About a week ago, I posted about my desire to wash my hands of Tesla ownership. I’ve had a Model 3 Long Range for about 3 years now, and generally speaking it’s been a very good car.

My criteria for an EV were mostly centered around a few fairly straightforward areas. One, I wanted something that reduced “range anxiety” as much as possible. An option that had access to a robust charging network and got good range on its own was very important to me. Secondly, I wanted a nice car but didn’t want to pay 100k for some of the options out there. At the time, Tesla was by far the best choice.

However, as I got to using the car daily, there was a lot that I didn’t like. I covered a lot of this in a previous post, but at a high level:

• I despised the closed ecosystem. It doesn’t scale and makes it harder to use basic functionality. The software team at Tesla builds a 3rd party implementation of something like Apple Music, says “good enough”, and moves on to something else. All of the media apps are pretty awful. A basic CarPlay implementation is all I really want or need.
• The car has general fit and finish issues – panel gaps, weird noises, etc. I notice every little bit of wind or road noise. In general, the car felt very cheap. Things rattle or squeak, and at the price one pays for a new M3, it’s unacceptable.
• I don’t use superchargers as much as I thought I would. This means the “Tesla advantage” is smaller than I thought it’d be.
• The “premium” connectivity package is anything but. It’s pretty spotty, coverage-wise and while I think I can hotspot my phone and connect the car to that, I still would have to pay the $10/month for a stripped-down Apple Music implementation as they only allow paying customers to use streaming services.
• The trunk space was too little for my needs. Honestly, if I had a Model Y I’d be a bit happier with the car. Having a hatchback like the Honda Prolouge, IONIQ 5, ID.4 or the soon-to-be-released Rivian R3 is the sweet spot for me, space wise.
• I want nothing to do with Elon Musk.

So, I decided to sell my car and buy a comparably priced used EV to hold me over for a few years, at which time I’ll evaluate the Rivian R3 vs the Honda Prologue and whatever else is out there at the time. I found a low mileage VW ID.4 that checks most of the boxes for me. Will I have some issues with it? Yeah, probably. But I’m happy to have a car that has the space, CarPlay and build quality that I want, with 100% less Elon.