#. 94 A WOMAN’S BRIEF — TESLA & UNNECESSARY THINGS

It’s a Tesla talk. We Pines are on our first FSD Tesla around the Cascade Loop. We and Scooter Sublime are loving the ride, the hikes, and the river. This post comes to you from Winthrop, 200 or so miles from home.

Nothing requires learning about your car like a road trip.

We started with our first full battery load. Full load is only for long driving stretches. This car took on Seattle traffic like it was born to the challenge. Our first Tesla Supercharger charge in Burlington was fast! We had just enough time to walk down the way for Dave’s Senior cup of coffee from McDonald’s, then to Starbucks for my Americano.

Now, about learning. Not far out of Burlington, a trinity of warnings grabbed hold of the touchscreen: a flashing red bar, a firm voice command, and in case you didn’t listen, the message writ large. Goosebumps! The camera that watches the driver noticed that he, the driver, wasn’t paying attention enough to the road. Car will only self-drive when a human is ready to assume control. Bottom line: If you hear of a Tesla causing trouble, 99.9% of the time the human has caused it. The car rarely makes mistakes.

The Tesla Y Touchscreen has at least twenty five major option categories. When one investigates all options within those major categories: menus, submenus, settings, nested settings, buttons, over 1000 “selectable items” are available for use. Then there’s the App. All these things are available. Not all are necessary. This makes me think of the human body.

Not all parts—trilllions of cells, hundreds of muscles, hundreds of bones, scores of organs—are necessary. Take the Palmaris longus muscle. Most people have one but not everyone does. A simple test at the wrist will shows if you were born without it. This muscle is like the HEPA filter found in my Tesla Y’s bioweapon defense mode.

That filter will protect me in a virus attack as long as the viruses are tucked into stuff like soot or dust, and as long as my massive Tesla battery is charged. Gases can’t get me. The filter’s carbon layer takes care of gases. Like the HEPA filter, the Palmaris longus muscle is mostly unnecessary, but it’s a good source for surgical graft material. So, it might be nice if you have one.

Goosebumps are unnecessary. Say hello to a slew of tiny muscles, one per hair follicle, the arrector pili. When you have a goosebump moment, as we had, that colony of muscles pull the follicles straight up, bunching the skin and startling the hairs to a standing position. This is useful for furry animals that want to look bigger than they are but we humans? Useless save for the chill we feels when those tiny muscles heat up.

Here’s a necessary feature of our Tesla. Our grandson, master of all things Tesla, is an authorized driver of our car. He can, using the Tesla app from his West Seattle home, tell our car what to do, as he did for us yesterday while we and our Tesla were in Winthrop. He put our car in “Low power mode.” Of course he explained why. We are learners, and he is our in-flesh owner’s manual, but even he has useless body parts. All males do: Nipples.

As a woman who appreciates the history of male egos, and the pleasure of being female, I love this. All human embryos start out meaning to be female: XX sex chromosomes. In some cases, a Y chromosome hops in on the action and changes everything. Well, not everything, the nipple apparatus had already been installed by the time the late Y joins in. About all the male nipple can do is demonstrate goosebumps. About all the flush door handle the Tesla Y can do that a regular pull handle usually doesn’t, is freeze in winter weather. But hey, both these things look really good.

In a car designed to move me farther and faster than my feet or a horse, one with more than a thousand options available, I’ve grown comfortable with about twenty. By the time we reach Leavenworth, perhaps I’ll have mastered another five. Especially if our grandson is watching and suggesting. The car always is.