Hey, everybody. It's Peter, and in this video, whether you are a seasoned Tesla fan or you have no idea what Teslas are really all about, this video is hopefully for you because we're going to talk about why Teslas are great and why they're not so great. And to do that, we're going to do this here at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals, where I have full access to their entire vehicle line, including the dozen Teslas that are sitting on the lot right now with more to come. We are absolutely Tesla fans here, but they're not perfect and they're not for everybody. And we're going to talk about what's great about them, what's not so great about them to help you decide if one's right for you. Hey, guys. I'm going to drop in here with a really quick edit. Do me a favor and if you're interested in EVs, hit the Subscribe button.

In this video, I'm going to talk about EVs and other EVs, but I'm never going to cover everything, whether it's Tesla or something else. But I do want to make sure that if you guys are subscribed, that I can answer your questions and comments. So you can always ask questions and comments in the Comments Section here, and I'll answer those as best I can in the comments. But also, I'll make other videos about these EVs like Teslas and other EVs to make sure that you get the answers you want. I'm hoping I can earn your subscription. All right, back to the video. All right, so before we go too deep, let me just tell you a tiny bit about myself because I think it might matter with my biases. I used to work for a channel, that YouTube channel, that helped sell a whole bunch of EVs that happened to be for a couple brands in particular.

still work, partner anyways sometimes, with that brand on some things, and specifically with some EV stuff. I also am a fan of Tesla. I have partnered with Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals here and probably they're letting me make these videos because they're wanting me to help sell these cars. However, I do have full independence and I can say what I want, and I'll tell you that Tesla doesn't always have the best value EVs, in my opinion, but I do think they offer the best EV ownership experience and I think that really matters. We're going to talk about that as we go through this video. Also, personally, I happen to drive a Jeep Wrangler 4xe. It is a plugin, semi-electrified plugin hybrid vehicle. I also own a Kia Soul EV. So when we talk about EV ownership experience, I've got some of that myself and there's a reason that I think Tesla still offers the best, and it starts with their charging network.

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So one thing to remember is Teslas are known as the safest cars in the world, if you ask Tesla. Now, to be fair, there are many very safe cars out there, and there are many situations where this will not be the safest car in the world. First of all, if you give this to your teenager thinking it's the safest car in the world, keep in mind, not many teenagers are used to a car that accelerates from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds. Super fun, but this is one of the slower Teslas at 4.4 seconds. So safety is also the driver, of course, and 4.4 seconds, zero to 60 is something that most people are not used to doing. And the way an electric vehicle accelerates is super exhilarating, a lot of fun, but can be a danger.

But when we talk about safety, let's talk about some of the real life safety things. You've got a battery down low. Everybody copies Tesla on this. Why? Because it's where you want the weight for both handling and safety and all kinds of things. It's practical, you've got lots of space, and this car is almost impossible to keep rolled over. You can see crash tests with these where they try to roll over SUVs and it rolls over and flops back on its wheels. Now, you can roll these cars and those things can happen, but they are very, very safe and you've got to give Tesla credit. They are among the safest vehicles out there. One thing to keep in mind with an SUV like this, any electric car, you're going to want winter tires driving in the winter. So 4.4 seconds zero to 60. Again, that's the slow version.

You also have a lot of weight, and if you know anything about physics, think of curling. Curling, they use very heavy curling rocks. Once a heavy object is sliding in motion, it stays in motion. And that's something to keep in mind with these cars. These are very heavy cars for what they are compared to other similar sized SUVs and when they start to slide because they're so heavy, they will stay in motion. So you want to make sure you have good tires on there because all of the fancy electronics are going to require good grip and good tires. Now, one other thing to keep in mind if you're buying a Tesla compared to other manufacturers is Tesla "famously has no advertising budget." Now, they do have a pretty influential social media influencer in Elon Musk and some of those things, you have to keep in mind, Elon Musk tweets are not subject to a lot of fine print the way most car ads are.

They get away with calling things full self-drive, the absolute leader in vehicles that can semi-drive by themselves. And I think that's the one thing to remember too. A Tesla is not a car that will fully drive itself. You have to pay attention, you have to keep your eyes on the road, and you as a driver are responsible for what this car does. That being said, nobody does it better than Tesla right now. Let's take a look inside right now. So in the title of this video, I talked about what makes Tesla great and what makes Tesla not so great. Well, one of the things that makes them great is they are really a technology company first more than a car company. Now, this inside here is my key. It's just something that we use to keep it on the dealership. It's just a card, it's a credit card, and it has to be swiped up against the side of the vehicle right there to open it.

A cool system, but the reality is you're not going to do that. This is a technology company. You're going to use your phone to get into the vehicle. Because my phone's not paired to this car, I will be using the key at times, which is just a card. Another cool thing they do, aerodynamics are super important on any EV and Tesla does it among the best. All your door handles are flush in there and you have an extremely slippery surface that gives you better range. One thing to remember with any EV, it doesn't matter if it's Tesla or somebody else, wind is your enemy. The faster you drive, the resistance is exponentially more. So something like this that slips through the wind is important, but just keep in mind that speed will affect range and that's why your door handles are flush. It's not just a styling thing. It's every little bit of efficiency matters.

All right, jumping in here. You'll notice, if you've never been in a Tesla, a whole lot of nothing. You've got window switches. You have no door handles. What you do have is a little button. That is your button there that will pop open the door. Again, software solution over hardware solution. Some of this costs Tesla less money, and that's part of what it is. Down here, you'll notice a$ 100,000 car, those are your seat controls and these are your seats. One thing you'll notice missing, if you need ventilated seats, you're not getting that here. You have to go to another manufacturer. And that's why I talk about, it's not always the best value EV, but it absolutely is impressive. And what's really impressive is right here. Now, again, if you want a traditional vehicle, a traditional looking vehicle, then this isn't it. The Model Three and Model Y have no dash in front of you.

All of your drive information here, when I put it in... Oh, tap the car. See, there we go. Got to get that key out of my pocket. So I'm just going to put my foot on the brake. We'll talk about that in a second. We're going to tap this down here and now we can drive it. So when we put it in drive, we'll just do that right now, I should put my seatbelt on so it doesn't beep, but there is your driving information. And let me just put my seatbelt on so we can do this properly. A lot of people really like this because as I start to drive all of your speedometer and everything else is right up there. So you can see I'm just moving a hair forward to get the speedometer to appear. It's holding me in place, but that is your speedometer. I move slow enough that it didn't even read one kilometer an hour. So on this car, this is what you get.

If you are into amazing software in a vehicle, that can be very impressive. If you are into a traditional vehicle, having things over there can be difficult. So, again, sometimes we have to talk people out of cars as much as we have to talk into them. This is what we're talking about. But let's put it in park again, and we'll take a look here. This steering wheel is tilt and telescopic adjustable. Now, you'll notice there are some controls here. They do various things. If we wanted to change some of that stuff, we can go over here and we can do pedals and steering and you can go into very different types of things. Oh, where are we? No, that's not what we want. And this is where it can get confusing. There's an example. It got confusing to me because I didn't go to controls. The controls I want to go to is the steering right here, and sometimes when I'm talking on video, that's hard.

So to move the steering wheel in and out, you can do that. Now, again, for a control, I'm moving it towards me now by turning left, away from me, and sliding it up. And you can see it's moving down like that. So, again, software solutions instead of hardware are all Tesla type things. Now, for something like this, you don't really do it a lot. It can customize to you based on the user that you are. But it is something to keep in mind that controls are all literally all through here. Even something like opening the glove box is through here. Some people find that cool, some people don't. Now, again, some of those controls that you don't use a lot, I don't mind that they're in here. What you do have are things like autopilot. So you can really set things up. Full self-driving, visualization preview, you've got auto steer, which is beta. There's all kinds of things in here, but you've got some of those types of things in here.

You can set the speed limit and you can set it to go just a hair over the speed limit like a lot of us drive. You can choose those kinds of things in here. Even just the display in here, you can really change things up. Vehicles with sunroofs, you can slide things open. You can open the frunk in the trunk. It's all pretty cool in here. And if you're looking for a Tesla, this is the kind of stuff that you want. And like I said, with service, you can just tap down here on service. There's the owner's manual. There's different things, Car wash mode because if you're going through car wash, towing, there's all kinds of things, calibrating cameras, and there's all kinds of other ways to have this car serviced. You'll have tire pressure monitors in here as well. So a lot of what Tesla does here is better than anybody. But the problem is, Tesla limits themselves to only here. You have other controls that just do not exist. Is this right for you? Well, that's up to you.

Now, one thing I will say about Tesla is the simplicity of controls continues throughout the interior. Some people will say for the price of this car, they're not getting enough luxury. Other people will say this minimalism is what they're looking for and it's pretty cool in here. You've got this bright white interior, which isn't for everybody, but it's pretty nice to me. You've got a big panoramic roof. Now this is a darker tint on a cloudy day, it's harder to see through. It does not open, but it does give a really impressive view whether you're in the front or whether you're in the back. It's just the entire ceiling is glass. It's a pretty cool space. Let's continue on with other features. Any vehicle you buy in this price class is going to have navigation, but I would argue that Tesla does it among the best. First of all, they've integrated their charge stations into this system here. You've got the full Google Maps experience so you can change the way this map looks the same way you could on Google Maps.

A pro is what they do. They're a very good software company. A con is something like Apple CarPlay or Android Auto actually doesn't work on Teslas. So the phone manufacturers, while they play nice with most car brands, they don't actually play nice with Tesla. Tesla takes control themselves and if you want everything in your phone integrated like Apple CarPlay the same way on your Tesla, it's going to be a little different experience when you go from there. Now, that being said, there's still a lot of good software things included in here. Linking your phone works very, very well. So you're not going to be left out in the lurch. Again, they're a software company, but there are differences here. The other thing I want to point out is your camera system here. Now. This is a hard thing to film. You have excellent cameras here. Now, a lot of cars are giving that 360 top down view. Tesla does it slightly differently.

They give you this large camera which is out behind me right now, that's essentially my backup camera, and then they give me the two sort of wing mirrors there, which are at the side of the vehicle. They're actually below the mirrors on this car that give you a good view. So when you are backing up, you have no problem seeing. You've got a great camera system here. What Tesla does really well is, in many of their vehicles, they allow you to use these as dash cams that can actually record, which I don't know of any other vehicle right now that does the same thing. I might be slightly out of date, but certainly not a lot of mainstream vehicles allow you to use their camera system to do some recording. And the other thing is, if your vehicle's parked, it can use these camera systems that can come alive and they can activate to see what's going on around your vehicle.

One of my favorite things to do with a Tesla is making it do silly things. Now, you can make the car fart. You can make it fart when you signal. You can make it fart when you sit on a seat. And I did say fart because that's what you can do with some of these toy box things. But I think the most fun thing is the arcade. So the arcade came along because Tesla knew you were going to be sitting around charging for a while. You might as well give people something to do. Now, Teslas are among the fastest charging vehicles out there and certainly with a reliable charge network most Tesla owners spend very little time charging compared to other brands. But something like this, oh, we'd have to install it. I was just going to play that for you. I have played this before where you use the actual steering wheel of the car and the gas and the brakes to power your little buggy there and do other kinds of things.

It's super fun in a Tesla. There is no way you can get in this car and say, "That's not cool," because it is. One of the best things that Tesla does though is probably better than even their charge network, it's probably better than all of their silly games and fart noises that the car can make, is the ability to improve your car over time. And this is something that just other manufacturers haven't figured out how to do exactly. They're all trying to do it, but literally no one can improve these cars or improve their own cars as much, as drastically, and as impressively as Tesla. Let me show you how that works because it's a super simple process. You grab the screen here and you tap the vehicle down there. You go down just like you would on a phone to software and you can see all kinds of things. Now, this one has autopilot. It's the package included. Sometimes these things are a little extra money you have to buy, but here's your software version.

There's release notes. There's all kinds of things. It's exactly like a phone and you can connect to wifi to download it. It can do it over the air, I believe it can do it over the air, I've only ever done it on wifi, and it's very simple. And you can change everything in here. You can add safety features. You can add advanced full self drive. Now, one thing to keep in mind is, if you are a Tesla owner, you have big brother watching you and that means that Tesla pays attention to what this vehicle does. As this car is driving it is gathering data and it is sending it back to Tesla. That's one thing that some people like and I'll tell you why you should like it, and something people don't like. The reason to like it is every mile that every Tesla does is a data point that Tesla can use to improve things. So as it's doing its full self-driving, it's seeing how it reacts to various things, it's seeing how people react to various things, and it can take that data and create a better car.

And then Tesla is a company that pushes that data out and makes your car better because of thousands and millions of miles and thousands of other people, hundreds of thousands of other people, and their driving experience, it makes your car better. It's a really interesting software model. It's really something that I think makes these cars really stand out and can help you get some value out of owning something like this longer term because you don't have something that's immediately out of date the second a software update comes or a second the new feature comes out. Tesla's bodies and that kind of thing have stayed the same for quite a while, but their vehicles have drastically improved and mostly in that software department. And at this point it is completely unmatched by other manufacturers.

There is one more feature on this Model Y that I really think is important because this is something else that auto manufacturers haven't really done well yet. This is technically a seven passenger car. Now, these rear seats, they're not that big, but the point is you can fit two in the front, three in the middle, and two more back here legally. And Tesla does one thing better than most. If you look under the seat right here, this is a super deep storage area where most manufacturers, when they stick these rear jump seats in, you lose all storage because you still need to have, whether it's a fuel tank or an exhaust system or various things, that have to come out the back of the car. Tesla doesn't have that, so jamming jump seats in the trunk, which are optional, you can get this just as a five passenger, but putting the jump seats in the trunk here doesn't totally eat your storage space.

And keep in mind, Teslas have a frunk underneath the hood. It's even more storage space. So it's one of those few compact SUVs that gives you tremendous storage even with all the seats up. It's really impressive. So near the top of this video, I talked about how this probably isn't or Tesla probably isn't the best value EV, but they are the best ownership experience. Let me just flesh that out before we wrap this video up. For me personally, a great example is the Kia Soul EV, which was the 2020 model that we bought for our family. Frankly, it has features that you can't get at any price on Tesla and it was affordable and it fits our lifestyle, and I didn't have to shell out more than twice as much money for something like this in order to enjoy an EV experience. That had value to me. I also drive a Wrangler 4xe. To be fair to Tesla, they make the same class of car regardless of what it is.

And I get that a Model Three and a Model Y are different classes and a Model S and a Model X are different classes, but they're all still luxury priced performance vehicles that don't really perform well off-road. For instance, I can do this with my Wrangler 4xe on pure electric power. You can't do that on any Tesla right now. So it depends on what you want. And that's really the key when you're looking for an electric vehicle. Understanding what they are is one thing, but understanding what you need in a vehicle is really what matters. For our family, our Kia Soul zips around town, never leaves town. It never needs a charging network and that works really well for us. If you're driving across the country, a Tesla is going to be probably your best, most reliable charging network system vehicle out there. And that's going to really matter.

Now, here's the thing, Tesla doesn't have a dealer network, but here at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals, if you buy a Tesla here, you have both the dealer network, and what that means is you have Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals, but you also have Tesla's ability to help you over the air just about anywhere. It's the best of both situations, especially when you consider that this is Canada's huggable car dealer. Customer satisfaction, it's massive here. If you're a Tesla fan, you probably talk about how, "I don't need a dealer," and it's usually related to poor dealership experiences. Good dealers can really help the ownership of an EV and that's why I say Tesla's EV ownership experience is fantastic, especially here at Jim Gilbert's. And if you're shopping for an EV, why not swing by Jim Gilbert's? Because they don't just sell Teslas, they'll sell any kind of EVs. They've had all kinds of them in the past. Right now there's only 12 Teslas in stock, but there will be other EVs here as well, including more Teslas.

And, finally, if you made it this far, do me a favor, hit the Subscribe button, because if you're interested in EVs, we're going to talk a lot more about them here. I'll compare them, and if you have questions, you can ask me in the comments below and I'll do my best to address them with the vehicles in future videos. Thanks, everybody, for watching.