I finally finished installing both my trunk and trunk Hansshow kits. I installed the foot sensor on both too. I got their very latest kits about 6 weeks ago, which IIRC is V4 on the trunk and V3 on frunk... I’ve paid less attention to the versioning stuff recently since I already received it. In fact I’d missed that a new firmware is maybe out (thanks
@tlr1000 for mentioning that above, where did you read that?).
Anyway, I wanted to try and summarize my experiences. That was quite a lot of experience so I make no apologies for this being a long post.. but If you want to cut to the chase:
TL;DR Get these kits, install isn’t so bad, and they’re a great enhancement to your car!.
Firstly, I absolutely love having motorized front and back. I’m so glad I did this. I essentially never used the frunk until it was motorized (fear of damage, inconvenience, and knowing that I would dirty up the paint by touching it to close). Now I use it a lot, and it’s sort of fun to make people gawp at the froot/frunk, especially with the out of nowhere motorized open. The trunk is just much nicer to have, but less significant reasons to do it compared to the frunk, but I do again like avoiding the paintwork contact to close it. And also I always found it pretty crappy to have to slam it closed or manually lift it.. hard to describe but the original setup all added to my (still ongoing) feeling that too much of the Tesla is a bit basic and rudimentary and, dare I say it, cheap. Motorizing these pieces improves that experience a lot. It’s a bit like the Easy Entry experience.. kinda minor but adds a really nice touch that increases satisfaction. Even the frunk foot sensor, which has the well-known drawback that it only works *after* unlocking the car (having phone in pocket is not enough, unlike the trunk) is good because I can choose to have the car remain unlocked at home or I can walk into my garage, open the door and then walk to the frunk and kick open it. It’s especially helpful because remember that the frunk has no buttons to unlock it from the outside so it’s the screen inside the car, or the key fob, or the phone app.. until you get the foot sensor. I thought the (Approx) $900 outlay was a bargain for this.
Secondly, the installs weren’t super easy all round but they weren’t bad, and were kind of fun for someone who doesn’t mind tinkering with things, and it really didn’t feel risky or dangerous at any time. I did them on a car that’s only 3 months old (M3 performance) without stressing out. Partly because I never had to remove the bumper, the taillights, or any complex trim. The worst I had to do was peel up the rubber weather strip in some spots in the trunk, or deal with some slightly awkward trim clips. There were some frustrating time consuming parts though, even after watching every video I could find (yes including the competitor product ones, the foreign language ones, the different version ones, etc). I worked really hard to try and video and photo everything but I don’t really know what I’ll do with it all... not experienced in video editing and YouTube posting. But I feel like I have a gold mine of info to at least help people with and to capture some still photos from the videos I took.
Foot sensors worried me but turned out to be extremely simple on the trunk (because I have a newer car with a simple panel that can be removed from the bottom) and fairly easy on the frunk (release some clips and then pry open a slightly tricky plastic to bumper part). I think if you have an older car that doesn’t have the panel on the trunk, this might be way harder.
The frunk is basically just simple.. it’s harder to work out how to tie up all the cables out of the way and make it neat, than to do the install. Perhaps I was lucky since I didn’t have to mess with any adjustment screws or anything like that. But I did have issues anyway. The biggest one is that every time the power was interrupted (or on the first time it was connected up) the system would need a reset (connect up the programming cable temporarily, then hold open button down until first beep). But if I ever forgot to do this, it would usually do some crazy thing where it tried to open or close, and ended up busting a strut free of the ball lock/clip. I worry about forgetting that again in future if something goes wrong and needs a reset. The second issue was that the foot sensor control box didn’t work, and it of course took some time for me to convince myself it wasn’t me doing something wrong, then I had to talk to HAnsshow (William) to get some help, and then eventually concluded the control box was broken and needed a replacement which took 2.5 weeks to arrive. But it worked perfectly second time so hopefully that was just a one off bad one.
I will try to add some details about the trunk difficulties and experience soon. It’s too much for me to document just now
