A Prepper's review of the Tesla Model Y

I got a Tesla so I could be off-grid. It was the most costly mistake I've ever made.

Background

My wife and I live completely off grid. We have an array of solar panels that feeds our house with electricity during the day, and charges out batteries for the night.

On a sunny day, halfway through the day our batteries are full, and then we have nowhere to put the extra electricity. Since we have no connection to the grid, we can’t resell the surplus, it just… disappears.

So the prepper in me thought - wouldn’t it be cool if I had an electric vehicle I could charge off grid? I’d save on gas, and if there were gas shortages or supply chain disruptions, we could still drive around and charge the vehicle ourselves.

While everyone else was stuck with empty gas tanks, we could be self-reliant. It’s a pretty cool idea… in theory.

My wife and I also talked about how FSD (full self-driving) would be a handy feature on long road trips. We could just engage that mode and have the car mostly drive us… or so we thought.

Fast forward a few months and I somewhat strong-armed my wife into getting a Tesla to replace her 20 year-old gasoline car.

Full self-driving mode

Day 1, it almost killed my wife in a near-wreck. She used FSD on a highway just to try it out, and within minutes the car started swerving wildly near a semi. She had to fight the car to regain control and ended up in the grass, barely avoiding a crash.

My wife calls me, in shock, and asks me to help drive it back - she’s not going to be able to keep driving it, it’s too scary. I drive it home, starting to feel a bit ambivalent about the whole thing.

Next week I decided to be brave and try out FSD myself. On a sunny day in ideal lighting conditions, it did a mediocre job of driving me around. I had to take over every 5 minutes or so, so not exactly self-driving, but it was an interesting technology, and in one case it managed to drive me entirely from one store to another without my assistance. I was starting to become a believer… until it drove me straight into an oncoming traffic lane later that day. Luckily there were no cars there and I was able to maneuver back into my lane. Perhaps it got confused by the way the lanes were split, but there was a clear sign right in the middle of the median. An issue I would have never had driving myself.

So within a week, we realized a 2025 Tesla with the latest hardware and software could not drive itself safely, not even remotely. All the hype was fake, and if you look it up you’ll find more people having accidents where FSD tries to kill their drivers. It also doesn’t work at night, or when it rains, or when it’s foggy. In fact, any time you drive it at night there’s a constant stream of distracting notifications telling you one or another camera is “blocked” when really it’s just dark outside.

You see, they don’t have radar or thermal imaging or any of the technologies you’d think a self-driving car would have. They rely entirely on cameras that see worse than people (a common complaint on Tesla forums) - not a good setup for success.

What’s the point of a self-driving feature that needs constant monitoring and intervention to use? We realized we were the beta testers that Tesla was using to collect data. Every FSD-induced crash was a valuable data point for them.

No thanks, I don’t want to be some mega-corporation’s data point.

Unfortunately, whistleblowers from Tesla have shown that these issues are common, and FSD often puts drivers and their passengers into dangerous situations, including crashing them into oncoming vehicles.

What about regular cruise control?

Unfortunately, even the simple cruise control feature is too “smart”. And by that I mean, it thinks it’s smart, but it’s actually pretty stupid. With cruise control engaged, on a perfectly clear road, I’ve had the Tesla randomly hit the brakes and then speed back up again, for no apparent reason. Perhaps a bug flew in front of one of its cameras and it freaked out? Another “feature” is that on curvy roads the cruise control will slow you down a bit to make it easier to take the turn, but the problem is it’ll only work half the time. So when it works, it’s actually pretty handy, but when it doesn’t work, you have to cancel out of cruise control and take over, and since it only works about 50% of the time, you end up never trusting it and always coming out of cruise control anyway.

Oh and the Tesla is constantly trying to break the speed limits. By default, if I turn on cruise control, it’ll go above the speed limit. It even says what the speed limit is, and then right next to it, the “max” cruise control speed is there, set way above it. Go figure. Maybe I’m the odd one out but I rarely speed more than a few miles over the speed limit, and this car was going uncomfortably fast in poor lighting conditions.

Off-grid living

A few days into owning the Tesla, I plug it in at home and charge the car up using just the power of the sun. I’m not going to lie, this was a magical moment. Perhaps the only magical moment with the Tesla; but for a second, I felt like I was part of the future. What if everyone had off-grid homes and EVs? We could all be self-reliant in terms of our transportation, and gas stations and exhaust fumes could be a thing of the past.

But, unfortunately, Teslas uses up about 1% of their battery life just… sitting around doing nothing. That translates to around 3 miles of range lost per day, even if you don’t drive the car or do anything with it. They also recommend you don’t charge it up past 80% except for long road trips, or you’ll wear out the battery prematurely. So if you do the math, a Tesla with 330 miles of advertised range only really has 264 miles of range if you follow the 80% charge limit recommendation, and losing 3 miles of range per day means that in less than 3 months of no charging your Tesla would be dead in the water.

This is without Sentry mode (video surveillance) on or any other such features. Turns out all the constant data transmission the car does even when “sleeping” has a significant parasitic drain on the battery.

I could leave my Toyota unattended for half a year, come back, and it would still function just fine. Eventually the battery would die and I’d have to jump start it, something you can easily do with any other car or a generator.

Meanwhile, Teslas cannot be jump started, and cannot jump start other vehicles.

What about off-road worthiness?

One night when coming home I suddenly hear this horrible grinding sound from what sounds like my tire. Luckily I was already on my driveway so I just hobbled to a halt and left it there to deal with it the next day.

Come morning, I conscripted my wife to look into what was causing the noise as I drive around at 3 mph around my driveway. Suddenly, the noise gets much worse and is now a shrill shriek. She identifies the wheel that seems to be the culprit, and I call Tesla roadside assistance.

I’m told it’s likely a small rock stuck in between the rotor and brake shield, and get directed to this self-help article on their website.

To me, this is a red flag. If you have a dedicated support article for getting gravel out of your brakes, something is wrong.

Half an hour later and I work the gravel out with a screwdriver and a crowbar, putting an end to the miserable screech. I go online and find forum threads full of people with this same issue. Apparently this is a design flaw in Teslas going back years that’s never been fixed.

Turns out, despite all the talk of AWD and off-road capability, the Tesla SUV can’t actually handle gravel roads. Whoops.

You know what else Teslas can’t handle? A flat tire. Teslas don’t come with spares, not even the crappy donut kind. If you have a flat tire, they expect you to call roadside assistance to help you out. Being a pepper, I bought an aftermarket spare tire, but without a dedicated spot to put it, it ends up taking up half the trunk space and we can’t realistically drive around with it while also doing basic shopping chores, so it just gets left at home anyway.

Both my wife and I have had flat tires and been able to change to our spare and continue with our day. But without a spare? You’d be screwed. And maybe that’s okay for a hipster living in a city 5 minutes away from help, but what if you’re in a rural area where the closest tire shop is 40 miles away? And what if it’s night time too? You might be stuck there until the next morning.

Also, just as a heads up, it turns out Teslas cannot be towed with two tires down. You can’t pull it behind an RV either. It has to have all 4 wheels off the road. The manual says that exceeding even 30 feet of movement in neutral could cause the motors to overheat and get damaged. Yeah…

Tesla’s so-called SUV can’t handle gravel roads, or flat tires. Not much of an SUV if you ask me.

Let’s talk about EMF

Probably our two biggest issues were privacy and EMF. The Tesla is constantly transmitting. I have an assortment of EMF meters I use to test any new device or appliance, and I can confirm, for instance, that if you put an iPhone into airplane mode and disable Bluetooth and WiFi, it really does stop transmitting.

But a Tesla? Well, there is no way to disable any of that. There’s no airplane mode, no Bluetooth off switch, and it has a cellphone modem that’s always on and always transmitting your location, telemetry, and likely video (despite what their sketchy privacy policy says). Teslas have something on the order of 18 antennas, so it’s kind of like sitting in a microwave. Imagine strapping 18 phones to your head every time you drive.

Also, the A/C magnetic fields are completely off the charts when you’re charging this thing, so I recommend putting some distance between you and any Teslas being charged. The EMF is worst in the second row, nearer the charger, which is also where you’d have your kids strapped into a car seat. We realized, a regular gas station stop which takes 5 minutes (and the kids stay strapped in the car) is infinitely more convenient than stopping at a supercharger, taking the kids out for half an hour due to the dangerously high EMF, and walking around the nearby store aimlessly waiting for your car to charge up. Anyone who’s had little kids knows how much of a difference 25 minutes makes. And what if they were asleep?

Overall, to me the EMF is a dealbreaker. I could maybe deal with that if it was just me and my wife and we really loved the car otherwise, but with little kids, there was no way I was going to put them into that vehicle for hours at a time. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information about EMF in Teslas online, so I had to find this out the hard way.

But at least it’s convenient, right?

Speaking of bluetooth - that’s how you get into the car. Your phone has to have bluetooth on, and when you’re near the car, it’s meant to sense that and automatically unlock the doors when you pull on the handle. It works, about 80% of the time. 20% of the time you have to pull out your phone, go into the app, refresh, and then it can detect you. Sometimes you have to kill the app and restart it. The walk-away lock is similarly unreliable. Sometimes it locks the car when you get 10ft away from it, sometimes 30ft away, sometimes you look back and wait, wondering if the car will ever lock, and then end up pulling out your phone, opening the Tesla app, and tapping the “lock” button.

On the other hand, sometimes it overreacts. For instance, yesterday when I unlocked the frunk (that’s a front trunk, something EVs have since they have no traditional engine), standing right in front of the vehicle, it immediately locked the car. Why? Why would you assume that someone using the frunk would want to lock the car at that moment? It makes no sense.

Meanwhile, my Toyota is 100% reliable. I walk up to it, it senses the key fob in my pocket, and when I pull on the handle it unlocks. When I push the button on the handle, it locks. No bluetooth required, no charged phone, no app. It just works, and with way less EMF, if you care about that sort of thing.

Another ding on the convenience front: Teslas lack a lot of traditional buttons found on normal cars. For instance, there’s no lock or unlock button on the doors, so the only way to lock it is via the phone app or the giant screen. That means the usual trick of opening the door, locking it, and then closing it behind you as you walk away is simply not available. Teslas advertise convenience and ease of use, but in reality, they’ve removed so many features that regular cars have, and replaced them with buggy software-enabled versions, that the car is actually far more inconvenient to use in regular life than a regular vehicle.

Speaking of missing features - Teslas have no sunglasses holders! A basic feature that even cheap early 2000s cars have, a Tesla doesn’t have.

But hey, at least I can unlock my frunk from the bathroom using the app!

What about the privacy issues?

Finally, we have to address the privacy issues. Teslas have an internal microphone and camera that is constantly pointing at you, the driver. In addition to the array of a dozen or so external cameras and microphones that can see and hear everything outside the car, they can also listen in on any conversations you have inside the car. Say goodbye to having a private conversation with your spouse or kids.

And there’s no way to switch these off, nor is there a way to disconnect the Tesla from cell towers. It’s always on, always listening, always recording, and we have to simply hope that Tesla isn’t collecting and abusing all that information - which, it turns out, they are. A Tesla whistleblower has revealed that employees routinely share sensitive videos of people using their Teslas, including videos of naked people, children being hit by cars, etc.

So yeah, Tesla is a scummy company harvesting your videos and mis-using them, and all their privacy policies are worthless. They’re just another big tech company, masquerading as a vehicle manufacturer. They probably make more money off your data than the cars they sell to you, and that makes Elon “freedom of speech” Musk a complete clown of a hypocrite.

But if you go on Tesla forums to try to find solutions to the privacy or EMF issues, you’ll just hear from tons of abusive trolls. What I’ve learned is that the demographic of people who drive Teslas don’t care about privacy, EMF as it pertains to health, or preparedness, even for basic issues like flat tires.

Tesla’s Customer Support sucks

Before I forget - Tesla’s horrendous, mostly non-existent customer support deserves a mention. Do a search and you’ll see endless forum threads of people complaining about it. It was extremely hard for me to reach anybody at Tesla. They literally don’t have a regular phone number you can call. All you can do is make a support request via your phone (but there’s no way to call anybody, they call you, if you’re lucky). You can also call a Tesla store, but only the sales line. They care about making sales, but not supporting their product, so the only way I was able to talk to a human was to talk to the sales team and try to get their help. (Spoiler: they weren’t very helpful.)

TLDR; we’re selling the Tesla

At this point we’ve decided we’re done and we’re just going to sell the car. Of course, Tesla no longer has a return policy, so we start trying to sell it, and to our dismay discover that unlike Toyotas that have been so reliable for us, Teslas has no resale value. They drop like a rock. My Toyota is more expensive now with several years and thousands of miles on it than it was when I first bought it. A brand new Tesla with <500 miles? Not worth even 80% of what we spent on it.

Maybe if Elon spent more time making cars and less time trolling people on Twitter they’d have figured out how to make a car that works by now. Alas, perhaps you can learn from our costly mistake.

So yes, the cool thing is we can charge our Tesla at home with our solar, off-grid. But is that worth everything else that’s wrong with the car? No, no it isn’t. We’re selling it.