After four months of owning a Tesla, driving another car feels like being in a Model T

OK, for those who want to nitpick the title of this post, I’ve never ridden in a Model T — which stopped being made by Ford in 1927. I’m just using the Model T as shorthand for a car that is technologically unsophisticated compared to the 2026 Tesla Model Y Premium that I got last May.

In previous posts about the Tesla (see this blog’s Cars category), I’ve described why I like it so much. Way more than any other car I’ve driven in the 61 years since I got my driver’s license. Yeah, I’m old.

What I haven’t talked about much, if at all, is how the Tesla has changed how I feel about other cars.

Such as the 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Limited that is still in my possession until next week, when my granddaughter is picking it up to use in her sophomore year at the University of Oregon. (Freshmen, freshwomen, or freshpeople can’t have cars in their first college year.)

I really liked the Crosstrek. I mean, really liked. It was an improved Crosstrek version from the 2020 Crosstrek that I’d owned previously. I liked the larger engine in the 2024 model, wireless Apple CarPlay, the improved touchscreen, and some design changes. I figured that it was going to be difficult to find a car that I liked as much as the Crosstrek, given how pleasant it was to drive.

Then the Tesla entered my life.

I’ve been driving the Crosstrek one day a week since I got the Tesla last May in order to keep the battery charged. Other than that, the Crosstrek has been under a car cover to keep it in good shape until my granddaughter inherits it. Today I drove it to Big Red, a touchless car wash here in Salem, to get the Crosstrek looking good for my granddaughter’s adoption of the vehicle.

That felt strange. As it does every time I drive a non-Tesla car, including my wife’s RAV4 plug-in hybrid, a quasi electric car.

Other cars simply feel old-fashioned, outmoded, clunky, unsophisticated. This is partly due to the Tesla Model Y being fully electric with a large touchscreen that handles almost all of the car’s controls. I came up with 20 reasons why I like the Tesla more than any other car. But that’s sort of coming up with reasons why I love my wife.

There’s more to it than any list of reasons. Something hard to describe, yet fully real.

The best I can do is gesture in the direction of the Tesla’s intelligence and personality. This is the first car I’ve owned that I’d even use those terms with. It fits with the Tesla because my Model Y basically is AI, artificial intelligence, on wheels. It’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) capability is what convinced me to get the car, and FSD is what continues to amaze me every time I drive it.

In the Crosstrek today, I had to make all kind of decisions.

Should I change lanes? Is it safe to change lanes? How should I get home after needing to turn right on Commercial when leaving the car wash, when home was in the opposite direction? Am I going too fast? That’s what driving a car always has been about: decisions, decisions, decisions. Which involve worries, worries, worries — in case the decisions aren’t correct.

Having the Tesla drive me to my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem later in the day, I did virtually nothing. My Tesla had preset the navigation to the Chemeketa Parking Garage, because it knows that’s where I go on Thursdays at 5 pm. I backed the car out of our carport, because the Tesla gets confused when  it tries to turn around in our rural driveway.

But once I got the Tesla pointed in the right direction, I pressed the Full Self Driving button. Then did nothing until the Tesla pulled into the parking garage about 25 minutes later, because it doesn’t do great in parking garages. The trip was hugely more relaxing than my shorter trip in the Crosstrek. More than that… it was hugely different in all sorts of other ways, just as a Model T is hugely different from modern cars.