This weekend I was in San Luis Obispo for a gig, about halfway between SF and LA. It's possible to fly into SBP, but since I was traveling with two of my kids it was a lot cheaper to fly into SFO and drive down, and only slightly slower.

I'm signed up with Hertz's reward program ("Gold") and one of the benefits is that you pick out your own car. When I got to SFO, there were several Tesla Model 3s in the "Gold" area. This was somewhat surprising—I had only paid for a small sedan ("B") and the Teslas are fancy ("E7")—but it seemed like it would be interesting to try one out and I liked the idea of not paying for gas. I got us loaded up but when I got to the exit the attendant didn't believe I'd gotten the car from the designated area, and said it would be a $50/day upgrade. I went back to the area, identified an apparently identical Model 3, and asked if I could have that one. They said yes, I moved kids and luggage over, and we were off.

I forgot to take a picture of the car—what sort of review is this?—but here's a picture of my kids enjoying the best seats on the SFO people mover.

This was my first time driving an electric car and the first thing I noticed was lifting your foot off the accelerator is very different. In a gas car you coast, slowing down a little from engine braking, but apparently in EVs you get regenerative braking. There's a sense in which this doesn't matter, and is just a question of where to put the "coast" point—at no pedal vs pushing down a little—but it doesn't immediately seem better to me.

The first evening was a short drive to San Jose. Getting out of the car, it was not obvious how to turn it off. Reading online later I learned that all you do is walk away, which is nice and automatic. But you'd only know if someone told you or you looked it up, and late at night after a cross country flight with two tired kids while poking at unfamiliar menu options on the dashboard tablet I was pretty frustrated with their minimally discoverable approach.

The next morning I was looking for somewhere adjacent to a charging location to get breakfast along my route. This seems like something the built-in navigation should help with; charge + activity seems like a common kind of goal. Unfortunately, it would only let me search for one thing at a time. Google Maps on my phone was better, letting me search for '...

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