Pati Nagle > Quotes

“The car’s task is to stay centered between the stripes. Generally, it does a good job of this. Too good, at times—such as when passing a giant semi that’s riding the lane stripe. The car’s radar senses the semi, and the car draws a conclusion along the line of: “There’s something big to my right, but I’ve got seven inches of clearance, so I’m OK.” Meanwhile, the human driver is freaking out.”
― Pati Nagle, The Tesla Diaries: Adventures in Owning an Electric Car

“For the first two or three months we had Nikola, my spouse tracked our electricity costs plus gasoline costs for the Camry, and compared them to our electricity and gas costs for the same months of the previous year. He gave up after three months. We were saving over $100 a month on those combined costs, and that was with quite a lot of jaunting about in the Tesla.”
― Pati Nagle, The Tesla Diaries: Adventures in Owning an Electric Car

“Keeping our lovely Camry going was costing us about $1500/year in maintenance and another $1000 in fuel costs. So that’s about $2500 per year in additional cost. By 2015, the Camry we’d paid $28k for had now cost us $33k. (We still own it today, though we’re driving it a lot less. In 2018, the total cost is up to about $40k, close to half the cost of our dream Model S.)”
― Pati Nagle, The Tesla Diaries: Adventures in Owning an Electric Car

“Now, all of this happened without Autopilot, because we had decided against buying it when we were designing the car. We apparently weren’t alone in that, because in May, we got a message from Tesla offering us a one-month free trial of Autopilot. Want to taste the Koolaid? The first cup is free...”
― Pati Nagle, The Tesla Diaries: Adventures in Owning an Electric Car