Is this because there unsafe, or because they’re driven by douchebags? Or both?
They are also quite heavily powered.
My Renault Megane E-Tech has “only” 220hp and that already gives quite a kick.
Not sure about model 3, but all others are much stronger than that - as far as I know.
Combine that with a large and heavy car (Y and X series) and many people will underestimate how much kinetic energy it has.
I’m not really a car guy, so maybe I got some series or data wrong, but I think the train of thought still stands.
High speed, relatively high mass, bad driving, bad driving experience.
I jumped into my friends Y to see if it was just dumb drivers or what… The interface is idiotic. Put the left blinker on and a video shows your rear left view… But in the center console.
Instead of looking left and seeing with their eyes, drivers process the image through a screen and don’t get direct visual confirmation. There’s got to be a mental disconnect here. (and a connection to some bad turning.)
Also, the turning radius is awful. Add that to the typical driver’s fear of cranking a wheel to its limit when doing a U-turn and underestimating how hard they need to turn.
It’s easier to undo a turn and let out the wheel than it is to correct your action after you’ve reached a point where the turn won’t work.
I got my first, sorta high powered and large car this year after more than twenty years of driving either subcompacts or small, dedicated offroad vehicles. During the first weeks, I did occasionally catch myself going way too fast. I have lightened my right shoe a lot since, but I think being used to sitting either more or less on the road or in a rattly, loud vehicle that required constant steering input got me used to a general feeling of reasonable speed that doesn’t work for my new, electric landyacht.
Teslas are probably the first, stupid fast car for a lot of buyers because they are affordable, so, there’s that.
Reminds me of a story my friend told about driving his mom’s Cadillac after being used to driving his Nissan Sentra. He hit the gas and wondered why he wasn’t going anywhere, then realized he was doing a burnout.
I’m imagining a confused teenager looking around the dash while the rear of the car disappears slowly in a white cloud xD
I experienced the opposite when we had our first snow a week ago. I’m used to getting a feeling for how slippery it is every time I accelerate. All my cars that I drove in winter were frontwheel drive and you’d step on it, hear what the engine did in relation to the speed, you’d feel the slightly varying torque or see the ESP light blinking and you’d immediately know what was up on the road. Yeah, the new one is an electric quattro with absolutely excellent traction control that dances right along the fine line of maximum traction even when you press the torque requester like a dumbass leadfoot elephant. I knew that of course, but I didn’t think about what that meant.
So, I felt like “Huh, hm, this isn’t nearly as bad as it looks out there, alright then…” and proceeded to have an interesting, first braking experience soon after. You know that video where that large container ship runs straight and steady into the beach while people casually step aside? Like that. All is well and nothing happened, but switching cars up a few classes really changes things you felt absolutely sure about.
Now, I was sliding along on the helm of my lovely land barge with the ABS-light calling me a goddamn dumbass for maybe ten seconds at relatively low speeds on an empty country road. But imagine someone taking their new Model 3 out on a dry summer day and when they run out of things they were sure about, they’re very likely a lot faster with a lot more stationary things that don’t care about their predicament in the way.