On 16 January 2021 I hired a Tesla Model 3 and drove it from Melbourne down to Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula. Not a Model Y (Australia still does not sell that crossover here), just the sedan I could actually book. I wanted a proper day in the product rather than another showroom sit.
The cabin was everything I had liked two years earlier standing next to a red Model 3 in the showroom: the big screen, the map, the sense that the car was a computer first. You can see the grin in the photo. As the kilometres added up, though, two things kept nagging at me, the ride and the looks. The suspension wasn't what I wanted, and the shape never landed for me the way the Model Y had since its reveal. It was a fun hire, but it wasn't the car I wanted to own.
Charging was the spine of the afternoon. There are no Superchargers down that way yet, and I did not have a charging cable with me, so I had to find a destination charger with a tethered cable already attached. It was so slow. We spent a few hours watching videos in the car and eating nearby while it crawled up. I was learning that a patchy third-party stop is a different afternoon from a Tesla Supercharger, and that the network Tesla was still expanding was part of why the product thesis held even when I did not love this particular car.
I already held a Cybertruck reservation from July 2020, with the same cheeky logic that enough Tesla equity could make the truck effectively free if Australia ever opened real orders. Walking away from buying a Model 3 did not mean walking away from the company. The capital I might have spent on a sedan I did not love was better left in the shares that funded the thesis, reservation included. Tesla had just joined the S&P 500 in December 2020, a lagging stamp rather than a reason to buy the wrong car.
I got the drive to Geelong and the Bellarine, a slow tethered charge with nowhere else to be, and a clear no on owning that sedan. The Cybertruck reservation stays. The free-truck share logic stays. If the right shape shows up in Australia at the right time, that is when the driveway conversation starts again. Until then the money stays where the conviction is.