December 31, 2021 11:00 am EST Bradley Brownell We drove a lot of cars in 2021, we're reposting a few of our favorites here. For the vast majority of American commuters, there isn't a better daily back-and-forth commuter car than the Tesla Model Y Dual Motor Long Range. The Model Y achieves things that no other car can, which makes it exceptional in a field of largely unexceptional competitors. Bradley Brownell (Full Disclosure: Tesla does not have a public relations department and will not speak to the media, let alone lend any of us shrimp-munchers a new car to test. When a friend of mine with a Model Y asked if I wanted to swap cars for a month so I could get a taste of the best from Fremont, California, I jumped at the opportunity. I returned the car to its rightful owner in the same condition it was loaned to me. He calls it Moby, because it's a big white whale.) For the month of December and a bit of January, my wife and I treated this Tesla as if it were our own. We went for road trips, took it to the grocery store, commuted to the office and ran our errands in it. Over that month, we added around 1,500 miles to the car's odometer and enjoyed the heck out of it the whole time. The weather in northern Nevada was clear but cold, as is usually the case in a high desert winter. Tesla Model Y Safety And “Self-Driving” Bradley Brownell The Tesla Model Y has been awarded a five-star NHTSA rating in all three categories: front crash, side crash, and rollover protection. It also has all of the safety technologies recommended by the agency, including forward collision warning, lane-departure warning, automatic emergency braking and dynamic brake support. The Tesla's regular non-Autopilot adaptive cruise system is incredibly good. So long as you are making all of the car's steering inputs on the highway, it's remarkably effective at controlling the stopping and going. Even on regular non-interstate drives, I found myself kicking on the adaptive cruise, which would not only come to a complete stop behind a line of cars, but read the red lights and stop signs and come to a complete stop without input. I don't think that's available without the FSD option, which unfortunately is too expensive to be worth it, if you ask me. This particular car was equipped with that $10,000 Full Self Driving suite of features, which means it has the poorly named Autopilot driver assist system, which again is not in any way a "self-driving" feature. Simply put, I hated it. I used it for several hundred miles of highway driving, both between Reno and San Francisco, and from Reno to the east, when we went on a long road trip in the desert. If you're chugging along hogging the left lane, it seems to work pretty well, but if you run in the right lane (where you fucking should be unless you're passing!) the car doesn't know what to do with exit ramps, cheating to the right as the lane expands, occasionally pointing the car's big nose at the guard rail. If you try to correct it, the system shuts off, forcing you to start the whole process over again. Twice, when the lane was poorly marked and suddenly shifted in rural Nevada, the car attempted to change lanes without warning. I really didn't like that. The Full Self Driving package had one really neat feature that I enjoyed. Even when you aren't driving in the so-called Autopilot mode, the car will read the traffic lights and stop signs ahead of you to let you know what's going on. If you are sitting first in line at a red light, the car will give you a little chime when the red light flips to green. Just in case you aren't paying full attention with your foot on the brake, you'll get called back to reality before the impatient dingus behind you has the audacity to honk the horn. Bradley Brownell