The 2024 Tesla Model 3 isn't perfect, but fixes nearly everything we used to hate

Tesla doesn’t have a formal communications department, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t listening to its customers, to reviewers, and to random people on X. The 2024 Tesla Model 3 makes it clear the company paid close attention to what people have said about its cars, took the feedback seriously, and went to work.

Introducing the 2024 Tesla Model 3 Highland.

Tesla prefers to make running changes, even big ones, rather than update its cars via traditional model years and formal refreshes, but you can still classify the new Model 3 as a refresh. Known by its internal “Highland” code name, the car’s battery and motors are untouched. More surprising, it hasn’t adopted the single-piece rear body "gigacasting" of the Model Y. At a mechanical level, it’s mostly the same car.

You’re forgiven for thinking the same applies to the exterior, but that’s not strictly true. According to Tesla, everything but the doors and rear fenders is new. Some of the changes are obvious. The new nose is resolved better than before, looking more like a Tesla Roadster and less like Spider-Man’s mask. The foglights are gone and cooling air flows through a single inlet. Out back, Tesla missed the memo on crab-claw taillights going out of style. However, moving them entirely onto the trunklid solves one of Tesla’s biggest build quality issues: inconsistent panel gaps that contribute to people having negative impressions of the cars’ build quality.

2024 EV charging stations:Ford's home charging solution is pricey and can be difficult to use.

Oh, yes, Tesla knows about the panel gaps. Despite all prior evidence, it cares about this ongoing problem, and fixing it wasn’t just about shutting us up. Tighter panel gaps are better for aerodynamics, so not only does the new Model 3 look like it was built by a company that cares but it achieves the lowest coefficient of drag of any Tesla at 0.219, down from 0.225.

Better aero and increased efficiency from software updates are responsible for Tesla’s improved range claims. We say “claims” because at the time of publishing, official EPA ratings haven’t been released. Tesla didn’t provide exact numbers, but we expect small changes from the current EPA-estimated 272 miles for the rear-drive Model 3 Standard Range car (seen in the gallery wearing new Stealth Grey paint) and 333 miles for the all-wheel-drive Dual-Motor Long Range car (seen below in the also-new Ultra Red paint). In other markets, Tesla reports improvements of roughly 10 percent.

Tesla's latest interior changes

Interior changes are slightly less subtle. The “wood” trim added to the dash and door panels a few years back is gone, replaced with nicely textured cloth on the dash that looks far richer. An adjustable ambient lighting strip runs above it and wraps around onto the doors, adding visual interest and helping to break up the all-black base interior. Spring for the optional two-tone white over black interior and the design really pops, as the white now runs up the door panels and onto the dash rather than being restricted to the seats as it used to be. It’s all still fairly minimalist, but now with a bit of panache.

The rest all looks pretty familiar up front until you look closely at the steering wheel. The shifter and turn signal stalks are gone; new touch-sensitive buttons have sprouted on the left and right spokes. Shifting is done by hoping the car guesses correctly which way you want to go—the early version present in our vehicles rarely got it right, but Tesla says improvements will be made before North American deliveries—swiping up or down on the leftmost side of the single screen, or via the touch-sensitive secondary shifter on the ceiling between the overhead lights.

Normally, we’d rage against touch-sensitive buttons on steering wheels and the deletion of physical controls, but we grudgingly give these a pass. Ferrari and Lamborghini put their turn signals on the steering wheel (though they don’t use capacitive buttons), so why can’t Tesla? Swiping on the screen to shift is hardly different from pushing a button on the dash of an Aston Martin. Tesla’s new controls all work well enough that we don’t have much to complain about. The turn signals take the most getting-used-to, but they still cancel themselves automatically (most of the time). Button presses are confirmed by vibrations in the panel itself rather than in the entire steering wheel, like the yoke in the Model S and X.

Once again, Tesla’s ability to pass off cost-cutting measures as innovation is unmatched. Physical buttons, switches, and levers are expensive to engineer. Parts that don’t move are far cheaper, and software code is even less costly. There are engineers at every automaker in the world who’d kill to have their own cost-cutting viewed nearly as favorably, and even praised, by customers.

Aside from the shifter, the screen looks and functions the same as before thanks to Tesla’s continuous over-the-air (OTA) software updates that keep older cars looking fresh. There’s now slightly more real estate thanks to a slimmer bezel, so you don’t lose much to the shifter. A new processor has the screen running faster, though not enough for you to really notice. Poke around a bit and you will notice controls for the new front seat coolers, a much-needed addition for anyone who lives in a hot climate.

The rear seat is where the real action is. It didn’t used to be a place you’d want to spend a lot of time, so it’s had a full makeover. The seat cushion itself is softer and the height of the bottom cushion and the angle of the backrest have been adjusted to make the seat considerably more comfortable, with slightly more headroom. The ambient lighting and (optional) two-tone door panels are present, and it’s all capped off by an 8-inch screen between the front seats.

Standard on all trims, the screen can control the rear air vents the same way you would control the fronts, change the entertainment source and track, take over control of the front passenger seat to create a chauffeured experience, and it’s also basically a Roku. You can stream Netflix, Disney+, YouTube, Twitch, and Hulu from your accounts, with audio played over the speakers (now optionally numbering 17 instead of 14) or through two paired wireless headphones. Critically, you can use them while the car is moving, unlike the same functions on the front screen that only work when the vehicle is parked. Sometime after the car goes on sale, Tesla will push an OTA update that allows gaming from the rear screen like you can already do on the front screen.

The 2024 driving experience

With the same motors and batteries as before, the actual driving experience isn’t what you’ll notice once you give up on the predictive shifting and put the car in Drive yourself. You do notice a solid thunk of the door closing when you first get in the car. Not the tinny, hollow noise of a Toyota but the way an actual luxury-car door sounds: solid. Start driving and what stands out most is what you don’t hear. The new 2024 Tesla Model 3 is much, much quieter inside than the old car. Less road noise, less tire noise, and less wind noise. You can have a normal conversation without raising your voice to be heard—a night-and-day difference.

It’s a comprehensive effort. Every window is now made of acoustically insulating glass, not just the front glass. The tighter panel gaps and better sealing reduce wind noise. A new panel under the frunk lid also reduces wind noise, while new suspension bushings and brake-mounting hardware reduce road noise transmission into the cabin. Soft-touch materials throughout the interior absorb noise, as do the thicker pads behind them. Yell loud enough in a current Model 3 and you can almost hear an echo. Not in this new one.

The cabin is also better isolated from road bumps. New frequency-adaptive passive shock absorbers improve ride quality enormously compared to the old car, though it’s still firm. Head toss especially is greatly reduced, as is gut jiggle. The rear end still suffers from crash through—that banging noise when one or both dampers bottom out—though now it only occurs on the worst bumps. It’s worse in the rear-drive car than in the Dual-Motor, likely because the carryover suspension design never had quite enough rear travel in the first place.

Handling is effectively unchanged, as the Model 3 still employs a noticeably quick steering rack and soft anti-roll bars that combine with the low center of gravity to make the car feel a bit hyper in corners. A bit less body roll would go a long way, whenever Tesla decides to make a new Performance model. Tesla engineers say new steering knuckles and front suspension geometry should make the front end feel more precise and responsive and less susceptible to tramlining, but we didn’t feel much of a difference. You’ll certainly get a lot more steering feel from the rear-drive car, if that’s something you’re after. The Dual-Motor's steering, with all that torque going to the front axle, feels somewhat detached.

Is Tesla missing something?

For all the upgrades Tesla gave the 2024 Model 3, we’d have liked to see a few more. We’re still not fans of the single centered screen and would much prefer to have either a small instrument-cluster screen or a head-up display so something as simple as checking your speed wouldn’t require taking your eyes so far off the road. Tesla tells us it’s not something existing owners clamor for, but we think it should ask prospective customers instead.

We’re also disappointed to see sunroof shades are still not standard. Yes, the tint on the ceiling glass is pretty dark, but it’s not enough. Forty-five minutes of driving with the A/C on after leaving the car sitting in the sun, the center console armrest was still too hot to rest an elbow on and the air around our heads was still noticeably warmer than around our torsos. The $145 (plus shipping) for a pair of mesh screens held in by plastic tabs is a rinky-dink and overpriced solution. Tesla’s decision to eliminate every sensor from the car but the cameras also needs a rethink. Something as innocuous as morning dew can obscure the cameras and diminish or disable the parking sensors and some Autopilot functions like blind-spot monitoring and Autosteer. At minimum, they need self-cleaning systems, but a better solution would include redundant overlapping sensors with different failure modes that can be compensated for.

Read 2024 Nissan reviews:The latest Nissan Z Nismo may disappoint some monster car fans.

Autopilot and the elephant in the room

You can’t drive a Tesla without talking about Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving Beta” (FSD Beta), so here we go. The former is actually quite good, while the latter isn’t ready for prime time and is a waste of $12,000.

Get on the highway, turn on Autopilot, and it’s a perfectly good adaptive cruise control system. It keeps distance from other cars well, though we wish it got up to speed quicker when moving out from behind a slow vehicle. Autosteer is good at keeping the car centered in its lane so long as none of the cameras are obscured by morning dew or worse.

Enhanced Autopilot, at $6,000, is a trickier proposition. The automatic lane-changes generally work well, though you’d better be ready to countermand them quickly when they’re unwanted, because the car doesn’t give you much time to think about it. We appreciate it keeping an eye behind us and getting out of the way of faster traffic as well. We also like the “Navigate on Autopilot” feature’s ability to take flyover ramps and off-ramps. We find certain other features far less useful. The Summon setting that drives your car to you in a parking lot still doesn’t work well and mostly feels like a novelty. The Autopark feature works fine but we’re not convinced anyone actually uses this technology in any car, let alone a Tesla.

FSD Beta, meanwhile, is just unacceptable. We find it completely untrustworthy and encountered several instances of it doing dangerous maneuvers. From attempting to turn left at a T-junction where there was not only no road but a curb there, to making unwanted turns onto other streets when no destination was set, to changing its predicted course to follow the path of a pedestrian crossing in front of the car, we found it not at all ready for public consumption. Most frustrating, the steering effort required to resume control while using FSD Beta was significantly higher than with standard Autopilot engaged, making it needlessly difficult to correct the errant computer. Paying $12,000 to test unfinished software (three years in beta and counting) with zero compensation and no legal protection when something goes wrong is absurd on its face, and the end-user experience is even worse.

All charged up and ready to go

Though the Model 3 is among the least expensive electric cars on the market, it’s still not exactly a cheap vehicle, so we’re loathe to recommend you go buy the more-expensive Long Range version just because it’s quicker. Instead, we recommend you consider it because of its range and charging speeds.

The 272 miles of range offered by the current base Tesla Model 3 is competitive, but nothing special. On a road trip, you’ll only charge to 80 percent anyway, which is 216 miles. Were the car to charge super-fast, it could be a worthwhile tradeoff. Unfortunately, the CATL-built LFP battery tops out at 170 kW, which is on the low end of competitive. The Model 3 Long Range features a Tesla-built lithium-ion battery that covers 333 miles (267 miles when charged to 80 percent) and charges at 250 kW.

The Standard Range car is plenty quick enough and likely to be significantly cheaper, but you should examine your driving behavior before you pass on the Long Range. If you’re in a situation where you don’t have access to charging at home, or you do a lot of road trips, the additional range and charging speed may be worth the price. If you’re just looking for a commuter that’s less expensive to own and operate, the base car should suit you fine.

Tesla feedback goes far

Every major change and minor update to the new 2024 Tesla Model 3 tells the same story: The company listened to owner feedback and fixed what needed fixing. There are a few more items on the wish list that the company hasn’t gotten to yet—and it may not intend to—but their absence might simply be the cost of keeping the retail price down. On the other hand, this is Tesla we’re talking about, so it may suddenly introduce more changes at any time. Regardless, the new Model 3 is a substantially better car than the already good outgoing model for what we hope will be not much more money, and that’s something to get excited about.

2024 Tesla Model 3 Specifications

Base Price $39,000–$49,500 (est)

Layout Front-/front- and rear-motor, RWD/AWD, 5-pass, 4-door sedan

Motors 257-hp/266-lb-ft permanent-magnet electric; 118 hp/120-lb-ft AC induction (front), 276 hp/257-lb-ft permanent-magnet (rear); 394 hp/377 lb-ft (comb) electric

Transmissions 1-speed auto

Curb Weight 3,900-4,050 lb (est)

Wheelbase 113.2 in

L x W x H 185.8 x 76.1 x 56.7 in

0-60 MPH 4.0-5.5 sec (MT est)

EPA Fuel ECON 134-138/126/131-132 mpg-e (est)

EPA Range, COMB 272-333 miles (est)

On Sale Q1 2024

*This has been updated from January to Q1 2024 at Tesla's request.