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Tesla Model YL impressed the heck out of me! I’ve seen all the reviews and noticed many of the same things, so I won’t repeat what others have said, but I want to highlight stuff I haven’t seen many/any people talk about!
TL;DR: passenger space is plentiful and not an issue, best model Tesla sells. Game changer for families.
Passenger space/comfort
I am 6’2 and can comfortably fit in all 3 rows even when adjusting them all to fit me-sized humans! Leg room is 100% not an issue. The only catch is 3rd row headroom. In a proper seating position, my head hit the glass. However, another guy who was 6’0 sat back there and was totally fine, so torso length matters! Even for me, a lil slouch or scooting my butt forward and it was totally fine. 6 adults can easily and comfortably fit in YL for sure. The thigh supports in the front row do absolutely nothing for anyone taller than probably 5’8. Very underwhelming. The captain’s chairs recline REALLY far, almost laying down, combined with the heated AND air conditioned seats and the first two rows are positively luxurious. Arm rests are also great and very sturdy. They come up high enough to still be comfy even for a tall guy like me. Tons of rear vents, air flow was really good and consistent throughout.
Trunk space
The sub-trunk cover magnetically attaching to the 3rd row seat-back is a great way to claw back some of the lost space when the 3rd row is up. Makes it very usable. Also, people have criticized the bump when the 3rd row is down, but there’s a pair of little folding arms (4th pic) that pops up and makes it totally flat. Great design!
Head rests
They are adjustable up and down via a mechanical button that you press and hold and just lift/lower the headrest by hand. (3rd video) Pretty decent amount of travel, and a huge improvement! These are on the 1st row AND the captain’s chairs!
Camping
I had a quick chance to fold all the seats down and climb in on my belly and close the trunk, and this is a huge improvement over the normal Y. I had TONS of room, my toes weren’t touching the trunk and my head wasn’t touching the front seat, not even close! And that was without moving the front seats at all! I sleep in our 2023 Y all the time and it’s great, but it’s only barely enough room and only with the front seats allllll the way forward. Also, the 4 extra vents in the rear cabin will be huge for air flow, which is somewhat of a problem in other Ys.
Zen Grey Interior
I’m a big proponent of Tesla’s white interior, and I like the Zen Grey! Definitely not stark white, but it’s still very light and looks phenomenal. Doesn’t look dingy at all. If you’re a white interior enthusiast like me, you’ll love Zen Grey too.
General observations
The showroom was PACKED with people and everyone was there for YL! I talked to a lot of people and let me tell you, families are super excited about YL! It was fun to watch everyone’s reaction as they climbed in the 3rd row and were shocked how usable it is. – at Tysons Corner, VA
Robotaxi on military bases will be a huge game-changer. Currently, service members usually have to walk off-base to get ride share since very few drivers have base access. This is a big problem because many residents of a base are there temporarily and don’t have a car. Being able to hail a Robotaxi would be huge.
Austin 🇺🇸 retweeted
If you pay $35k for a vehicle and it doesn’t drive itself you have failed the iq test and put your family at risk.
Why is it so hard to roll over retirement accounts between major financial institutions? This should be all online and simple but they make you jump through so many obscure hoops and mail you a PHYSICAL CHECK, wtf?
This is exactly why Tesla needs to simply raise vehicle prices across the board and include FSD as standard.
re: airbnb discourse
in college I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse. we had a few different steak sauces that were made from scratch daily. they were expensive to make, and less than half of the customers that ordered steak wanted sauce, so the restaurant charged $3 for it
we got complaints constantly. just at my own tables, half a dozen times a week I'd get complaints about being "nickel and dimed" for $3 of sauce on a $70 steak. a few times a month someone would mention it in an angry online review, or ask to speak to a manager and demand that it be removed from the bill because "who the hell charges for condiments?"
after several years of this, finally management had enough. they raised the price of every steak by $3, and now complimentary sauce was included with each steak on request. want to hazard a guess about how many customers complained about the $3 price increase on steak? essentially zero.
it was great, from the restaurants perspective! no more complaints, and instead of making $3 on 40% of steak orderers, they made $3 on all of them. and the customers were much happier, despite this deal being absolutely, unequivocally worse for them.
consumers are not rational agents from microeconomics textbooks. very often the *feeling* of what they're being charged for matters way more than the absolute value of what they're being charged. I think that's more or less what happening with airbnb. people don't want to be charged a cleaning fee and then also told they have to clean, even if in the counterfactual world the additional cleaning fee is more than they'd be willing to pay someone to do the required cleaning. a $100 cleaning fee *feels* better than a $50 cleaning fee + "load the dishwasher and take the trash out to the dumpster", even though most people would not pay $50 to not have to do that.
What are the odds there’s any technical/legal reason for this shape? Surely 0. This signals to me that Tesla could make the geofence as big and in whatever shape they want and at any time. Their own caution is likely their biggest limiter, especially with cybercab production ramping.
While at our local Apple Store I heard the employees begrudgingly telling numerous people who wanted to buy a Duo on the spot that they weren’t available, and that their “best bet is to place an order online and wait”
Taking photos with iPhone duo while it’s unfolded is incredibly disorienting. On a normal iPhone, holding it so the longest side is left-right makes it landscape. On the duo, you hold it up-down. VERY weird
Kudos to Ford for including an (albeit low-power) 120V outlet in the new Mach-E! Every EV should have 1+… looking at you TESLA! How are we in a world where the mustang mach-E of all things is better than a Model Y in even a single way? 😭
There's a new horse on the trail.
The 2027 Mustang Mach-E Trail brings the rugged looks and capability of the Rally trim to a more affordable price point.
Also new for the 2027 model year:
👍🏼 Mustang Mach-E lineup starts at $39,995 for Select RWD before destination and delivery.
🔋 For the first time, an extended-range battery is standard across the entire 2027 Mustang Mach-E lineup.
🔌 400W Pro Power Onboard is standard on Mustang Mach-E Trail and available on Premium and GT models.
@Ford
When Rivian’s FSD competitor ships, 2 things will both be true:
1. It won’t be as refined/capable as FSD out of the gate.
2. It will be a massive improvement for Rivian and a giant leap in consumers having more options if they value point to point software.
Tesla Stans will need to recognize 2, and Rivian Stans will need to recognize 1. And eventually, hopefully, it WILL be as good as FSD!
I’m very satisfied with V14 Lite right now on our legacy Y, but I’m not emotionally prepared for when unsupervised starts rolling out on HW4 cars. My yearning for a YL will reach all-time highs, but I must keep my resolve until they improve the battery.
Tesla's subscription take rate and usage among subscribers continues to climb! Approximate 1 in 6 Teslas on the road are subscribed to (or own) FSD, and of those people, FSD is driving >2/3 of their miles! Worth noting that even though the sub rate looks pretty flat, it was growing at <100k/qtr all the way through Q4 2025 but has grown at >200k/qtr in Q2 and Q3 this year! Put another way, in the same time that the fleet has grown by 40%, the number of FSD owners/subscribers has more than DOUBLED having grown 117%!
So many thoughts, but first and foremost I appreciate the lengths Kyle (& friends) go to be fair and unbiased while still letting their own preferences show. Hard line to walk but I think they do it better than anyone.
My others thoughts, in no particular order:
-I consider Kyle a huge Rivian fan, he even said maybe his single favorite brand to work with. Which makes his disappointment in the R2 hit even harder. Kind of a shame that an otherwise-great vehicle is so hampered by relatively poor range.
-BMW really cooked on their whole battery system. That kind of capacity and charging at that price point is crazy. Reasonably efficient too, I’m very excited to see a 10% challenge, I suspect it’ll be number 1 or 2.
-It’s funny to see them kinda struggle to review the YL because, like its own shape, it’s kinda perfectly rounded, which is great in a lot of ways but also makes it somewhat uninteresting. I think it’s telling that even the 2 who picked the BMW kinda acknowledged that for the average person you just can’t beat Tesla, and Kyle said it perfectly when he semi-joked that “if you put a normal person in the BMW you’re gonna be getting tech support calls asking where the heck to charge this thing” and we as enthusiasts have to remember that’s where most people still are.
Regarding Kyle’s biases (or lack thereof) I think of him like Schrödinger’s Shill: depending on which 10s clip you watch in any given video he could be considered a shill for literally any automaker, but then you watch the whole thing and realize he’s just not shy about sharing positive thoughts about ANY brand, negative ones too!
Pleased to report that V14.3 Lite is excellent and can now handle 2 specific edge case maneuvers that 14.1 couldn’t. Really really good. So good I can’t help but wonder when attention monitoring will start getting turned off in certain conditions, because it feels like it’s ready
Having graduated college right before AI is wild because it wasn’t that long ago that it required a TON of work (research, collaboration, trial and error, etc) to write code that would maybe do most of its intended functions as an assignment. Thinking back, every single file I ever wrote could probably be one-shotted by Opus 5.5 in <10mins. So many hours of hand-wringing that, were I doing it now with AI instead of 7 years ago by hand, would be trivial.
Austin 🇺🇸 retweeted
You found it. 🍌
The banana at the Next Gen Roadster reveal wasn't an accident. It was an analog stopwatch.
A laser triggered the drop the instant the tires started to roll. We hung it at exactly the car's 0-60 time at the time of 1 second.
Banana hits the ground. Car hits the laser wall. Same frame.
Here's how we did it 🧵
The new Tesla Roadster is (allegedly) going to charge like a monster as I showed below. However, it's also a multi-hundred-thousand dollar vehicle with a bespoke 4680 that would be too expensive to put in a consumer vehicle. But what if we found a middle ground: a pack that has the same curve but constrained to 400V. That's what we have below, and it would increase the energy onboarded to a LR Model Y in 15 mins by nearly 50% compared to now. Based on the existing 10% challenge result of 3.16mi/kWh, this new battery could allow the Model Y to be the FIRST vehicle to break 200mi.
Roadster charge curve (estimate)! We know the following:
-Battery = 115kWh
-Charges 15-80% in 10 minutes
-Estimated total range of 310mi
Based on that, we can reverse-engineer the charge curve! Model Y premium RWD real-world curve included for reference. If true, this would be the first 4680 that doesn't suck, on a car that sucks more than any other! 😉
