It's fantastic. Best thing I've ever driven, regardless of environmental impact. It's silent and odorless, responds instantly and precisely, and it seats 5 adults + 2 kids comfortably.
A niche benefit: I live in the mountains and it handles going down much better than gas cars, where you have to downshift and use engine braking to avoid burning the brakes. It uses 12 miles of range going up, and gains 4 back going down so the average is close to a flat road of the same distance.
I'm curious about how it handles downhills. I would've thought that without engine braking you would have to rely exclusively on the brakes and would thus burn them up even more. Does the Tesla have another mechanism? Or just insanely efficient brakes?
Have you put kids in the back much? Based on their comfort and the space they take up, do you feel that the S is enough for a family car, or will the X better fill that niche?
My kids absolutely adore "the cave". They wave to people sometimes at red lights. ;)
They won't be able to sit back there forever. My daughter probably has 2 years and my son maybe 4 or 5. When they are both done with the seats, we can have them removed and get even more trunk space.
One thing that I ding Tesla a bit about... They don't tint the hatchback window the way they do the panoramic roof glass. This was a mistake as the back seats get hot in the direct sunlight and there isn't currently air conditioning vents back there.
Enough owners have raised these concerns that I believe they will likely correct one or both of them in future revisions of the car, and we'll see if they make it one of the proposed hardware retrofits.
In the interim, we had the back windows after-market tinted and the kids have no complaints.
It's almost certainly safer than the late 1960's station wagon we had when I was a child, with the backwards-facing seats in the cargo area. The rear crumple zone on it was everything behind the axle.
A niche benefit: I live in the mountains and it handles going down much better than gas cars, where you have to downshift and use engine braking to avoid burning the brakes. It uses 12 miles of range going up, and gains 4 back going down so the average is close to a flat road of the same distance.