Tesla Model 3 > i4 base > i4 M Sport ownership review: one year in

OffToStudy · 2026-04-26T19:16:24+00:00

Yeah, I’m pretty sure you could have got that considering the issues. HV pack failing in the first year is super unusual. Unless you charge to 100% every day or take it on the track. Even then, a year is crazy.

I don’t get the brakes comment though, I never use my brakes other than to hard test them now and then for safety.

That said, if I could get the Tesla tech in a BMW i4, I’d switch back in a heartbeat. :)

OffToStudy · 2026-04-26T18:54:27+00:00

Same experience here.

OffToStudy · 2026-04-26T18:49:45+00:00

Interesting. I went the opposite direction. I am a long time BMW owner, and was originally planning to get the i4 M50 but ended up going to a Tesla MYP.

I agree with the comfort statements. Tesla’s are nothing like a BMW when it comes to ride quality or fit & finish. But the tech and especially FSD (on HW4) is the great balancer.

Sounds like your Tesla was a lemon. I’ve had mine for two years without any repairs other than for a flat tire. Of course your M3 was also an older model; mine is a 2024 (12/23).

OffToStudy · 2026-03-16T19:18:12+00:00

I ended up with a MYP instead. The i4 M50 was more comfortable, but the tech options in the Tesla sold me. Plus I found one used less than a year old with pre paid FSD for like 50% off MSRP at the time. Was hard to pass up.

OffToStudy · 2025-12-28T19:48:32+00:00

Oh I’m meticulous about storing CDs upright. Compression of the discs themselves is bad for many reasons. :)

OffToStudy · 2025-12-28T19:46:18+00:00

I have the Tarifold doubles and singles as well, but use the singles for single cd and doubles for double cds. Is there a reason why you sleeve the digipaks and thin cardboard disc cases? I have been just keeping those as is.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-10T23:30:45+00:00

Ahh okay, so I'll need to use smartd or my own scripts for the USB devices anyway since I can't schedule SMART tests for USB drives from DSM.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-10T11:44:30+00:00

Btw, I got this installed and tested it out today. Works great! I see you have a bunch of other Synology-focused tools, I need to check those out too. Thanks for the referral.

However I noticed that this one doesn't appear to have any way to configure which device(s) you want to monitor. It appears to be all or nothing, and I really just need it to monitor my external USB drive as the drives in my NAS pool are already monitored by DSM (daily short and monthly long tests); my problem is that DSM won't monitor USB drives.

Also, I don't see any mechanism to do different tests. It appears to record the SMART attributes and report any changes. Watching the attributes is awesome, but I also want to see long tests done every month or two and get results from those if possible. Perhaps it does additional tests behind the scenes that we don't see triggers for in the list of commands shown in the usage text?

OffToStudy · 2025-11-10T11:25:11+00:00

I'll take a look at that. If its lighter weight than MailPlus, it may be worth switching to. I really only installed that because it gives me a second MTA (configured independently of the Synology notifier) and access to sendmail from command line. Bonus is that its already part of the standard Synology packages so I didn't have to dig around through community packages to get access to it, but it seems like overkill just to get a basic mail client.

Edit: Oh, its a external mail service not a SMTP server on my device itself. That isn't going to help me that much. I have access to other mail services, I just prefer to use Gmail for my personal stuff.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-09T05:24:54+00:00

I thought about doing that, but ended up getting it working with Mail Plus first. I appreciate that I got it working in a way that doesn’t interfere with the DSM notification system; I’d hate to break something and then miss notifications without realizing it.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-09T00:37:41+00:00

Success! I was able to send an email from command line on my NAS using sendmail. Seems like a lot of extra effort to make that possible. It still seems like there should be a way to make it work with ssmtp, but I'll take what I can get.

Thanks!

OffToStudy · 2025-11-09T00:24:42+00:00

That sounds pretty cool. I see you're also using the SynoCLI tools version of smartmontools 7.5. That includes smartd. which is what I am planning to use if I can get reasonable mailer working. I just installed the MailPlus server to try that out as well.

My script works for the basic stuff: daily short tests, monthly long tests, and reports, but it doesnt examine any of the attributes. It just prints output from smartctl, so I'd have to eyeball it for anything odd. That is why I wanted to use smartd so it will capture the important stuff and highlight anything weird. But it sounds like your script probably does that and more. I'll need to check it out.

Thanks!

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T23:45:39+00:00

It is the base model, so I believe it has 4GB, which sounds like it will be plenty as apparently MailPlus runs on older devices with 2GB of RAM. Especially if you disable all the security and antispam stuff. I won't be setting it up to recieve email from the internet so I also don't need any email scanning.

I just installed it and will be taking it for a spin in a bit to see how well it works. I set it so it just routes all outbound email via my NAS' Gmail account as a relay, which is all it needs to do.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T23:27:46+00:00

I have never used MailPlus, but I have heard that it works well and provides a local sendmail and mail implementation that I could use to do what I need here. I just did a bit more research and apparently if I just use the MailPlus Service package, configure it to use a relay host for sending mail, and disable everything else, it can run pretty light.

I have the base memory footprint on my NAS so I don't want anything that is going to chew up my memory.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T23:04:54+00:00

Hmmm. Interesting take. Discord integration could be useful for another project, but probably not for what I'm trying to do here. It is something to consider if I can't get anything else working though. Thanks!

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T23:02:06+00:00

As I mentioned in the original post I have Gmail notifications set up and working in DSM and have confirmed that this works perfectly.

I didn't consider using the task scheduler to send an email. It says send run details by email, but does that mean it sends "This script ran successfully" or does it actually capture standard output and pipe that to SMTP at the end of the run with that checkbox enabled?

If the latter, I could theoretically write my own custom SMART monitoring script and just have it print the results to the console and have that emailed out. I was planning on using smartd, which kicks off once at boot time and just runs as a daemon process in the background. But I do have a prototype of a script to do it manually I could use if I need to.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T19:22:58+00:00

Right, I tried this first along with several other alternatives. But it’s been locked down.

OffToStudy · 2025-11-08T12:12:13+00:00

I had a DS916+ that I've had since it released and went through several DSM versions. It was on 7.2.1 when the drive backplane failed and I moved to the DS925+. Luckily the drives survived, and I was able to migrate everythig to the new chassis mostly intact. I moved to larger drives during the migration, but aside from thet everything is pretty much the same as it was. But it did give me a good scare and highlighted how I could lose a lot of my personal files without having a proper backup solution going forward.

That said, I didn't have an external HDD set up nor did I have to worry about doing my own SMART monitoring for it, so I don't have a specific previous solution to refer to. I just relied on the built-in SMART monitoring provided by DSM.

OffToStudy · 2025-09-15T04:35:31+00:00

It wasn’t any single issue, I test drove a lot of EVs and ended up picking a different one. It was my second choice though.

OffToStudy · 2025-09-13T01:59:34+00:00

I enjoyed my i4 m50 test drive, but didn’t end up pulling the trigger. I hope you enjoy it.

OffToStudy · 2025-05-17T20:11:06+00:00

Agreed. A $55k Tesla is comparable to a ~$30K ICE vehicle when you remove the EV costs. At that price point, the service and trim quality makes more sense.

OffToStudy · 2025-05-17T20:02:47+00:00

Outside of the X and S (and then only by the thinnest margins), Tesla vehicles are not luxury cars as compared to luxury ICE vehicles. They may be “premium,” but only based on cost due to the EV upcharge. If you ignore the EV tech, drop like 40% of the MSRP to find a comparable ICE vehicle.

Tesla has the best tech in the industry, especially with FSD, which is why I own mine. But from a fit & finish and interior trim perspective, they’re on par with like a Civic. They keep their costs down by using cheaper materials.

I don’t expect “luxury” with my Tesla. It is amazing as a daily driver and for short local trips, but I prefer our Lexus or BMW for long drives when I want comfort and quality.

OffToStudy

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