Towing with a Tesla

I mentioned in a previous post that I was likely replacing my Husqvarna riding mower that has the ailing and mostly unserviceable hydrostatic transaxle with my dad's Kubota GR2100, which is far more robust and seems generally better suited for the amount of hills I have in my yard. My dad lives down near Martinsville (about a 4 hour drive from here), and we'd been sort of idly talking about how we might make the handoff. 

He has a small trailer that he bought specifically for hauling the aforementioned tractor, and so I had been thinking of maybe borrowing that to save him from having to make the trip. I got the factory towing package when I bought my Model Y, partially because I wanted a receiver hitch for my bike rack but also because it seemed reasonably useful to have another vehicle capable of towing a utility trailer or some similar should the situation call for it. We got as far as checking weights and things and confirming that it was well within the safety margins for the Model Y, but hadn't really planned to make it happen yet. But in the last week, my 100 year old step grandmother was called home, so I found myself in the area on fairly short notice this past Friday. Fortunately my dad had just last week put in an outdoor NEMA 14-30 for me to use for charging, so after the funeral we plugged the car in and set to sorting out the towing situation. Took some digging to find the right combination of receiver hitch/drop, tow ball size, and locking pin, plus the keys to unlock trailer, pins, etc. but we got it all sorted out. 

The Model Y's factory hitch has a 7-pin harness including wiring for an add-on trailer brake controller, and a Class III receiver. The Class III is kind of overkill, because the Model Y actually only has a 3500 lb towing capacity, with a 350 lb max tongue weight, which is technically within the limits of a Class II hitch. This does assume 3 passengers, so I suspect you could probably push it beyond that and not exceed the GVWR/GAWR, but I probably wouldn't go north of 4000 lbs even with a trailer with brakes, mostly because I'd be concerned about the rear end squat. As it was, because this doesn't ride particularly high (it's really more of a tall wagon than something with any pretention of being an SUV), I had to use a hitch with basically zero drop, and I was careful to get the meat of the load's weight over the trailer axle to avoid too much on the tongue. 

The trailer in question weighs about 1000 lbs, and the tractor is listed at 940, though I suspect that's dry weight, so it's probably around 1000 too, meaning we're at a nice even ton, plus just me in the car, meaning a total rig weight of around 6800 lbs. This trailer doesn't have brakes, but that really wasn't a big deal, because between the regenerative braking and the fact that the Model Y has pretty strong friction brakes, I was never concerned about the stopping ability for the whole rig. I'd want at least some surge brakes if I were hauling another 1000 lbs though. 

Prepping for towing

Accessing the hitch involves prying off a plastic cover on the rear fascia with a flat blade screwdriver. My Jeep had a cover, and it had thumb screws. This has plastic friction clips, and let's just say I suspect they probably only survive one or two removals no matter how careful you are. It's not a great design. Once you have the cover off, hopefully with all of the clips intact, you discover that the amount that the hitch is recessed, combined with the relatively small opening means that you're sort of fumbling around to get the hitch pin in place, and probably some longer ones might not fit at all, especially depending on the orientation of the lock. Additionally, the chain ears are way up inside the recess. Smaller hands probably make that easier to manage. Again, this is a case where the people who designed this probably didn't do a lot of towing. The rear camera does make it super simple to line up the ball and tongue. That's not unique to Tesla, but it is really nice to be able to turn on the camera when you're underway to check that part of the trailer. My trailer was fairly short, and about the same width as the car, so the regular mirrors were adequate once I adjusted them a bit, but a longer or wider rig would require towing mirrors, which would add drag and affect range. 

Plugging in the trailer harness activates Tow mode, which according to Tesla disables Autopilot, increases the following distance for the adaptive cruise control, and supposedly uses some different logic on the stability control to help manage trailer sway, something I thankfully did not have to test. I understand why they'd disable auto lane change, but I've grown very accustomed to using Autopilot's lane keeping, especially on long trips, and would have liked to be able to use that, especially since there are some times that you really do need to be able to look at the screen for a minute, and having something handle keeping you literally between the ditches is a great help. 

Actual Towing

Tow mode has a major thing missing, in that it doesn't adapt the car's baseline range estimates or trip planning algorithm at all. I get that every trailer is different, and the weight, aerodynamics, etc. all affect range differently, but at the very least, they could characterize a generic impact on range from towing and use that. This is an area where it's better to be a little conservative and end up with more range than you thought than dealing with constant range anxiety or worse, actually being stranded because you didn't stay ahead of the aggressive burn rate. Even if there was some way to manually tell the car to assume a certain percentage drop in range when planning the trip and determining needed charging stops, that'd be an improvement. But the car's default range displays were still claiming what is effectively ideal (aka only achievable on the EPA test cycle) range, and calculating charge stops according to Tesla's standard usage projections (which are more real-world accurate than EPA). What you end up having to do is put in your destination, drive for 30+ miles, which is long enough for the energy usage screen to get an average usage with you towing such that it can project your range based on the past 30 miles of historical burn rate, and then you have to compare that with how far the Nav system says you're supposed to be going. When it almost definitely is longer than your available range, you have to find a Supercharger on your route and add it manually. To make matters worse, because you have basically no sense for how much more range you're going to burn, you have to keep checking this periodically to make sure that you still have enough range to make it to the charger you chose, and then once you're at the charger, you have no guidance on how long to charge. I erred on the side of caution and charged back up to almost full, which meant that instead of the normal 15-20 minute stop to gain back 100-150 miles of range, I was looking at closer to 50 minutes, because the charge rate tapers off dramatically as the battery gets above about 80% charge. 

Charging while towing a trailer, in addition to being something you'll be doing repeatedly and often, is also a bit challenging, and again seems to be mostly an afterthought rather than something that Tesla tested or consulted with people experienced with towing to work through the logistics. Tesla charge ports are near the driver's side taillight, and because of the large cables involved in carrying 250kW @ hundreds of volts DC, Tesla makes them short and expects you to back into the space to charge. They have started putting at least one pull-in space in, but that's not universal, and it's not always that helpful, i.e. it's not longer than an average space, and it's not pull through, it's just nose-in parking. Only one of the two Supercharger stations I used even had one, and in order to use it, I still had to pull in with my nose well into the adjacent space (blocking a  second charger from being used), and my trailer was hanging out into the parking lot, only narrowly avoiding blocking the air compressor, to the annoyance of at least two Sheetz patrons while I was there. Someone pulled into the space in front of me and then left the parking lot, so I couldn't ask them to move, and so in order to get out, I had to back up with the trailer already halfway to jack-knifed. I managed to do it, but it took a good 10 minutes of back and forth. The second charging station had no good options, so I had to drop the trailer elsewhere in the parking lot, charge, then go retrieve it and reattach. 

Driving dynamics are fine, and it's a solid tow rig from that perspective. It was stable and predictable as far as handling went. Electric cars have stupid amounts of torque, and Teslas are overpowered, so the car barely noticed that the trailer was back there in terms of moving itself along at typical speed. It just used more juice. The trip is mostly highway, the majority at 60mph posted limit, with a few sections of 55, 65, and one 70, along with drops to 45 at traffic lights. I ran a bit above whatever the limit was, and even on the hills, there was no issue maintaining speed. One thing I did notice is that I didn't get as much regen braking as I would have expected going down hills, because the trailer's weight wasn't enough to overcome the increased drag. The only time I got any significant regen was when I was slowing down, rather than just maintaining speed on a downhill. The adaptive cruise control was surprisingly quick to adapt to the extra weight in terms of slowing the car down when needed. 

As I noted, this comes with a harness for an external brake controller, but I'm somewhat curious if you'd get enough control to really take advantage of the dual braking. Specifically - Teslas do regen braking as soon as you take your foot off of the accelerator. The brake pedal actuates the friction brakes directly, without any attempt to try to simulate braking with regen for the first bit of pedal travel before actually applying the friction brakes like many other hybrids and electrics do. Because the regen braking is so aggressive, the brake lights come on as soon as you lift off of the pedal. Assuming that the brake controller keys off of the brake pedal being actuated, the trailer brakes wouldn't be activated unless you need more than regen alone can provide, but you'd have to tweak the sensitivity carefully to ensure that you still are getting as much regen as possible. Seems to me that there's an opportunity to have integrated the trailer brake controller to make the entire system smarter and more efficient, but at this point I don't think Tesla is that invested in making this a full-time tow rig. I'll be curious to see how they do it differently on the Cybertruck, since that has to compete with actual trucks, most of whose manufacturers have spent a lot of time sweating details to make towing easier. 

By the Numbers

Here are the details of the trip, in terms of miles traveled, power used, etc. 

The trip down was effectively a control, because I didn't have the trailer. That leg, plus a bit of other driving around, was 269.5 miles, used 75 kWh, at an efficiency of 277 Wh/mi. Using standard conversion, this works out to 132 MPGe. The actual trip MPGe was probably a bit higher than that, because that figure included probably 40 minutes of me sitting with the AC on before the funeral, and a couple of "check out how fast this thing accelerates" starts for my dad. I used a combination of home charging and supercharging, so the fuel cost would be somewhere between $9 and $25. (I'm still using the last of my free supercharging, so I have to estimate based on what the going rate is rather than telling you what I actually paid.)

The return trip was more direct. I started at 100% charge. The Model Y has a 75 kWh battery, and I charged to about 95% at both stops, though I didn't actually need that long of a charge at the second stop. I traveled 242.1 miles, which used 141 kWh, at an efficiency of 583 Wh/Mi, or 62.9 MPGe. That would cost between $15.50 and $48 depending on how much was Supercharging. 

That was comprised of the following legs: 

• Ridgeway to Lynchburg: 82.7 mi, 51 kWh, 613 Wh/mi, 59.8 MPGe
• Arrived at 24% charge 
• Indicated range was 70mi, estimated range (based on last 30 miles' average) was 29.
• Lynchburg to Madison: 96.1 mi, 57 kWh, 591 Wh/mi, 62 MPGe
• Arrived at 17% charge 
• Indicated range was 84 mi, estimated range was 27.
• Madison to Manassas: 63 mi, 34 kWh, 532 Wh/mi, 68.9 MPGe

So the short answer is that you lose about 50% of your rated range, which is probably pretty equivalent to the haircut a petrol-powered vehicle takes to its range while towing, but on account of the reduced capacity, it is both impressive in terms of its efficiency, but also barely adequate in terms of being able to comfortably make it between Superchargers without careful planning. For me, it's nice to know I can do it if I need to, but clearly the sweet spot is short trips where the 100-ish mile max range isn't much of a concern. 

Road Trips with a Tesla

I took a 900+ mile road trip in the first month I had my Tesla Model Y, and I've managed to put 9,000 miles on it despite being in a pandemic lockdown and working almost exclusively from home in the 10 months I've owned the car, so this is by no means the first road trip I've taken, but the last couple I did (Eastern Shore of VA and Johnstown, PA) revealed a couple of things that I hadn't noticed before that I thought I'd discuss. 

Road trips in an electric car, even one with nominally 300+ miles of range, still require more planning than their fossil-powered brethren. I knew that going in, and TBH it sorta appeals to my inner tech nerd, but it's definitely not for everyone yet. Highway speeds, especially when the speed limit is 70 like many of the interstates around here, eat into that range, and since Tesla seems to have done a lot of work gaming the EPA test cycle for maximum claimable range, a safe estimate is more like 75% of claimed range, with additional modifiers if it's in a temperature extreme or there are a lot of hills. This isn't inherently a problem, but since you're dependent on chargers that even with some 2700 Supercharger stations and lots of other non-Tesla chargers available, are nowhere near as ubiquitous or convenient as ye olde petrol station. 

The car does a fair amount of the work for you, in that you put a destination into the SatNav and if it predicts that you don't have the range to make it to your destination, it automatically chooses a Supercharger on your route, and even tells you how much time you should spend charging to gain enough range to make it to either your destination or the next Supercharger on your route if it's a multi-charge trip. The prediction seems to know something about topography, speed limits, and the like, because I can see obvious kinks on the car's projected energy graph line that correspond to mountain passes and things, and if you run into construction or traffic that slows you down, you often end up with a slight gain in actual range vs projected. Its trip range indicator is pretty accurate on the highway even if the car's primary range indicator on the dash isn't (it uses either ideal conditions or a much less aware average to project range based on percentage of charge remaining). The car will even warn you to stay below a certain speed if it thinks you're at risk of running out of megableems before your destination. 

So they're doing a lot to help you manage range anxiety, and my experience overall has been that a restroom and snack/meal stop is plenty long enough to gain back the required charge such that I've rarely felt like I was wasting time compared with my previous road trips. It's especially nice that a lot of Supercharger stations near the highways are collocated with either a Sheetz or a Wawa, rather than a random mall, as that enables the same sort of relatively quick food/bathroom stop as one would make while refueling.

But there are some fundamental flaws in the way this system works right now, or at least bad assumptions that ultimately require you to do a little more planning than just hopping in the car, inputting your destination, and wafting away on a cloud of inconvenienced electrons, confident in both your car's range to never give you up, and the Supercharger network to never let you down. 

1. Tesla assumes that on a trip that stretches your range, you are going to be able to charge at or near your destination, and it doesn't really take into account whether you actually have enough range to make it to an appropriate charger post arrival, especially if it's not a Tesla charger. To complicate matters further, Tesla also appears to have lowered the threshold of acceptable minimum charge at destination both as their range projections improve, and in an attempt to reduce reliance on mid-trip charging (the Supercharger network is getting busier as more Teslas get sold) such that sometimes trips that a year ago would have featured a Supercharger stop now claim to not need it, but you roll into your destination with a projected 13% SOC (which likely translates to actually single-digit%). This is not user-adjustable. This might be ok if the stay is long enough to charge, but depending on where you are, that might mean:
• >24 hours charging @ 120v/15A (4 MPH of range added) - normal house current
• >12 hours charging @240v/30A (20 MPH of range added) - typical J1772 Level 2 charger/dryer plug
• >6 hours charging @240v/60A (41 MPH of range added) - Tesla AC charger (if these are installed at a hotel or somesuch, Tesla refers to these as "destination chargers")
• 30-60 minutes at a Supercharger (depends on whether it's 150 or 250 kW DC fast charging)
• However long you need on the above methods to gain back enough range to reach the closest Supercharger on your return path.
• There is also the rapidly-expanding CCS DC fast charger network that supports all the non-Tesla cars. In addition to often being expensive, bordering on usurious for its charge rates if you don't have some sort of deal through your manufacturer, Tesla owners have to buy a $500 adapter to make their car's proprietary plug interface with CCS. I suspect it will be a long time before the CCS network footprint exceeds the Supercharger network by enough to make that a worthwhile investment.
2. Tesla's in-car SatNav has no ability to do multi-stop trips, or even a toggle to indicate that this will be a round trip. While it shows you projected state of charge for a round trip briefly when you first start the trip, you can't actually get the car to act on that information. The only way to do this is by using Tesla's Trip Planner website and adding the multiple destinations to force it to calculate charge stops without assuming any other charging is happening so that you know what your charge and range situation might actually look like for all of the legs of your planned trip. And then likely you're going to end up manually selecting the appropriate Supercharger along your route as your destination, stopping for whatever amount of time you deem appropriate, then putting in your actual destination once you're done charging. So you lose all of the trip planning aid in the car. And even when the car decides you need a charging stop, it is basically doing the same thing in the background, so what you get is the ETA and remaining distance to your charging stop, with no sense for total trip duration. This seems like a pretty basic set of missing functionality. Maybe they should reallocate a couple of the programmers working on making the car play fart noises and bring the Nav system to parity with Google Maps, circa 5+ years ago?

A couple of other random observations that came from more driving:

I've been able to conclusively prove that even if the Nav system has some idea of speed limits for range projection, Autopilot is deriving the speed limit it uses (you can set it so that it automatically sets the max speed as "speed limit +N MPH", and on some roads it automatically limits Autopilot's set speed to 5 MPH above posted limit)  from "reading" the posted signs. I know this because first it misread a sign with a truck-specific speed limit and assumed that it was applicable to all cars, and then after it dropped the speed limit in a construction zone, it didn't raise it again at the posted end of the construction zone - not until there was another posted speed limit sign.

For a system that is supposed to know things like which lane it needs to be in, where to take exits, and to make very specific routing decisions to make semi-autonomous driving credibly safe, or at least defensibly possible, Tesla is absolutely not updating the map data often enough. According to my car, running the very latest generally available software (i.e. I accept software updates within days of them being offered to me), my map data is 2020.48. This apparently rolled out in November, so given that the data was probably aging before they packaged and released it, I'm guessing it's at least 9 months out of date. This explains why the car continues to insist on stopping for traffic lights that have been gone for months on VA-28 near I-66, and why it believed I had gotten off on an exit (and dropped its max speed accordingly) because of changes to the traffic path during ongoing construction on I-66, why it seems to know nothing about some of the other HOT lanes in the area, etc. It may be that part of getting access to FSD (which I don't have yet) includes much more frequent map updates, but it seems like if they have to do it at all, it would be easier to just package that up for everyone. 

I still have an overwhelmingly positive impression of the car and the system, and I don't feel like I've made an undue number of tradeoffs by switching to an electric car, and this electric car specifically. But I do think it's worth highlighting these areas where things could definitely improve as we look both at Tesla and the broader transition to electric transportation over the next number of years. I don't know if anyone at Tesla looks for this sort of discussion, or if anyone reading this might be better informed as a result, but I enjoy writing about it, so I'll continue doing these sorts of periodic updates and hopefully some will find them insightful.

"Fun" with disposable riding mowers

I have an acre of property, a lot of which is "lawn". I use the air quotes because it's green and needs to be mowed frequently, though admittedly a significant minority of it is green things other than grass, because I can't bring myself to be the stereotypical Suburban Dad that "takes pride in his lawn", i.e. spends real money on a service to spray chemicals on the lawn to make it more grass, and has a whole lawncare "regimen" that is religiously followed each weekend and season. I throw down some grass seed to fill in bare spots and otherwise hope for the best. I just can't be bothered to pretend that's important, and since I chose to live in an area with no HOA, no one else can force me to. Also, I'm on a well, and I'm certainly not interested in wasting my water keeping the grass I've potentially spent good money cultivating alive during a drought, nor am I keen on doing things to increase how frequently I need to mow it, and a large portion of my back yard is heavily shaded during the summer and heavily covered in leaves during a lot of the fall, so consistent, even grass is problematic at best anyway. 

For the first couple of years I owned this house, I managed to convince myself that it was manageable with a self-propelled push mower, out of some mistaken notion of needing the exercise. After a bout with heat stroke, and realizing that I was wasting way too much of my weekend mowing, I decided to get a riding mower. I do not regret this decision, even when considered against the more typical method around here of paying a service to handle it.

My yard is probably 50% hills of varying steepness, some that are something you can mow side-to-side, (though there are some times when you have to shift your weight to the uphill side of the seat) others where you pretty much have to go up and down or diagonally across for fear of rolling the tractor. So I pretty much knew a zero-turn was right out, and I was looking for a traditional riding mower with a locking differential to manage the hills better. About ten-ish years ago, most of the mid-range riding mowers with hydrostatic drive had a pedal for a manual diff lock, but somewhere along the line, that had been replaced with either a lower-end diff that didn't lock (in the really cheap ones), or an auto-locking one in the higher end lawn (not garden) tractors. Pretty much across the board, that auto-locker was a Tuff-Torq K46 hydrostatic transaxle, unless you were stepping up to a garden tractor intended to pull ground-contacting implements. The right combination of price, features, availability, and not being an MTD with a nicer-sounding licensed brand name like 90% of the Cub Cadet, Craftsman, etc. available at the big boxes, plus no-interest financing led me to a Husqvarna YT42DXLS, which Husqvarna specifically claimed was well-suited for hilly applications, and given that it was roughly half again the price of the Lowes Depot variants, I figured more robust and reliable.

Worked great for the first 2.5 years I owned it, until a combination of some still-undetermined issue with a full fuel tank and the fuel/vapor system puking raw fuel into the air cleaner, hot exhaust, and dry leaves led to an engine stall followed by a fire that due to the distance from an available fire extinguisher led to a very melted front end and a total replacement of the engine. Fortunately for me, Husqvarna and Kohler stood by their product and covered what was probably half the cost of the tractor in parts and labor repair work under warranty. I've used it for another 3 years since then, though I do have a fire extinguisher mounted on the fender now. That brings us to last week, where a new problem presented itself. I sometimes mow only a section or two of my yard based on where the grass is long, but this time I did the entire yard at once. Toward the end of my mow, which hits the steepest part right at the end, it got slower and slower and more moan-y going up the hills until finally it would barely move itself under its own power on anything other than flat ground. No slipping belt noise, just the moaning that sounds like a bad power steering pump, which unfortunately means a transaxle issue.

Husqvarna maintains that this transaxle is maintenance-free, i.e. there is no fluid level to maintain, and no standard interval to change the fluid. Tuff-Torq equivocates a bit, as they do sell replacement fluid, and some variants of it do list a maintenance schedule, but after some research, I understand why - this is basically a sealed transmission. It has no drain plug or accessible fill cap, nor a filter. There is a fill cap with a magnet to collect spare bits of transmission out of the fluid, but because the transaxle is typically under the under-seat fuel tank, the only way to drain the fluid is to remove the transaxle completely from the frame, pry off the cap that is now exposed from the top of the case, and turn the transmission upside down to dump out the old fluid, which is usually traditional 10W30 motor oil. You might be able to use a vacuum fluid change system, but access is still going to be an issue, and you're unlikely to get all of the fluid that way. So they're right, it's not exactly consumer serviceable in the way that one might expect a homeowner to change the oil, air filter, spark plugs, etc. Seems too good to be true, but service intervals on lots of stuff have been getting extended and simplified because of higher quality lubricants, better designs etc. so I guess it could be plausible, right?

No, dear reader, our instincts are correct, it is basically too good to be true. The internet is pretty full of sad stories about this transaxle failing exactly like this after a low triple digit number of hours of what should be typical use in a variety of brands and models of riding mower like this. Some get repaired or even replaced under warranty, but I'm well outside my warranty period. Turns out that this transaxle has a bit of a design flaw that a cynical person might look at as a very clever way to make these things cheaper to build, and ultimately more disposable when they fail after some number years of use that is >= the warranty period. Since things expand when they get hot, this transaxle has a breather that will allow fluid to escape instead of pressurizing and blowing out a seal or the fill cap. The act of using it to carry my considerable avoirdupois plus a full tank of fuel up a 25+ degree incline, or across a slightly less severe (15-18 degree) incline for long periods of time, especially in the heat of summer, means that it's probably burping out fluid pretty consistently, that then collects along with the grass and leaf dust as greasy schmutz all over the cooling fins, making the overheating problem worse, which causes more fluid foaming and venting, and basically cooks the transaxle. Those same forums and YouTube videos have hopeful stories about people managing to resuscitate them by swapping the fluid for synthetic 5W-50 (which is what TT sells on their site as replacement fluid) after draining considerably less than the factory fill out of them, cleaning the fins, maybe swapping the drive belt, but also those who did that, had no improvement, and had to crack the case to replace the internal parts that had worn prematurely due to overheat and lack of lubrication. The rebuild kit, if you can find it, appears to be almost $500. The replacement transaxle is closer to $1K. So despite the fact that I have an engine with less than 60 hours on it and a perfectly functional mower deck, I am somewhere between maybe being able to do major surgery to get it functional enough to sell to someone with a flat yard, and selling it as-is to someone who's looking for a donor engine and/or mower deck for a project. I figure that even if I fix it, my yard means that the same problem exists, and I'm basically signing up to tear the thing apart every season or two to change the fluid, plus the existing accelerated wear likely means that the next time this starts happening, it'll be necessary to start throwing expensive parts at it.

I am still waiting to see if I can limp it along to use it for short periods of time before it overheats, or if it is far enough gone that I am going to be back to push mower for a few weeks or what, but the long-term fix is that since my dad has hired a service to tend to his several acres, he is going to sell me his now-idle Kubota GR2100, which is a small (I think 4WD) diesel lawn and garden tractor that is probably much better suited to my terrain and one or two notches up in terms of the heavy-duty vs medium/light duty and prosumer vs residential spectrum compared with my current problem child. 

Musings on the swipey dating apps

Well, after a bit more than a year of blissful ignorance about what the dating apps were doing, I'm back at it, so I thought I'd write a little update to my previous post.

After my generally terrible experience with Tinder and its awful UI that caused me to bail after 3 weeks, I went to Bumble. Turns out I never really discussed it in comparison to Tinder when I used it for a couple of months in the fall of 2019, so briefly:  

Bumble is another swipey app, and as I understand it, was formed by a woman who had been in a leadership role at Tinder and parted ways with them due to sexual harassment and other issues, so the "like Tinder, but better" vibe definitely figured in. Bumble had been hands-down the better overall experience, because it addressed 95% of Tinder's counterintuitive UI, the silent failures (it throws up a flag "you're using Bumble offline"), and because it was a newer app and was trying to attract people, less upsell. It also was designed to address what I called brand confusion on Tinder, where it was trying to be both a dating app and a hookup app, because there were categories of things beyond the short bio that you could use as filters, but only if you had populated them, meaning there was incentive to complete that part of the profile. There were also prompts for additional info so that you have more to go on than the pictures and a couple hundred characters of bio. Additionally, there are rules about photos having to contain actual people, so you didn't end up with dating profiles with no actual pictures of the person they were representing. Between this, and the fact that when there's a match, women have to initiate the conversation, they were definitely pitching it as a place for a safer, more useful experience for those wanting to find something more than a hookup, but without the heavy time commitment of building a giant profile to sacrifice to the algorithm gods for the "matching you with science" dating sites. So Bumble had better quality profiles, and the feeling that you were actually getting somewhere faster for the time you invested. And measured by actual success, it worked for me - I matched with someone I was able to chat with long enough to decide we wanted to meet in person, and date for more than a year, during which my Bumble account was happily dormant.

But, after reactivating my account in late January and dusting off the place, I discovered that sometime last year, Bumble instituted a swipe limit, and it's really aggressive - something like 25 yes swipes every 24 hours if you're on their free tier. They still have generally better quality profiles, but you're seeing a lot less of them in a given session, meaning that everyone's match chances are way down, despite lots of new users due to "well, it's a pandemic, how the hell else am I going to meet people?" There are also a lot of efforts to upsell to get better access to various features. 

So, I groaned and signed back up for Tinder. Most of my previous complaints are still true, but 6 weeks in, I'm at least more used to the UI now. Tinder has a yes swipe limit too, but it's more like 50, and it resets every 12 hours, so it's a lot less intrusive. I suspect Tinder is still playing some games with what profiles they show you in order to get you to go paid, because I frequently am told that there are no more matches in my area, but there are several that are in their daily "top picks" that may or may not eventually show up in the regular feed, and closing the app and reopening frequently brings several additional profiles. But it seems like when the available profiles drop below a certain threshold, they'll arbitrarily ignore your age range and distance limits, so some subset of what you're getting isn't actually usable. Tinder has also started making it look like you have new messages so that they can show you more ads than the ones that show up in between profiles, and that seems kind of cruel.

But Tinder has a somewhat more fundamental problem that they don't seem interested in actually solving - fake and otherwise garbage profiles that ruin the signal to noise ratio. This is likely Tinder trying to strike a balance between keeping you on the platform longer swiping through garbage so they can show you more ads and keep trying to convince you to pay for the service, and having a reputation as a waste of time/ not worth the effort.

Anecdotally, I'd say that 25-40% of the profiles I'm getting shown are not useful because they're doing some or all of the below: 

• using generic photos (landscapes, memes, food, etc) instead of pictures of the person they're purportedly representing
• leaving the bio completely blank
• These first two are especially frustrating because it's a site where you're literally deciding based on a handful of pictures and a few words if you might want to meet someone. I suspect some of this is women who think "well, they're not going to read the profile anyway and they're swiping right on everyone in the hopes of getting a match, so why bother?" but for those of us that aren't, it's just wasting everyone's time and limiting the potential match pool.

• advertising their sensual/erotic massage services
• and they know they're likely doing something prohibited, because the people generating these accounts do things like post a picture full of text with details about their services and how to contact them with a code word on another platform (usually snap or instagram), or deliberately misspell certain keywords (add spaces, extra letters and numbers etc) to defeat pattern matching. 
• a catfish to try to get you to sign up for another paid-only dating site (Ashley Madison is still a thing, apparently), their Onlyfans, or some similar paid content site
• putting their location as a big US city so that they're shown to people as a local option but actually being based in any number of remote countries, ostensibly wanting to chat to improve their English, but I suspect also hoping for import dating, or another type of catfishing.

I'd been dutifully reporting the more obvious of these, but I suspect this is a fool's errand, and in the last couple of weeks it appears that Tinder either accidentally or intentionally made this harder. It used to be once you reported a profile, you could then swipe left so you wouldn't see it again. Reporting a profile now makes it disappear, but it'll show back up in your options later, so you have to interact with it twice. Similarly, if you match with someone and they play any of these games in private messages, you have to report them before they realize you aren't falling for it and unmatch you, because it's extremely difficult to report someone after they've unmatched. 

It is difficult to continue putting time and effort into either of these sites right now due to the lack of success, but it is harder to discern where the frustration about the crappiness of the platform ends, and my own limitations as attractive to the pool of people I'm interested in begins. Either way, I do appear to be getting exactly what I paid for this time around. 

Tesla Autopilot update

I'm coming up on having owned my Tesla Model Y for 5 months, and thought it might be useful to give a little update on my experiences using Autopilot. I use it pretty consistently where I can, with a few exceptions that I'll get into below. Since I don't have the FSD beta yet, that means that it's usually offered whenever there are lines on the road. I've found that it'll be available even on two lane roads without a center double yellow line, as long as there is a line on the edge of the road. So for example, there's a residential street nearby that has a bike lane marked, and thus has nice stripes along the edges but no double-yellow line. That seems to be enough for autopilot.

Right now, if you are on a divided interstate highway and some selected limited access US and State route highways, it'll offer Navigate on Autopilot, which is a slightly more autonomous mode, where if you've set a destination in the nav system, it will recommend, but not execute until you confirm, lane changes to get you into a faster lane when you're overtaking slow traffic, to keep you from clogging the left lane, and to get away from construction cones, as well as to make sure you're in the correct lane when the road divides or you need to take an exit. It will also actually signal and make the exit for you so that you follow the navigation. It's pretty seamless, and the amount of interventions I need to make in this mode are very minimal, though occasionally it is fussing at me to get out of the left lane when I am literally in the process of overtaking a slower vehicle. My only real complaint here is that it is ultra-conservative about speed on cloverleafs, to the point that I always feel like I'm annoying the driver behind me if I leave it to its own devices. But given what I'll say below about how it manages curves elsewhere, that's probably appropriate.

Regular Autopilot is what happens everywhere else. It follows lanes, will change lanes when safe to do so if you signal your intent with a turn signal, it stops at stop signs, traffic lights, and maintains a safe following distance. On 2 lane and some 4 lane roads, the max speed you can set autopilot to use is speed limit + 5MPH. On other 4 lane roads, the logic allows you to set whatever speed you want. There are settings in the system regarding how you want it to manage set speed vs speed limit, so that when you invoke Autopilot, or the speed limit changes, it responds in the same way you'd be when driving. It still will not make turns that are more than just following a curve in the existing lane of travel, so even if you have navigation active, it won't make that right turn at the intersection it just told you to do. As I said initially, it works well for what it is, as long as you remember that it's not autonomous and pay proper attention. Inclement weather is a mixed bag. I was honestly super-impressed with how well it did on a secondary two lane road on a foggy, rainy night where the visibility wasn't great, but the driver is still definitely responsible for managing its safe speed - it doesn't slow down because the wipers are on, or because of temperatures, or whatever. I have also had situations where Autopilot was unavailable due to crud on the front or side sensors when driving in a post-snow melt where that salt and slushy crud all mix to throw a bunch of trash on your car and you use a half-gallon of winshield washer fluid in one drive.

But I now have a better sense for what it does poorly, what confuses it, etc. and that has led to both some situations where I don't use it, and areas where I have to intervene more frequently to keep things literally between the ditches. Here's a list in rough order of increasing severity: 

• Traffic lights - AP is pretty conservative about lights. Unless it's following a vehicle at close range so it can see that they're proceeding through the intersection, it requires you to tap the stalk or press the accelerator briefly to confirm it's safe to proceed through the green light even though it's clearly recognizing it as a green light. I had hoped this was a matter of teaching the AI, but it hasn't improved at all over time. It will stop for a yellow if it hasn't entered the intersection yet, including if you have already given it permission to proceed because the light was green and now isn't. This all makes sense in terms of safe, conservative driving, so I can't really complain all that much other than to wonder what is different where FSD is concerned.
• Flashing lights that aren't normal traffic lights - those warning signs at the side of the road for pedestrian crossings, school zones, etc. usually are yellow and make it think it needs to slow down for what is soon to be red, or per driving rules, slow for a flashing yellow at an intersection to be sure it's safe to proceed. It especially doesn't know what to do with various flashing yellow lights that look and are placed like traffic lights, such as the emergency signal in front of my fire department that has a normal red on top that is only ever lit when the trucks need to exit, and a smaller yellow underneath that is always flashing, or the horizontal flashing lights signifying an intersection that is flashing red in the cross direction. Given the yellow light logic I mentioned above, you're having to forcefully override it with constant pedal application to get it to go past those, and if you're not paying attention, you are going to annoy the driver following you.
• shadows on the road - the lovely sun-dappled road from your car commercial occasionally makes Autopilot think there are obstacles in the road. Same for lane changes where a large truck is casting a huge shadow of itself into the open lane between the two of you where you want the car to go. It'll occasionally decide the truck is actually in that lane and refuse to make the lane change until the angle changes and the shadow isn't there. This is usually only a problem when it's a huge contrast difference, like bright, direct sun filtering through tree leaves.
• Indistinct lanes - areas where it goes from 2 to 1 or vice versa, lanes without a center line, etc. confuse it occasionally. It can guess where the lane is, but it doesn't always guess right, and in situations where it's 1 lane becoming 2, I have had it kinda dither for a minute before it commits to a lane, and when the lane is not clearly delineated by lines on both sides or is exceptionally wide, such as during a 2 to 1 merge, the car does tend to wander a little trying to decide how to center itself in the lane. 
• Blind hills - those fun little whoops that make your stomach jump a little and make the car go a little light on the wheels when you take them quickly? Autopilot basically panics when it can't see the road ahead, and the threshold for that is just long enough that it'll be upset before you get to the crest of the hill where it can see again. Usually it just disables itself, but it has panic braked on me at least once. This is generally worse at night. 

The above things aren't really unsafe, and are more situations where the system is being understandably conservative, but significantly more conservative than a human would be, so it's more something I mention here as a quirk or limitation in the system. The following are more likely to actually cause an accident if not caught quickly enough, and this is the area where a lot more work is needed before full self driving even as Tesla defines it is going to be a workable thing. 

• Misaligned intersections - Autopilot sorta guesses where the path through an intersection is, because the alternative would be to shut down due to the lack of any lines on the road to guide it. Reasonable assumption is "continue roughly straight" but often intersections shift slightly, and there are a couple where it has tried to drive into the median because it didn't realize fast enough that the lane shifted almost a full lane-width to the right, and times where it unceremoniously changes lanes in the middle of an intersection because it picks up the wrong lane marker when re-acquiring the lane. Also if you're the first car in an intersection, stopped at a light with cross traffic going past, it will frequently just give up and tell you AP isn't available because it can no longer make a reasonable guess as to the correct path of travel. Intersections with stripes for various turning lane paths sometimes confuse it too, rightly so. 
• curvy secondary roads - you know the type, those roads that those of us who enjoy spirited driving in a suitable vehicle relish the chance to use without someone in front of us. They're probably posted 35 or 40, but they have plenty of curves, some with those yellow signs suggesting the maximum safe speed is 30, or 25, or even 15. The Model Y actually handles pretty well in spirited driving. It's not my 911, but it can be hustled through those roads safely and enjoyably. The problem is that Autopilot is not capable of managing that sort of road even at speed limit + 5 mph without leading to some potentially scary last-minute interventions. After playing with it for a while, here's the conclusion I've come to: Autopilot is not responding quickly enough to the clues being provided, including the line direction, possible warning signs and even those arrow markers along the side of the road to consistently decelerate to a safe speed that it can manage, nor is it willing to apply aggressive enough steering angle to compensate for maybe carrying too much speed into a turn and getting a little bit of understeer. It has briefly crossed center lines, been close to crossing the outside line and being on the shoulder, and generally not been great at keeping equal distance between the lane markers through turns if more than about 40° of steering angle, or any braking, is required. As a result, I have to do one of two things on roads like this - either I have to manually dial back the max speed at the entrance to a turn it typically botches, or I can only use Autopilot when it is following another vehicle, since they're likely to slow down at the point you'd expect, thus the robot will too in order to maintain following distance. 

There are multiple instances of pretty much all of the above concerns where I have wished for the ability to take a more active role in "teaching" the autopilot to do better, whether it's the ability to give it a voice keyword to tell it that the flashing light it thought it needed to stop for isn't a traffic light so it remembers for the future, or to invoke a "watch my path" mode so that it can store some data about appropriate entry and exit speeds and steering angles on secondary roads and gradually build a crowd-sourced knowledge about how to manage them. Even being able to more successfully navigate roads that I drive all of the time by storing some of that locally, and realizing it needs info from a server for a new road would be a huge improvement in the performance in some of these fuzzy areas. 

I joked with a friend after seeing a Tesla with a Student Driver sticker that given the fairly stupid robot piloting them a lot of the time, probably that should be a factory-installed option. Don't get me wrong, it's still amazing, and I am definitely glad I have it, but objective discussion of where it can be improved is always going to be useful and necessary.  

Man rants about phones

I've been a Sprint customer for 20+ years, partially because I used to work for them, and now mostly because of inertia (generally not having enough issue with them to switch), and still having a few friends that work there and some stock left over from my employee days that make me moderately biased toward their continued success. Now that they've formally been absorbed by T-Mobile, I have been getting emails asking me to come to a store to switch out my SIM to "take advantage of the new combined T-Mobile network", which I did... or at least tried to do, today. 

My daughter's LG G7 Fit, which I bought unlocked from woot for cheap, swapped SIMs no problem. My nicer, purchased directly from Sprint, G7 Thinq was declared ineligible for said SIM swap "due to device". After talking to someone with a technical clue in one of the repair stores, it's apparently being blamed on antennas and bands, i.e. Sprint's specified cocktail of bands and CDMA support for their SKU of the G7 apparently makes it not completely compatible with the long-term network/band layout TMO is using. So while my phone isn't exactly going to stop working tomorrow, I am not gaining what is arguably the primary benefit for the merger - better coverage, and quite likely my coverage via the legacy Sprint network will get worse the longer we go post-merger, eventually terminating in a message that I need to upgrade or risk losing service when they want to turn the lights out on the old stuff at (I'm guessing) the 12-18 months post-merger mark. I'm sure TMO doesn't want to keep CDMA around any longer than absolutely necessary, and Verizon has already announced (but delayed, or else it'd already be gone) the sunset of their 3G network too, so the writing is on the wall. 

So suddenly I am realizing I'm in the market for a new phone. I looked, and I've owned this for 2.5 years. My typical dwell time per phone is about 2.5-3 years, mostly because I tend to not trash them and I keep using them until there's a real reason to upgrade, so this is maybe a few months early in the upgrade cycle, but not too terrible I guess, since it's been paid off for 6 months. 

At this point, I'd be stupid to buy a new phone that isn't 5G, and I still want Android, but I'm finding that this is tweaking a few recurring annoyances in the phone market that might be worth writing about briefly. 

There are a few features that I care about on a phone beyond the obvious table stakes that define it as a smartphone. These may not be interesting to anyone but me, and are admittedly somewhat specific to my use case, but either way:

• Fingerprint reader

My phone and my laptop both have a reader built in, and now that I have set it up so that 1password and some other apps can use it in addition to basic login/unlock, I would never buy another phone without it. I've actually considered getting an external one for my desktop because I miss it when I'm using that. The dedicated hardware reader on the back side of the phone makes so much sense on account of the way you hold it anyway, so I have a strong preference for that, since that's my muscle memory now. Even before the current phone with the reader, the LG G4 had the power button back there, so I'm going on 5 years of turning on my phone that way.

• Software update cadence

This has been a problem for Android since the beginning, because Google didn't have enough market power to exert direct control over updates, and was left beholden to both the device manufacturers and the carriers, both of whom have their own development cycle where they add/update/break their own software and UI skin, and test cycle before they actually release updates to the end user. Google addressed this to some extent by making more and more of the OS carrier and device independent so that more bits could be updated directly via the Play Store, and moving to a monthly security release so they could patch holes in the rest of it in a way that could be deployed more rapidly without the extensive dev and test cycle that comes with a major feature release. My experience is that is still hit and miss, and I'm not sure whether the carrier or the device manufacturer or both is to blame for that. I was getting monthly security updates about quarterly (i.e. 3-ish months behind current) on this phone, but that dried up when the merger closed, so I'm currently stuck on May 2020.

• Expandable storage (microSD slot)

No matter how much storage you spring for when you buy the phone, it's probably not going to be enough, especially given the arms race that seems to be happening with camera sensors and their megapixel counts and support for 4K and even 8K video. Granted, with the accelerating transition to cloud services, streaming audio, etc, maybe that's not as important as it was a few years ago, but I'd rather just take advantage of how cheap ridiculous amounts of storage have gotten, slap a microSD chip in my phone (current one is 256GB) and not have to think about storage use, ever, even if I put a large portion of my entire music collection on it, and keep every photo and video I've ever taken with a smartphone, and back up all of my SMS weekly, and, and, and... 

• Wireless charging support

I have several wireless chargers now. They're not a complete substitute for USB-C charging, but they're useful, and I'd be annoyed if I couldn't charge my phone by setting it in the built-in phone holder in the Tesla.

• Headphone jack

I have Bluetooth headphones, and a bluetooth speaker, and a bluetooth adapter to let my phone talk to my home stereo, and even in the old pickup with the aux jack, I got a little bluetooth to aux adapter so a real headphone jack is more of a nice to have anymore, but having the ability to put the big wired over-ear cans on for noise reduction and feed them from my phone is still helpful.

In the US Android market, with basically 3 carriers, there are a few main brands that pretty much everyone considers because they're consistently offered and supported by the big 3 as the flagship devices. There are others that are considered budget offerings, but that's not really my focus, nor is how much "better off" I'd be with an iPhone. This is specifically about the tradeoffs for my options in Android. Pros and cons to switching to Apple is, as Alton Brown says, another show. 

• Samsung

Samsung makes pretty good hardware, but it is increasingly hamstrung by their insistence on forcing you to use their (usually inferior) versions of apps and features that already come with Android, most notably their voice assistant Bixby, along with their heavy-handed UI reskin of Android. And they're simply not good enough at software to justify this. I can't find the story to link to it, but I remember reading some really impressive horror stories around their development practices that made me pretty leery of ever owning another Samsung device. Between that and the lack of an MicroSD card slot [edited to add 4/5] (apparently this resurfaced briefly on the S20 but is gone again on the 21) and often a headphone jack, I left Samsung behind after the Galaxy S4 and mostly haven't regretted it. Part of why I use Android is that I like the app ecosystem. Google has a good keyboard, voice command features, tap and pay app, photo app, and OS UI. I don't want to have to fight with my device to use those things. 

• OnePlus

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to OnePlus. Brief glance through shows generally solid hardware, though it depends on the specific phone model whether it has wireless charging, none of them have microSD, and they're mostly using the under-display fingerprint reader. I had hoped they were pure Android as well, but it looks like if they were, they've become infected by the need to "improve" it with their own touches. To be fair, it seems fairly well reviewed, and the 8Pro is a reasonable competitor to the LG V60 from a spec and pricing perspective though it doesn't seem to be offered through TMO as some of the others are. 

[Edited to add 4/5] The Oneplus 9 has been released since I wrote this, and initial reviews all say it is a very solid phone, a good flagship offering capable of competing with Samsung, and generally better hardware than the current Pixels, though the above concerns still exist. 

• Google

Google has their Pixels, and the main selling point for those is that you're getting a pure Android experience. This is about as close to the Apple direct software upgrade cycle as you get in Android, for better or for worse. One assumes that the hardware and software integration means that they work well together and bug escape is minimal, but Google is a pretty siloed company, and seems to be getting increasingly dysfunctional, so I'm not sure how valid that assumption is anymore. Google also gives you access to the newest Android features here first, and their camera/photos app has been doing well competing with Apple for impressive quality in poor conditions. The current gen has a hardware fingerprint reader in the back where I like it, but no provision for external storage unless you count plugging something into the USB-C port. Google assumes that the only thing you needed all that storage for was pictures, and gives you unlimited storage on Google Photos, but at "high quality" which is not original quality. Also, Amazon's included photo storage for Prime members is better as a photo backup solution, as it has no such restrictions. Google really wants you to subscribe to one or more of their services to address this. I'm also sad that they have gone away from the Nexus name, because I enjoyed the hat tip to Blade Runner, but since ultimately I'm going to have to compromise somewhere, I'm considering the Pixel 5 more seriously than I have considered previous Google phones. 

• LG

I've had 2 LG phones, the G4 and the G7. Been very happy with both, as LG has gotten pretty good about mostly leaving Android stock (my phone has a Google button to invoke Google's assistant), and the hardware was quite good, with one or two exceptions. LG had fairly good speakers in the phone as far as those go, and they also had a real headphone jack with a fairly decent quality DAC such that it could drive a good set of headphones surprisingly well. 

The exceptions? As it ages, my fingerprint reader is getting flaky, which is kind of annoying but not bad enough to be an issue yet. Really, the big issue is that LG sucks at software updates. My phone, released in mid-2018, has already been abandoned on Android 9, despite Android 10 coming out roughly a year after the phone's initial release. Some flavors of G7 (looks like Korean and EU versions, and possibly the TMO version) got Android 10, but neither mine nor my daughter's appear to be among the chosen ones. And there are now rumors flying [edited 4/5 to add] confirmations that they might be interested in exiting the phone business entirely, which makes me at least a little leery of buying another LG and potentially ending up with a truly orphaned device [edited 4/5 to add] a complete no op, since they're still coming from the factory with Android 10, despite us being on to Android 11 already. LG has also brought out their own payment app to compete with Google Pay and Samsung Pay, so it seems they're losing the plot on not substituting their own apps again. 

Setting all that aside for a moment, LG has a weird collection of what might be considered their flagship devices right now. The V60 is probably the closest analog to the G series, supports 5G and has a microSD slot, but unfortunately has moved to using the under-display (and thus front-mounted) fingerprint reader that apparently doesn't work as consistently as the hardware ones, so it's on the short list, but I'd have to relearn my muscle memory of reaching for the phone and unlocking it with my index finger that is already in the right position on the back of the phone based on how I hold it. But they've also been chasing the gimmicky - they have 2 different varieties of multiscreen phones, the Wing, which has a screen that rotates 90° while leaving the lower half of the vertical screen available for simultaneous use, and a second screen case for the V60, which opens like a book to reveal 2 screens. Moving parts to break, more screens to use battery and get broken, limited case options, and generally thicker to accommodate all of this for questionable benefit. It all seems a bit "shark jumpy" to me in light of the above mentioned rumor.  

I don't think this set of wants and needs is that unique to me, but maybe it is. Fortunately I have time to do some more research and not rush to make a decision since my current phone is functional.