The Tesla Model Y’s Spartan cabin design lacks many of the physical controls that we take for granted in most new models, replacing them with touchscreen options or the bare minimum of actual buttons. Once you’re used to it, you’ll find that much of the in-car tech is excellent to use.
Interior and dashboard design
If understatement is your thing, then the Model Y is the car for you. Aside from its huge touchscreen, that dashboard is almost completely bare, but its simple design does contain some neat details; air from the climate control system flows through a subtle, slim slot that runs the full width of the dash, for example. Some of our road testers love the understated look, but others find it so bare that the design seems almost unfinished.
We’ve said many times how we like physical controls, and the Tesla has so few. Almost everything is controlled through the large, central display. One of the few actual buttons you’ll find is for the hazard warning switch (on the ceiling), but there are extra controls on the steering wheel, including the windscreen wiper washers and the headlight flasher.
The latter works OK in practice, but we still think it’s a poor decision to remove a physical control for the headlights. While automatic lights make this less necessary than before, they’re not perfect; we’d much rather be able to take control manually if we need to. Turning the lights on required a longer press of the button, which can be quite annoying.
It’s a similar story with the indicator stalk. It feels cheap and is a faff to use because it doesn’t click into place – making cancelling a signal needlessly difficult. It’s almost as if Tesla is persuading owners of the merits of touchscreens by deliberately making its physical controls less than ideal.
Materials and build quality
Fit and finish were certainly a weakness of earlier Teslas, but things have improved dramatically. We’d say it’s still not perfect; there are one or two trim panels between the doors and the dash that don’t quite align perfectly – but these are now flaws at a level which isn’t uncommon among some other brands either. Though the overall design is fairly sparse.
