From Tesla Model Y to Model S Plaid: A Swap Experience | October 14 2025, 16:51

Recently, my Tesla Model Y fell ill, and the dealership gave me a Model S Plaid as a loaner car. It’s simply a monster, accelerating to 100 km/h in 2 seconds. Over a thousand horsepower. But after driving it for a week, Nadezhda and I realized that we would still not trade our Model Y for a Model S.

Well, the fact that it’s unusually low to the ground is a minor issue. We would get used to that. But getting out from behind the wheel is always incredibly awkward for me. My belly isn’t that big, but in the Model S, it’s like a real cockpit. You have to carefully sit down and climb out, whereas in the Model Y, you just jump in somehow and go.

Moreover, the Model S is really noisy inside compared to the Model Y. You can hear the road. And this is for a price twice that of the Model Y. Also, for some reason, the mode where you just walk away from the car works less sensitively, and locks the car only when you are already quite far away.

And then there are the turn signals. What idiot decided to put their buttons on the steering wheel? It’s impossible to get used to that. The steering wheel still turns, and the buttons are always somewhere unclear.

But, damn it, it’s very beautiful from the outside. Especially with a light interior.

By the way, Tesla has somewhat poorly thought out the mechanism for issuing a replacement car, and it works with only one driver. You can’t set two keys for two different phones. Moreover, it would be nice to store the settings in the cloud and receive a replacement car already adjusted to your preferences.

And the car fell ill in an interesting way too. It’s funny when the car on the highway tells you that there’s a little problem, the engine is dead, but you should not distract yourself, just keep driving. After parking, the car might theoretically not drive, but so far all is normal. If not, we will tell you. Meanwhile, your drive will not sound the same.

As I understood, the car simply switched from 4-wheel drive to 2-wheel drive. Funny that such a fallback exists at all. Already fixed, it needed an inverter replacement.