It’s been quite a while since I blogged about one of these, but in the time I’ve been away I’ve continued to open a Star WarsLego Advent Calendar each year. I’ve only added the first week, but I’ll be sure to update this once I’ve opened the other. You can relive the previous ones here if you’d like!
One thing that has changed over the years is my preference for figures over models. I was always a little disappointed with a mini figure over a model, especially a classic starship, like an X-Wing, TIE or Millenium Falcon! So far this year, there haven’t been many figures, although the models have all been great, with only one I didn’t recognise so far. It’s an artefact from the Lego Star Wars games.
Here’s the finished calendar and one of my daughter’s Lego Harry Potter calendars!
I started this last month, but I’d already blogged twice at that point and had another one drafted (which I’ve since published), so why had I started another? Are blogs like buses? Well, not this blog, which is about a different form of transport: the good old bicycle, or in this specific case a Swytch eBicycle!
I blogged about cycling here when I purchased a new one in 2017, and while I did get out cycling more than I had, it never became a regular thing. For the past few years, I’ve only been out with my daughter, and I tend to go out on my older Dawes 401, which is more comfortable and better suited for cycling along canal paths.
My Boardman Road Team Carbon has been unused for the last two years, and I can’t remember where exactly the idea of turning it into an eBike came from. I signed up on the Swytch website earlier this year to order one of their new Go eBike Kits. It has been a pretty strange process, and I’m still not entirely sure it’s one I would recommend, so let me try to explain why.
While I think you can go online and buy some of the Swytch kits (from the likes of Amazon and eBay), you can’t do that from their website. If you want to buy a kit directly from Swytch, you have to register your interest and, in return, are offered fairly substantial discounts when it comes to ordering. I don’t know how realistic the discounts are, but I was reasonably happy with my price compared to similar eBike kits from UK sellers. If you look further afield, there are many options, but I wanted to buy from a UK-based company, for which I’d have some comeback if I had any problems.
I can’t remember exactly when I signed up, but it was the 12th of August when I received an e-mail to say I could place my order. I got to select which kit I wanted and had to pay a deposit of £200, and I was told the final configuration and order process would be completed later. Quite unusual, but it all had been so far. I reached out to Swytch at this point and asked about the compatibility of my Boardman Road Team Carbon. They said it was, with a typical asterixed cavitate *Please note that our technicians have done their best to identify your bike’s compatibility based on the data provided. We believe the Kit will fit, but we cannot guarantee this in all instances.
About a week later, I received further details and a deadline to complete the order process and select any accessories required. I did a little more research as the process isn’t that obvious, and I thought I needed a Universal Pedal Sensor and a Universal Torque Arm, as the forks on my bike are carbon. I didn’t have an option to change the display from LED to OLED, although even if I had, I might not have selected this given the price was now over my £500 budget, including the £30 delivery.
My order was locked on the 25th of August, but shortly after reading more reviews, I contacted Swytch about changing my order to include the OLED display instead of the LED one. The OLED provides additional information about speed and distance, and most reviews suggest getting this over the basis LED option. This was the point where my first concerns were raised. It took several days for their e-mail reply, and it wasn’t all that helpful, suggesting that as my order was locked, any changes would delay delivery from September to October. I said this was fine, and then they suggested I would need to add the OLED display for £60 when I just wanted that instead of the LED one, which was £30 in their accessory store (most of which are out of stock)
I was close to cancelling my order entirely when they eventually reopened my order and allowed me to edit the kit I had selected. I expected this to cost a further £30, but the Go+ Kit with OLED was £40 cheaper than the kit I ordered! I asked them about a refund, which was processed quickly, so I felt reasonably happy by the end of the process and waited for October to arrive. In the meantime, I’d been reading many reviews. I joined a few Swytch forums, full of horror stories from people confirming orders and then waiting several months for kits to be delivered, with estimated days being pushed back month after month. I contacted them once again at the beginning of October to express my concerns but was assured that my order would be delivered in October, and to be fair to them, it was.
I received a confirmation from UPS on the 16th of October saying it would be delivered the next day, but I was going to be out all day, so I rescheduled for the 18th. It arrived in the morning, but I didn’t have time to look at anything until Sunday, the 20th, when I foolishly started by removing the tire and innertube from my Team Carbon and fitting them to the Swytch wheel. It was pretty straightforward, but it would be removed as events progressed.
If you stumble upon this blog and take anything away, be it this. Don’t always start with the first step in the instructions! In hindsight, I should have checked out some of the other steps first, specifically whether the Universal Pedal Sensor (UPS) would work with my bike. The UPS (not the ones who delivered it!) has two parts – a round disc with small magnets around the edge that attaches to the pedal and rotates as you pedal, and a sensor connected to a clip that attaches to the frame in a way which aligns to the round disc. There was no way this was possible on my bike, and even following the suggestion to remove the clip (this is molded so that it would have needed cutting), it did not seem there was any clearance between the pedal and either the down tube or seat tube to attach the sensor, and for it to be aligned with the disc.
I was pretty disappointed at this point and was unsure what to do. I considered returning the whole kit, but I still like the idea of electrifying a regular bike. Returning it would also result in a loss of £60 as their terms state delivery costs are not refunded, which I guess is fair enough. It looked like the kit would have fitted onto my Dawes bike, but I didn’t want to electrify that as that’s what I use when going out with my daughter. A few people in the FaceBook group (Swytch Bike Chat) suggested buying a second-hand bike to use, implying I’d be ruining a carbon road bike, so I had a quick look on Gumtree and, to my delight, found a second-hand Boardman Sport for sale just 10 miles away for £100. It was exactly the same bike that a friend now used on their turbo trainer after upgrading themselves, so I gave them a call and asked if I could pop around to check if the UPS would fit. There is much more clearance on this Boardman, and it was apparent it could be made to fit without any modifications to the sensor, so I contacted the seller on Gumtree and collected it that afternoon.
The bike was in excellent condition and had a new set of tires fitted, too! The bar tape and seat are white, which is not ideal as they both looked pretty old and grubby, but they are easy to replace. Installing the Swytch kit was very simple on this Boardman, although the tires were much more difficult to remove and refit. I’ve not finished the installation, as I ordered some new black bar tape, so I haven’t installed the OLED display or tidied up the cabling, but I took it for a bit of spin once everything was cable-tied out of the way and it makes a nice difference going up the pretty steep hills where I live.
Somewhere in the process, I broke one of the lugs on the locking wheel washer, so I contacted Swytch, who sent out a replacement set within just a few days. I also contacted them about the Torque Arm, which I couldn’t see how to install, and their instructions are not great. The response directed me to the manual, so I went back to them and asked them to send this back as it’s not required now. I’m not using the bike initially intended. A refund for that will help offset the cost of the ‘new’ bike, although I might end up selling the Team Carbon, which might just cover the cost of the Boardman Sport, Swytch Kit, and accessories! It took several unhelpful e-mails, some days apart and some responded to in a matter of hours, to finally get the return approved, which pretty much sums up Swytch.
I will add some pictures once everything is finished, but I think that’s enough of my Swytch story. Would you recommend them after all that?
Page 1 I’ve been an Amazon kindle fan for quite a while now and have just upgraded a kindle Voyager to a kindle Scribe. I thought it might be interesting to test out the note taking abilities of the Scribe by writing this blog on the kindle scribe itself, and testing how it converts my terrible handwriting to text and PDF! This blog might look a bit different as I’m not quite sure how to demonstrate that yet… Lets start with a kindle history lesson. I wasn’t really an early adopter with this, as the first kindle was launched in 2007 and the first one I aned was a kindle keyboard which wasn’t released until 2010. That was a 3rd generation device, which is similar to my adoption of the iPhone which stall at the 30S model!
Page 2 like the iPhone, he had a ite a few bundle’s since that first 3rd gen kindle keyboard, and the old ones other get handed down to family members, i. e. an excuse to upgrade! The bundle keybard was upgraded to a land Touch in 2012 and that will a handle Voyage in 2015, the 7th Gen. I’ve actually been using that voyage for quite some time, as that’s what my new handle Scribe has replaced. Its replaced the bundle Paper white 3rd italian or 10th gon device my partner was using( I think the Voyage is better even though it was slightly ever) and we have a Paper while 5K generation that my daughter uses with a handle Unlimited subscription. So why did I buy the Scribe? Good question!
Page 3 I quite liked the idea when it first came out in 2022, Lt it was quite expensive and I caldit justly spending almost £400 on a handle. for context, the lenddle voyage had been the most expensive one at abut £160( the Paper whites were ball and £80 and the keyboard perhaps £ too at the time). The scribe was an offer for £279, but I discard Amazon do a trade in offer where they give you a small gift card in exchange for an old device AND 20% off a new one. With ball applied to the already discounted price, I pided up a 320 Scribe with Premium Pen for £213.99! A bargain i’m sure you’ll agree? But hats sill more than any of the other handles. What makes the Scribe so special? More great auctions! The clue is in the name. The Scribe is the first binder hat allows you to write or scribe on the
Page 4 device, so comes with a pen and is almost twice as big as the Voyage or Paper white. Ya can mask up PDF files and some e Pub bodes, but the main reason I bought it was to make notes in meetings and then convert them to text or searchable PDF tiles. Now if you made it this for you will have seen how bad my handwriting is! I’ve had other devices that promised to do this, and never rally waled that well. Possibly dan to my illegible unting, but also down to the technology working too well. I’ll let you decide how well this works. I still don’t know as I need to send this to my Mac and see how its done. I’ll finish up oer Here once I’ve assessed the results…
So, how did it do? Let me try to explain what I’ve done. On the Kindle Scribe, you can choose to share a notebook and then have options to Convert it to text and quickly send it to an e-mail address. That’s what I did, which sends an e-mail with two links. One downloads a text file, which is the unadulterated text blocks at the beginning of this blog. The second link downloads a searchable PDF file, which is shown above. I also added the picture gallery with the 5 Kindle devices I’ve owned to break things up, and a hyperlink to an iPhone blog!
I know my handwriting is terrible, and I’ve even used the fountain pen option on the Scribe, which makes it look a little better. You can select Felt tips and pencils with various degrees of thickness and pressure sensitivity, but so far, I quite like the fountain pen effect. There are options for highlighting (which you can do using the premium pen user configurable button) and deleting (the premium pen also has an eraser on the end). You can also lasso blocks, move things around, or copy and paste between notebooks.
But what about the conversion to text? Well, you can see for yourself it’s far from perfect, but it wouldn’t take too much effort to correct and spell check, as it’s broadly captured what I tried to write. The search facility in the PDF file is also remarkably good. I think it’s done a better job than the Livescribe 3 Smartpen I bought back in 2013. That was quite a fat ballpoint pen that wrote onto specific notebooks with small dots tracking the writing. The pen transferred these to an App, which allowed you to convert them to text, although I never really got on with it, and the conversion to text wasn’t anywhere near as good. If I did this professionally, I’m sure I’d be recreating the text again using the Livescribe pen for a side-by-side comparison, but I’m not!
The other thing I’ve not mentioned is the Kindle bit of the Scribe! It has a much bigger 10″ screen, so reading eBooks is much nicer than any of the previous Kindle devices. It is still missing the page-turn buttons the original Keyboard device had, which Voyage tried to replace with haptic ones, but so far, I’ve not missed them too much as there’s less page-turning, and tapping the side of the bigger screen feels quite responsive.
So, would I recommend a Kindle Scribe? For £213.99, absolutely. It’s probably worth that as an upgrade over a standard Kindle device, but adding the note-taking functionality makes it a no-brainer! I would be more difficult at the RRP, so you’d probably need to consider the competition. They are generally more expensive but better as a note taker or Reader, but from all the reviews I’ve seen, the Kindle probably does the best job of both, and when it’s almost half the RRP, it is excellent value for money.
ps: I corrected the text I typed below the PDF file. I hope you noticed the difference 😉
Right, this is going to be a long one, so buckle in for the ride! I’m going to try to blog over the next couple of weeks while we travel from Scotland to Austria, stopping at some interesting places along the way.
Before we begin, a few updates related to previous posts are probably worth mentioning. We now own Lexee! What do I hear most of you say? Lexee is the name of our Tesla Model 3 Long Range, which we leased from Lex Autolease in 2021. The lease expired last month, and we could buy her, which we did. She will be transporting us from Scotland down to London for a day at Wimbledon to watch some tennis and then down to Dover before catching the ferry across to Calais. From there we plan to travel through France, Belgium and Germany to Austria, specifically Salzberg to explore some of the places where The Sound of Music was filmed, before heading back through Switzerland (possibly), Luxumberg and France, to catch the ferry back to Dover and then drive home to Scotland. If that sounds like a long way, it is! About a 2000 mile round trip, so a good test of the car and passengers.
They will be me, my partner of 22 years and our 11 (soon to be 12) year-old daughter. No dog for this trip, who will be enjoying her holiday staying with family at Culzean Castle. So that’s about it. We’ll be leaving for London on the 5th of July, and I’ll blog where I can along the way, hopefully with some interesting stories, pictures, and videos from my new drone. Wish us luck and enjoy the adventure…
In Bruges
So, we’ve already made it to Belgium, and this is the first time I’ve found some time to provide an update on our adventure. Perhaps the blog won’t be as EPIC as the road trip!
The drive down south was fairly uneventful, although I think I’m getting too old to drive between the Scottish and English capitals! We stopped at Tebay Services on the M6 for lunch and electricity before continuing south. Lexee suggested another stop at Keele Services, but by the time we got there, nobody needed to stop, so we thought we’d crack on. P came up with the great idea of stopping in Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare and found a charger at the Morrisons for Lexee. We grabbed some supplies and plugged in the car before wandering into Stratford, where we took a few photos and headed back as the heavens opened. Not the first time we’d get wet on this holiday 🌧️
The Premier Inn at Wimbledon was fine, and we found an on-street charger to plug in Lexee. It wasn’t clear if it was for residents only, but we thought we were okay while the car was charging, and I slowed things down to make it longer than required. At 5:20 the next morning, I got up and walked to the All England Lawn Tennis Association, aka Wimbledon, to join The Queue. I probably need to write a separate blog about the whole experience, but needless to say, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’d hoped to get a ground ticket before 11 am and then head back to the hotel to check out with P & K before finding somewhere to park and enjoy the tennis. I was still in a very long queue by 11:20 when P & K found me to switch places so I could check out and sort the car before joining them back at the tennis. It had been a long 5 hours and I was almost ready to go back and watch films in Lexee, but they managed to get a ticket fairly shortly after I’d left (about another 90 minutes). By then, I’d checked out of the hotel, packed Lexee, who hadn’t gotten a parking ticket and found somewhere to park for the rest of the day. I returned to Wimbledon and enjoyed some tennis and football before driving down to Dover for a night in the Travelodge before our early morning ferry to Calais.
We stopped in Dunkirk en route to Bruges, checking into the Radisson Blu just after 3 pm. We were all pretty exhausted and needed a rest before exploring. Still, the hotel was a big improvement from the previous one and was cheaper to boot, so we called reception and extended our stay for an extra night, giving us a full day to explore Brussels before heading to Brussels. We headed in for some dinner and caught the end of Belgium’s largest flea market before enjoying some food and drinks at Heavenly Pizza after a short walk around the tall spires in Bruges. The next day, we returned for a waffle breakfast before a short boat trip along the canals. We headed back to the hotel for lunch and to recharge our batteries (Lexee had been topped up again the day before in the car park under the hotel!) before a final walk into Bruges for dinner at the Frites Bar.
We’d struggled to find a reasonably priced hotel in Brussels for the following day, so we booked something a little outside. We plan to visit the Atomium on our way in and then drive into the centre for a few hours. I’ve registered Lexee so she can drive in the ULEZ, and we’ll head out to the hotel after a brief visit. There are no plans beyond that, but I will provide another update. This blog might look messy as I’ve typed this on my phone using the Jetpack App! It wouldn’t let me edit the Divi blog I’d started the blog with, so I copied and pasted that into here. I’ll sort it out when I have more time to fire up the laptop. I’m sure I’ll have some spelling to fix and can add links and pictures, too!
Charging across Europe
I’m still on the Jetpack App, so excuse the spelling mistakes 😂 We’ve now reached Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany 🇩🇪 having passed very briefly through the Netherlands 🇳🇱 stopping for some lunch in Maastricht. Tomorrow, we are planning to make it to Salzburg in Austria 🇦🇹 where we will be staying for 3 nights. It will give us a chance to relax a little from the EPIC road trip.
Not having a plan does offer lots of flexibility. Still, you also tend to spend a fair amount of downtime planning the next day or two, including driving, accommodation and fuelling the body. Luckily, we haven’t had to give too much thought to charging Lexee, which I was referring to in my ‘Charging across Europe’ heading!
I was a little worried about how things might work across Europe, having not tried it before and knowing that the UK isn’t as easy to navigate as North America, which we’d done on a road trip around New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto, Montreal and Boston last year. I needn’t have been as we’ve been fortunate enough to find destination chargers at most of the places we’ve stopped for the night, and there’s been plenty of Tesla Superchargers and other destination charges en route. We’ve not needed to go out of our way once, and the only real challenge has been the multitude of new Apps I’ve needed to install, accounts to create and payments to make. Some of them have been toward the prices I’d normally drive away from in the UK, but the approach has been to charge to full when we can overnight and start each day at 💯%
The Tesla chargers have all been super fast (some pushing the 250kWh max), the cheapest (around €0.33 or £0.28) and easiest to use (connect and you’re off). The destination chargers have been a bit more complicated, more often than not requiring an app to be downloaded and an account created to use. Some just require payment on a webpage, and some use Apple Pay, which is probably the easiest. There was only one that wouldn’t work with either method (after frustratingly downloading the app and creating an account), but the hotel had an RFID card that could be used instead. That was also the most expensive, almost competing with gasoline ⛽️, at €0.71! I’m sure we’d have found a Tesla charger, but the convenience of starting the day with a full tank’ was worth the extra cost and was probably only about £7-8 in the context of a £?000 trip!
I’ll try to pull together some more detailed stats once we’ve made it back home. I have a Teslamate account connected to Lexee, which tracks her every move, and a Grafana Docker container where I can access lots of wonderful information about trips, charging, costs, efficiency, etc. When I eventually get some time with a laptop rather than a mobile phone, I’ll add some screenshots with some details.
Anyway, that will do for now. We’re about to go and eat at a traditional German restaurant, which I’m not sure my Daughter will approve. Still, we had takeaway pizza last night while watching the Netherlands v England EURO2024 semi-final, as my partner wasn’t feeling too good. It’s great to see lots of the world on a road trip, but it does take it out of you! A new country for all of us tomorrow, though, and a few days in the same place, so we should get some time to relax a little….
Drone home…
I’m writing this from the Hotel Castel Jeanson in France on my laptop after trying to tidy up the previous blocks! I’m not sure how well I’ve done. Since the last update, we’ve visited a few castles in Germany and many sights from the Sound of Music in and around Salzburg. I’m going to post some pictures to a gallery below and some drone footage I’ve taken in a few places, which I’ve uploaded to YouTube.
I was quite surprised at how many places specifically ban the use of drones, outside of the usual restrictions for using drone assist. I can understand why, but we’ve visited some spectacular places which can’t be fully appreciated from the ground. Anyway, I might provide a more detailed update should I find time before we arrive home, but for now, it was a quick update to fix things and add some pictures and video!
There’s no place like home.
We made it home last night after 2890 miles through 6 countries using almost 900kWh of electricity. Lexee did us proud and never missed a beat. We all need another holiday and have agreed to leave the next road tips for at least 2-3 years! It was a great adventure, but at times, it didn’t feel like much of a holiday moving between so many hotels. I was going to try to wrap this blog up with a detailed analysis of our EV charging, but I think I’ll save that for another blog. My Teslamate service has all of the data, with the Trip summary shown below. I need an updated credit card statement to double-check the conversions from € to £, so watch out for that in the coming months. I might also provide a bit more detail about the places we stayed, but for now, our EPIC trip has ended!
Well, so much for blogging every month! I’m only a few days late, but there’s still no blog for May. Part of the problem was knowing what to blog about, as I was all out of ideas. At least, I was until I took my new drone out for a test flight over the weekend. Then, I remembered I’d blogged about another new drone some years ago.
I’ve always loved playing around with remote-controlled things (search ‘remote’ if you want to find out more about them), and I bought my first outdoor drone back in 2019. My sister had bought me a tiny indoor drone as a birthday present, and I bought myself a Millennium Falcon drone, which again was more of an indoor toy. I didn’t want to spend too much money, so I ended up with a MJX Bugs 4W drone, which I blogged about here, and used it quite a bit for about 6 months.
Toward the end of 2019, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) introduced the Drone and Model Aircraft Code, which pretty much changed the game regarding flying Drones in the UK. Anything other than a ‘toy’ drone required the user to have an Operator ID, which was pretty straightforward to apply online, although it requires annual renewal for a small fee. Anything over 250g also requires a Flyer ID, which is an online test to ensure you are familiar with and understand the Code.
At the time, I obtained both, which wasn’t all that difficult, but the rules and regulations about when and where you can fly a drone over 250g (the Bugs 4W was over 600g) were quite restrictive. I flew it a little during lockdown in 2020-21, but for the last few years, it has been in the carry case and not flown.
I watched a Captain Drone YouTube video last month, something I’d not done for a while, and he was reviewing a Holy Stone HS900 drone, which is under 250g and has a 4K camera, for around $250. I followed the Amazon link, and I could get one the next day for £219, so I was far too easily seduced and clicked the buy-now button! When it arrived the next day, I realised I’d actually bought an HS 720, which is an older model and not quite as good as the HS900 reviewed. It never made it out of the box, and I was straight back on Amazon looking for other options when I came across the DJI Mini 4K. This was £50 more expensive, but with the DJI pedigree and comes with a claimed 10k range (I’d never fly it that far!) and a 4K camera with 3-axis gimble. I ordered it and returned the HS 720, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to take it out for a test flight.
That happened at the weekend after dropping my daughter at Guide Camp and taking my dog for a walk. It happened to be where I’d filmed the original Bugs drone all those years ago. I’m sure you can tell; the footage is in a completely different league, and I’m sure I’ll be taking this little drone out much more frequently. In fact, I’m hoping to get it out next weekend around Linlithgow Palace and the newly refurbished St Michael Church spire.
I was hoping to post the video footage here, but I need to investigate some WordPress settings. Even scaled down to 720p, I’ve not been able to upload to my site. I’ll post a picture instead, and uploaded to YouTube for the timebeing. Remember to watch in 4K for the best quality!
Or more accurately, to buy or to lease again, that is the question!
Back in May 2021 I blogged about a Tesla Model 3 test drive, which very shortly afterwards became a Tesla Model 3 delivery day and led to a Tesla road trip blog later that year. Almost 3 years later, our Tesla Model 3 lease is almost up, and we must make some future motoring decisions.
We’ve done 17,747 miles in Lexee (yes, you get to name your Tesla and it was leased through Lex and my daughter is called Katee). Other than some inconsiderate Mercedes driver putting a large dint in the rear wing in a car park (which was repaired at the beginning of this year) we’ve had almost 3 years of trouble-free, and incredibly cheap motoring. Lexee was serviced by Tesla after 2 years, but that was done exactly as shown in the picture, on our drive, where a Tesla Service Technician visited and replaced the pollen filter and carried out some minor checks. The tyres are still fine, although I’m hoping we might get them replaced before the lease ends if we do decide to buy. We’ve spent around £600 on electricity, which is crazy compared to how much we spent on petrol in the previous car(s). Some of that is down to free charging, both locally and at work for the first 18 months. We also have a home charger, and an ‘agile’ tariff which allows us to pick and choose when to charge based on the cheapest rate, so only £130 of the total. Most of the £600 is when we’ve taken Lexee on holiday, travelling down to the Northeast of England quite often, down to London and Yorkshire a few times, and around Scotland more frequently. During the last 2+ years, we’ve had countless software upgrades, which have added new functionality to the car and fixed some minor issues. I can honestly say, that the only thing that still irritates me about Lexee is the automatic windscreen wipers, which are hopeless, but given some of my previous cars didn’t even do this, it’s a small price to pay.
I’ve owned cars (I blogged about them here) that have all done one of two things better than Lexee (apart from perhaps the acceleration) but as an overall package, nothing comes close. The Tesla Model 3 is an incredible car and one I’m more than happy to continue driving. We had another test drive in a Model Y back in 2022 when they first came out, and it’s a very similar driving experience. My conclusion was that from a driver’s perspective, the Model 3 is a better car, but from a passenger perspective the Model Y probably edges it. We also hired a Model Y on a road trip around the Northeast of America and Canada last summer. We flew in and out of JFK, and travelled down to Philadelphia and Washington DC, before heading up to Niagara, Toronto, and Montreal, swinging back via Boston and Stamford. We (I) drove almost 2000 miles and the experience couldn’t have been better. We never waited for a charge. We generally needed to stop before the car, and it cost $140 including tolls (excluding the $1,200 for the car)
As you might know, Tesla has just updated the Model 3 (the aptly named ‘Highland’ project) just in time for our lease ending in June. After reading and watching far too many reviews, there was only one thing for it. Another Tesla test drive! It was just me and Katee last weekend when we headed down the M9 to Edinburgh trying to take in all the noises and bumps, so we could compare on the test drive. We had the choice of a red or grey standard-range version. Katee picked red before I’d even had a chance to think! She drove in the front for the first half of the journey and then switched to the back for the return leg, although was a little disappointed the rear screen wasn’t working.
The biggest difference is the lack of stalks behind the steering wheel. My Model 3 has 2 stalks – the left one for indicating and a wiper button, the right one for selecting drive and cruise controls. The Highland version has these controls on the steering wheel and the drive controls on the screen and above your head by the courtesy lights. Selecting drive wasn’t a problem as we did this once on the trip. I think you can set it, so it tries to select this automatically too. The indicators were more of an issue, and while I’m sure it’s something you’d get used to, I can’t help feeling it would alienate some non-Tesla drivers from switching. Every car I’ve owned had stalks for indicators, so it does feel strange and unnatural, even though it never felt much of a problem. The only area where the Highland model didn’t feel ‘a little better than my Model 3 was the acceleration, although given that the test car was a standard-range single-motor version and we have the long-range dual-motor version, it’s a bit of an unfair comparison. The standard range is still more than fast enough for a family saloon, but the ~4-second 0-60 time of the LR model never tires.
But yes, everything else was just a little better. It was a little quieter. It was a little more comfortable. The screen and responsiveness was a little faster. The interior trim felt a little better and the seats a little more comfortable. It has a nice interior light around the car (which you can change the colour) and the seats are heated AND ventilated. The screen in the back would have perhaps sold it for Katee, but even she felt it wasn’t a compelling enough improvement to retire Lexee. And she is absolutely right!
I’m hoping we might get to buy Lexee for around £25k. Similar spec and mileage cars are selling on Autotrader for over £28k, so it seems like a reasonable offer, and we know the car has been looked after (I clean it every 2-4 weeks). Leasing a new one looks like it would cost more than the previous deal, which worked out around £500/month after the salary sacrifice and tax implications. Another long-range would be at least £125/month more and even a standard range would be around £40/month more. We’d have to factor in things like insurance, road tax, maintenance, etc. if we bought Lexee (they were all covered in the lease) but it’s probably not that much more than the monthly lease costs when you add in the cost of the car. We’d still own Lexee in 3 years, whereas we’d be back in this same solution if we leased again.
We still have another few months to decide, and a few longer trips to do. I’m heading down to Banbury in a few weeks to see friends and we’re back down to the Northeast for Easter. We’re also considering a European road-trip holiday for the summer, which might be more difficult in a new lease car than it would our own Tesla. I’ll let you know what we decided to do over the summer, probably as part of a road trip blog…
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