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A Scary Visit from Gremlins

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totoro722

Member
Supporting Member
May 21, 2020
316
807
Oregon/SoCal
A few weeks ago I was sleeping soundly when my wife woke me to ask if it was normal for the Tesla to be making a loud noise in the garage. I told her it was probably doing some self-maintenance thing, not to be concerned, however out of curiosity I looked at TeslaFi to see what was going on. The SOC was dropping fairly rapidly after a brief midnight charge. The thing that alarmed me was that the temperature in the garage was 90 degrees, and the temp inside the car was 117 degrees!

That got me out of bed in a hurry. On entering the garage I found that it was in fact very hot, and that the air conditioning on the Tesla was screaming on high. After kicking the garage door opener to open, I opened the driver door and it was easily over 110 degrees inside. I could see from standing at the door that the drivers seat was inflated and hot, and the console showed the drivers seat heater on high.

Naturally, I switched that off, and the seat disinflated fairly quickly, so I jumped in and began scanning for more problems. The only other one I found was that the heated steering wheel was also on, so I turned it off. Meanwhile the climate control was beginning to get control of the temperature in the car, which was dropping rapidly.

After tucking the car back in and closing the garage, I went to look at TeslaFi to see if I had somehow turned the seat heater on when I had last used it 8 hours earlier. The best I could reconstruct is that, after a brief charge at midnight, suddenly a large power drain began, which I assumed was the heater kicking on. Nobody was near the car at that time and it was safely in a closed garage.

Living in Southern California, heated seats and a heated steering wheel are options which I never use. It was not related to something I was doing using those things. This was quite frightening to me, for if my wife had not pointed it out, it could have gone on until... well I am not sure how it would have ended. It would not be good, though.

It has been maybe three weeks since this occurred, and I have been too busy to contact Tesla or post here until now. There has been no recurrence, and my MX is back to functioning flawlessly. My search of this forum has been unable to turn up a post of a similar event, so I would like to hear from the experts here what they think about it.

For those who will ask, it is a March build 2020 MX LR+ with about 10k miles. Aside from a couple of assembly issues quickly fixed, there have been no other problems. The car was plugged into a v2 HPWC which charges at 48 amps.