it’d whisk out of our grip never went away - than we ever have with a steering wheel.Īlso worth noting: The yoke’s covering was largely worn off on our 19,000-mile Model S tester. If you do shift position, that one hand loses contact entirely. It’s never possible to adjust your grip upward or move your hand around the steering wheel from corner to corner, as one might want to do on a meandering road with slow and fast corners of differing radii. Even when you’re arcing the Model S through wide sweepers at speed and testing the handling, it is disconcerting. And don’t even start to think that you’ll “adapt to it,” or “get used to it.” Given more time to really get the hang of operating the yoke, it would still be annoying and undeniably worse than a wheel when you need to go lock-to-lock. Want to execute a quick turnaround maneuver? Instead of a convenient rim to grab and keep turning, you’ll find open air. If a turn is 90 degrees or sharper, making said corner is just plain awkward. Beyond that, the yoke is inferior to a traditional steering wheel in every practical way. There’s only one thing it does better than a steering wheel, and that is to provide a superior, wide and flat resting place for your hands on long highway journeys. The new and weird hits right away with the yoke of a steering device. Just like getting a new phone, though, diving into the interior of a Tesla requires an acclimation period. Despite the low mileage limit, we spent the entire day tinkering about, getting familiar with and learning everything we could about what it’s like to drive and operate a Model S Plaid. It’s the one and only Plaid available for rent in Michigan, so we snagged it for one day, which allowed us a maximum of 100 miles of driving. Since Tesla doesn’t provide test cars for review, we got this one through Turo (more on that experience soon). The Model S Plaid has been on sale for a little more than a year, though we haven’t been able to get our hands on it until now. That acceleration is but one part of this big sedan’s stat sheet. The Model S Plaid is a special car, and its rapidity is guaranteed to shock you. We knew it was going to be ridiculous, but it still managed to catch us - journalists who drive quick cars all the damn time - completely off guard. It’s difficult to comprehend without being in the car and feeling it. The speed at which nature passes you by through the windshield and the side windows is akin to pushing high triple digits in an old “Need for Speed” video game, watching the world bend and stretch around you in that game-ish way. Short of being a fighter jet pilot, an astronaut or a race car driver, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced acceleration at the same level as the Tesla Model S Plaid. ![]()
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