This is almost too embarrassing to admit, but I ended up damaging my falcon wing door the same day I took delivery. No, this is not another tread about the door malfunctioning. It was more my brain that malfunctioned.
So I took delivery of my beautiful Midnight Silver 90D and spend the entire afternoon on my driveway messing around with the doors, configuring the car, experimenting with Auto Summon, and just admiring the car that I had waited three years for. After awhile, I pulled the car into the garage and heard a heart stopping crunch. Apparently I had left the FWD behind the driver's seat open and just drove the door straight into the overhang of the garage. My heart stopped for a few minutes.
After I regained consciousness, I reluctantly went to assess the damage. The glass on the roof was cracked, but what's worse was that when I tried to close the door, it wasn't able to fully close. The door is now misaligned by 1-2 degrees. I had to pull on the door and press it in far enough that the mechanical catch was then able to close it fully.
For the next few hours those 2 minutes just looped in my brain over and over. At some point I just accepted the situation and thought about how this could have happened. Primarily, I think it was just the fact that the car is so different. This is my first Tesla and first EV. Even though I know how everything is supposed to work, I had to erase 30 years of muscle and sensory memory driving ICE and come up with new instincts. It's like switching from Windows to Mac, or vice versa. There are just enough things different that you end up doing things wrong the first few times because your instincts are wrong.
Here's how I rationalized the accident. One, on a regular vehicle, if the rear passenger door was open, you'd expect a door in your path when you get into the driver's side door. With the FWD, the doors were lifted mostly out of my visual field that I just didn't sense that it was open in my distracted state. Two, because it's an EV, there is zero engine noise, so when I put it into drive, I didn't hear any outside noise that cued me into the fact that the FWD was open. Three, the little warning that told me that the door was open was so soft, and the interface on the dash was so new and full of information that I was not accustomed to, that I totally did not notice any warning whatsoever. In the end, if I had been lucky to not have the accident for a few weeks, I would have developed the new instincts that would prevent this altogether.
Now all I can do is to wait for the damage report from the body shop. The glass obviously has to be replaced. The biggest question is if the door itself is bent. If bent, I was told, then the whole door would have to be replaced, which means new paint and color matched door. That would just kill me.
At least I didn't have both FWD open.
So I took delivery of my beautiful Midnight Silver 90D and spend the entire afternoon on my driveway messing around with the doors, configuring the car, experimenting with Auto Summon, and just admiring the car that I had waited three years for. After awhile, I pulled the car into the garage and heard a heart stopping crunch. Apparently I had left the FWD behind the driver's seat open and just drove the door straight into the overhang of the garage. My heart stopped for a few minutes.
After I regained consciousness, I reluctantly went to assess the damage. The glass on the roof was cracked, but what's worse was that when I tried to close the door, it wasn't able to fully close. The door is now misaligned by 1-2 degrees. I had to pull on the door and press it in far enough that the mechanical catch was then able to close it fully.
For the next few hours those 2 minutes just looped in my brain over and over. At some point I just accepted the situation and thought about how this could have happened. Primarily, I think it was just the fact that the car is so different. This is my first Tesla and first EV. Even though I know how everything is supposed to work, I had to erase 30 years of muscle and sensory memory driving ICE and come up with new instincts. It's like switching from Windows to Mac, or vice versa. There are just enough things different that you end up doing things wrong the first few times because your instincts are wrong.
Here's how I rationalized the accident. One, on a regular vehicle, if the rear passenger door was open, you'd expect a door in your path when you get into the driver's side door. With the FWD, the doors were lifted mostly out of my visual field that I just didn't sense that it was open in my distracted state. Two, because it's an EV, there is zero engine noise, so when I put it into drive, I didn't hear any outside noise that cued me into the fact that the FWD was open. Three, the little warning that told me that the door was open was so soft, and the interface on the dash was so new and full of information that I was not accustomed to, that I totally did not notice any warning whatsoever. In the end, if I had been lucky to not have the accident for a few weeks, I would have developed the new instincts that would prevent this altogether.
Now all I can do is to wait for the damage report from the body shop. The glass obviously has to be replaced. The biggest question is if the door itself is bent. If bent, I was told, then the whole door would have to be replaced, which means new paint and color matched door. That would just kill me.
At least I didn't have both FWD open.
