I know there's other threads out there talking about ride height etc, but this is a question specifically about what was written in the May 22 blog post: What's unclear to me is whether the above statement only applies to cars equipped with the air suspension option, or to all cars? I can't really see such adjustability happening without the air suspension, and hope they throw in some clarification.
Looks like badly phrased marketing-talk to me. For instance: why would I need to manually raise the suspension for a heavy load in the frunk?
That's load balancing, not suspension raising. Balancing is automatic. You won't have to do anything for a heavy load.
Found that to be very interesting. I wonder how high can it be raised? Would impact Cd but will be great on snow.
I think they meant to raise it up while putting groceries into (or out of) the frunk. So you don't have to bend down as much. In many of the manufacturing plants I have don work for they have lift tables so their operators don't have to bend over to pick up 50lbs bags. A few inches actually makes a huge difference. It will increase your CdA a whole lot. Every inch of height will add ~2% (1" more to a 56" tall car) to your CdA. But driving on snow will probably impact your range more than the height. And below ~35mph the CdA won't matter all that much.
And I though only my girlfriend would say this to me :crying: Anyway, I intend to get the adjustable suspension only for the crappy dirt roads we have to take to go moutain biking sometimes.
Is anyone else concerned about reliability issues associated with the increased complexity of the adjustable suspension? On the surface I really like the idea of the active suspension but it seems to violate the KISS principal ("keep it simple stupid"). $1500 seems like a very reasonable price but I'm afraid that it's going to cost much more than $1500 to have it serviced after my warranty expires. I've seen it act pretty flakey at the Bellevue store and even the sale associate confided that he was a bit concerned over the potential reliability of the system.
Hmm... first time that someone from Tesla expressed such a concern. I had raised this sometime ago: Active Air Suspension: Reliability?!!
I've owned 2 cars with adjustable air suspension and one was incredibly reliable, and the other not so much. The reliable one, coincidentally is used daily, as my wife lowers the car whenever she stops so that ingress/egress is easy.
The Continental system they are using has been around for awhile so it's not new tech. Assuming they implement it properly it should work just fine.
The one in my DS-21 always worked perfectly. I don't recall it ever requiring service other than eventually the spheres needed replacing.
The air suspension in my '04 Lexus RX330 has worked flawlessly for 60k miles. Now that the warranty has expired, it does have me worried from time to time...