Enjoy. Welcome to have a spin in ours if you needed to. Don’t tell the wife though (although real time tracking on the app doesn’t help!).
If you haven’t been in one at all, the first time you hit the pedal you will grin!
If Berlin starts punting out the 3 with the new battery and solid casting / front and rear I’d be tempted to get one and be poor each month!
Thanks Steve, with the 'rona, it’s all a bit awkward.
Yours is through a salary sacrifice scheme right? I may finance one through my wife’s. The deals are stupid.
I like the overall refresh and the cabin changes. But it still seems like Russian Roulette as to wether you get one properly screwed together.
This is all a bit “I think” but the wife got a circa £500 car allowance a month as part of her salary package.
She could lease, use it to buy privately, or take as income.
We lease as it’s all in. Fully serviced and insurance costs. We didn’t work out the savings (best to use to fund a purchase) it was just easiest.
The car crept in the list this year. Oddly, the 6 or 7k more long range would have added £200 voluntary contributions from salary a month (which is way about the % difference in list price).
Zenith do the leases and you could just scan cars and see if you got money back, or paid more. This came in bang on. About a tenner more than the not missed Evoke
PS the Euro build quality is nailed. They do not have issues like the US horror stories. Ours is spotless.
This seems very good.
Not even close to the NHS salary sacrifice deals 
Wow. Happy days for you.
I wish our job did some bulk incentive. We get jack shit in terms of perks.
You see loads close by. I see two or three daily now. You will NOT regret buying one. At all.
Still prefer the Polestar as an actual car but the real-world range from Youtube videos has been appalling. Coupled with the 2nd class charging network, it has put me off.
Tesla have the volume and infrastructure (the share price is the clue!).
I would be tempted to hold out for the new battery/chassis.
But it’s a lovely drive as it is and there are literally no downsides.
I’ve not tried the 4wd long range one but it can only be better still.
There are always downsides, and I look forward to complaining about them frequently.
You might be surprised.
My wife was. She was sceptical and now proclaims it the best thing she has ever driven. By far.
Which one are you trying. They are fast, and feel stupidly fast (did you see them on Top Gear?).
I could have had a Model 3 long range but was put off by the awful interior and shitty quality
You missed the point then.
I’d not chose my 420 over the 3 in a month of Sunday’s having driven both for a few months.
Not only will it cost us 1p a mile it is clean and silent.
The extra plastic and chrome inside the BMW isn’t worth that.
When I have the choice of which to use each day, it’s always the Tesla (with the wife wfh it’s most days!).
tldr: very excellent car, mister.
I went to the Solihull Tesla centre for my first Model 3 drive, and indeed first proper poke around a Model 3, having watched hours of videos on the bloody things and the competition.
It was a great experience all round. The covid booking process was really straightforward and I pretty much had my choice of slots, scheduled for an hour.
The fellow in the showroom as extremely accommodating. There are certain similarities to the church of Apple with the experience, but it was very positive. He showed me round the basic controls and how to set up the seating/mirrors/steering profiles, explained how the test drive would run - most of this was how to get out of the shopping centre car park for free - and that basically although they had programmed a route in the satnav I could go where I wanted in the time allowed.
I was the first to arrive for the 12pm slot so he gave me the choice of either the M3P or a LR with 18" wheels. Although I was very tempted to boot the Performance model around, I decided to go with the LR as that’s the exact config I’m interested in.
The interior quality was far higher than I was expecting. The seats seem extremely comfortable and everything was a lot plusher than the impression I got from videos. I was genuinely surprised by this. First impressions and all…
I found the handling to be excellent. I don’t put myself in the good driver bracket so I would never test the limits of what I felt was on offer. There was no sense of carrying lots of mass around, cornering was very flat and it seemed totally sure-footed in wet conditions on greasy roads.
The performance was quite honestly skull-fucking. God alone knows what the M3P must be like. From a standing start, or from any ‘in-gear’ speed it was just comical. My 330d is fairly perky, this was just mental.
The auto-wipers did just work. I know @SAP7 will love to be validated there. They should still have a switch for adjusting them, mind.
I did have one negative moment to call out. On the motorway, I had the traffic aware cruise control on and I did get an instance of the infamous “phantom braking” while passing a lorry in the middle lane. Apparently the current software is especially bad for it but it’s something that has plagued Tesla (more than other manufacturers) for years. They really need to sort that shit out, it is not cool. At all.
Then I had a moment that you could only describe as a Tesla plant, if you were of the tinfoil persuasion: I decided to go to Hopwood Park services on the M42 and sit in a Supercharger bay for a few minutes just so I could play about with the screen controls a bit.
There are 16 stalls and about 4/5 were in use. I had been there about 2 minutes when a fella in a shiny Taycan drove very slowly past me, then parked in one of the bays. Bit weird, I thought.
Then he gets out of the car, looks around a bit and walks over to the car. I lowered the window and he says “Are these only for Teslas then?”
“Yes mate”
“Oh right, I’m new to all this.”
The two Ecotricity chargers that you drive past to get to the Superchargers both had i-Paces in them, and I think a queue waiting to get on them. And they’re only 50kW.
So anyway, I’m pretty smitten with the car and If I order one I will just hope it doesn’t piss a load of water into the boot or have the doors hung on backwards, etc. The recently announced changes make the interior look even better and the thicker glass should cut down road noise even more, although I thought it was decently quiet at motorway speed anyhow.
By the way, I still fuckin’ hate the fanboys.
Yep, that works for me 
Nice. The charger issue, if it’s not resolved in a year, is the reason why I’ll be trying to persuade the wife that we should get a Tesla. And there is zero chance that it will be resolved.
Nice write-up though. Amazed at your comments on the interior, given the shit that has been written on here about that!
There does seem to be something in the argument that units coming from Europe are (much) better than the ones casually thrown together in the States.
It is of course unlikely that they will use a duct tape special as the main demonstrator.
I did say that the stuff I spout isn’t just fanboi confirmation.
They are good. They are build well. They drive lovely. And the speed really is a jaw drop moment the first (and for a while after) time you have a go.
It’s hard not to sound like a broken record when it’s just you against the world… but anyone in any doubt should park it and see for themselves. The internet can convince you of any preconceived view.
A test drive might change that.
The bottom line is I wouldn’t swap back if I could.
Money and price should be the only limiting factor in my opinion. Otherwise, go electric.
Most of the criticism I’ve seen has been around paint quality, panel alignment and lack of PDI. Interiors haven’t been the focus of too much ire, although until today I wouldn’t have said such a spartan interior could feel ‘luxurious’.