dmfische
Member
I had this happen to me. Have a Dec 2018 S100D and parked it on a hill in icy conditions. Have winter tires but in retrospect the incline was a bit much given the conditions. Just as I closed the door, car slid backward 15’. Very lucky it didn’t hit anyone or anything.Maybe Tesla got more data about the parking brake capabilities. Tesla is not known for super thorough testing before shipping cars, Elon model is "ship it and fix it later". This could just be that someone finally got around to checking what the max grade the parking brake can hold and added a warning to the software to wash their hands of any liability. Or, maybe as part of cost cutting the new parking brakes are weaker, but software has no way of knowing which ones you have installed, so warning is for shown to all. Or maybe it's a Model 3 feature which accidentally got turned on for Model S. It's really hard to tell with Tesla.
That said, a friendly warning to @thatisug , when you first park, the car's regular brakes may be engaged in addition to the parking brake (they for me are when I park on a much less steep driveway). After you get out of the car, the regular brakes disengage leaving just the parking brake ON. What that means that you may get out of the car, everything will seem fine, then the regular brakes will disengage and if the parking brake fails to hold the car, the car will roll down the driveway all by itself. Here is a video of my Model S parked on an icy driveway, where the rear wheels (the ones which have the parking brakes) were on ice, so after I got out of the car, when the regular brakes disengaged, the car rolled down the driveway - in my case only until the rear wheels got enough traction to stop the car, but if it was the parking brake failing, nothing to stop it.
It freaked me out when that happened btw, at first I thought maybe Summon got enabled (I always keep it disabled), so I pulled my driveway security cam and realized the rear wheels were locked and sliding.
I’ve looked through the manual and forums. Can anyone explain what the long press on the park button actually does other than turn on the indicator? Is there anyway to engage the front brakes when parked?
New to the forum and to Tesla. Other than this incident, I’ve been loving the car.