• Minimalist cabin design
• All functions on vast touchscreen
• No secondary displays

How is the quality and layout?

If you’re coming to a Tesla from another manufacturer, then the way it does things can seem a little alien at first. Firstly, the car unlocked and the ignition (for want of a better word, it doesn’t actually have one) automatically switched on as soon as we approached the car (using our smartphone as a key) ready for us to select drive and pull away. Before then, adjusting the steering column and mirrors is done via a sub-menu on the 15.4-inch infotainment touchscreen.

There’s plenty of space inside thanks to the minimalist cabin layout, while the only physical controls for the driver are the seat adjustment, door handles, the steering wheel with two rotary switches and the column stalks (one for the wipers/indicators, the other for drive selection). There’s not even a head-up display; instead we had to glance across to the massive touchscreen to check our speed, for example. It all looks very high-tech, but we’d welcome a few physical controls for commonly used functions.

Infotainment and tech

All major functions and driving controls are operated using the crisp and responsive 15.4-inch centrally-mounted touchscreen interface. This will be odd the first time you use it to open the glovebox, adjust your mirrors and turn on the wipers, but we soon got used to it – as well as using the brilliant voice control system, which spelled out our commands on screen, so we could see exactly what the car thought we were saying.

The system is very slick and quick to use with crystal-clear graphics and mapping, and there are plenty of additional features to keep occupants amused – although the majority of them only worked when we were parked. There are various games, including a racing game where we could use the car’s steering wheel as a controller, a music maker, and we could even watch YouTube videos. Spotify music is also available, but Apple CarPlay and Android Auto aren’t included – Tesla expects you to use its system instead.

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Comfort

• Comfortable ‘vegan leather’ seats
• Heated seating all round
• Flat floor means lots of foot room

Electric seat adjustment means it’s easy to get comfortable at the wheel of the Model Y, while the car’s battery layout results in a flat floor for all passengers. Vegan leather seat trim is standard (white costs extra), and it feels robust. The rear seats have different positions for the backrests, so we could recline them a little way when we wanted.

All five seats are heated, so we could get warm that way rather than using the climate control, which also helped to save battery energy. However, the heated back seats (as well as the rear climate control functions) can only be controlled either via the touchscreen up front or the Tesla smartphone app.

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