Dumb question but probably what I should have asked first: does Tesla give you some sort of credit or warranty on tires that suffer a puncture? Do the service centers ever actually repair a tire for you rather than just pushing a new tire purchase?
I heard some folks took their oem tires to a Goodyear or Continental shop and the shop gave them 50% off a new tire because the punctured tire was so new.
Um. So, here's my tale. The originals on my 2018 M3 LR RWD wore out around 35,000 miles or so (vague memory). That was, like, two-three years ago. At the time I looked up the specs on these tires and discovered that they had (vague memory) some warranty that was good for 40,000 miles or more. However,
that was only if one bought the tire retail. OEM installs didn't count and had a much shorter warranty. Sigh.
So, went shopping on Tire Rack and got some Michelin Cross Climate 2 tires. Had them shipped to AAA in Edison, NJ, got them mounted, balanced, and went on with my life.
Roughly a year later I was heading down (literally, it's a steepish hill) a heavily used secondary road at night when, coming up the hill in the other direction came a police car with lights and siren going. Like everybody else in line, we shifted away from this guy towards the right, but kept on going. But this road was of the "no curbs" variety. A homeowner had put some nice granite blocks and rocks on the verge of his property where it ran into the gutter, but some of those rocks and rolled free and were lying down there, nearly invisible in the dark, and the front right wheel found one. Wasn't a blowout, but it tore the sidewall. Alarms went off, I managed to go up a hundred yards, get off the road I was on, and one more sharp right later was parked on a residential street.
Called Tesla Service on the app. They sent their roving tire guy who put a spare on the car, took the dead wheel away, and sent me on my way.
As I mentioned, the sidewall was absolutely torn, so that tire was a full goner. There was less than 10k miles on the new set, so, no question, I could just put a new tire on with the rest. However, Michelin CC2's were Out Of Production (!), so nobody local stocked them. Including Tire Rack. A mad search of the Interwebs revealed that some Racing Supply Place in Texas had, like, three of them. They were very happy to take my money and drop-ship one to Tesla in Springfield; and the Springfield crowd was happy to mount the tire on the wheel and balance it for a nominal sum. One trip to the Service Center later and they had their loaner back and I was on my way.
The fun bit? Tire Rack has a hazard warranty on all the tires they sell. I filled out forms (it was easy) and
got the original purchase price back. Not bad.
Most difficult bit: Tire Rack wanted all the DOT numbers printed on the side of all the tires, so I had to go hunting around in the SC to find the dead tire so I could take a picture of the sidewall (torn) and the rubber text on the side of the dead tire.
And, yeah, the CC2's have a
real 40k, prorated warranty. They're hanging in there pretty well.
