Sorry I'm Late

I let things get away from me over the weekend and didn’t get to my normal (well, mostly normal) Monday drop. Not that this meandering pile of literary merde is going to make up for my tardiness, but you pay good money to subscribe here (well, not really), and I owe you some effort.

Renting A Tesla

A solid depiction of my rental car

I am on travel in (cold, wet, yucky) Southern California this week, and my rental call purveyor was able to convince me with favorable pricing to rent a Tesla. This was not an easy decision to make, as I have meticulously mapped out all the gas stations convenient to rental car drop-off avenues of approach in order to fill up at end of rental, and the prospect of having to “fill up” electrons injected some anxiety into the mix. I’ve never driven a Tesla (I’ve driven IN one), and Hertz added a little to the foreboding by sending a series of emails to me that included videos and other information they deemed essential. I read these all and determined that this was indeed going to be a very different experience. During the last half hour of my flight, I reviewed all of them again—seems to me that Hertz probably had enough clueless dolts like me who couldn’t get the cars moving that the information was probably worth consuming.

I arrived at the rental car plaza and proceeded to my white Tesla Model 3. Teslas don’t use keys or (ordinarily) fobs—they use a coded card the size of a hotel room key. I had some nervousness about the whole “how do I get my card?” thing without having to interact with an actual human being, which is one of the great perks of business travel. But like any other car, it was unlocked and the key card was there, encased in protective plastic and affixed to a plastic identification tag. Opening the trunk proved straightforward, and a small family could live in it. I am told there is a front trunk, but having no reason to use it, I will remain ignorant of it for this trip. Once my luggage was stowed, I got in the car to survey my surroundings. Pretty much everything you need to do is done on this big Ipad in the middle of the dash, with the rest of the dash consisting of, well, dash. There are a few buttons on the steering wheel, a transmission stalk and a turn signal stalk, and that’s about it. When you drive a Tesla, you are essentially driving a large smart phone.

Driving the car takes a little getting used to. The “gas” pedal is like the rheostat you used to have on your train set as a kid (need I go into this?), where depressing it makes the car go faster, while taking pressure off slows it down—and removal of pressure altogether brings the car to a pretty fast stop. Known as “regenerative braking”, this method of slowing and stopping the car adds to battery power. What this means is that there is really no “coasting”, and trying to do so will leave you ten feet short of the stop sign until you get used to it. As for battery power, no shit, there’s a little battery symbol like on your phone at the top of the iPad that tells you how much battery you have left.

That iPad is very important. Want to move the mirrors? Ipad. Want to change the braking mechanism to something more like coasting? Ipad. Climate? Navigation? Entertainment? You guessed it. Again—this car is basically a big, heavy phone with wheels. Batteries, software, and wheels. Oh, and seats.

There is no question about it—this is an important technological development in cars. The thing is wicked fast and very efficient. Upkeep costs are also dramatically lower than internal combustion vehicles. The driving experience is magnificent, the sensing and sensor readouts are AMAZING, providing a real-time understanding of the road around you at all times and serving as the guts of a driverless future. But I have some nits to pick.

The car “feels”…a little cheap. Plastic. My every days over the past twenty years have been a mix of new and used: Acura, Lexus, BMW, and Jaguar. None of these ever felt inexpensive. Whether they were worth the money is a different story—but they never felt cheap. The Tesla feels a little cheap. And I understand that it is NOT an inexpensive vehicle.

Secondly, and related to the first—while there is no combustion or exhaust noise—there was plenty of road noise. I am hard of hearing except in low frequencies, and I’m still pretty sensitive down there in the low registers of road noise. It is the basic way I compare vehicles. I have a 2010 Jaguar XF with 282,000 miles on it that is quieter than my average brand new rental. Not a lot of quieting has gone into the Model 3 from what I can tell. Now, I know—the Model 3 is the base model, the affordable Tesla, and as such, it isn’t going to set the world on fire in lux appointments and quieting. I get it.

But this is why I’m gonna hold off a little on buying an EV—I want my proper automobile builders to take what St. Elon of Durban has created and integrate it into their refined quality control processes to give me a car that moves and acts like this but FEELS more substantial. They may have to (initially) sacrifice range, but when I get around to buying one, I won’t have to drive far.

I’ll have the car until Wednesday, and I’ll enjoy the driving.

This Pisses Me Off

Pennsylvania’s Junior Senator

In the runup to the 2020 Democratic Senatorial Primary in Pennsylvania, candidate John Fetterman suffered a stroke, the serious extent of which was hidden from Pennsylvania Democratic voters by the Fetterman campaign and family, and a less-than-aggressive press corps. Fetterman won, and continued on to face the (feckless, NJ resident, Trump-backed celebridoctor) Mehmet Oz. Fetterman’s candidacy consisted of staying out of the limelight as much as possible and sending out attack dogs to criticize anyone with the temerity to suggest that a man with documented heart problems who was also recovering from a MAJOR stroke—ought to be concerning himself with basic life functions rather than the U.S. Senate. This charade continued up into the debate, in which “accommodations” were required to allow the physically and mentally frail (at best) Fetterman to participate. Anyone who watched the debate who was not on the campaign payroll was offended by the spectacle. Fetterman had no business being in the race (not that Oz did, but that’s a different story), but he won nevertheless and was sworn in as a Senator last month.

After last week’s State of the Union Address, he was taken to hospital with light-headedness, and it appears that he is still there. Charlie Cook at National Review has been all over this story from the start, and his latest is gold.

Fetterman does not have the physical and mental capacity to continue serving in the Senate. He never should have been there in the first place. This was cruelty, vanity, and power-seeking all wrapped up in one terribly lamentable situation.

The Super Bowl

Sorry, I missed it. Was in the air. I sorta watched on the guy in front of me’s tablet in between bufferings, and followed along on Twitter. I feel bad for my Delaware Valley homies who invest a lot in their Eagles fandom, but it sounds like it was generally a great game.