Ok - so now I actually have a few minutes to type out a coherent post.
I had been trying to post here in between multiple phone calls to Tesla and trying to stick to my Saturday evening plans!
Before anything else I want to say:
If you find yourself in a similar situation to me and you NEED to move your car - at your own risk you may JUMP the 12v battery. Tesla advises against it - but it was the first thing the Tesla preferred tow driver did. He told me has seen this issue already on several model 3s (! There can’t be more than 100 delivered in my region). He jumped the battery and was able to get the car into drive. It’s easy to access the 12v battery in this car, I won’t go into it here but you can look it up easily. If you do decide to jump - do it quickly and immediately move your car somewhere safe. My 12v battery completely failed shortly after we got it into drive and could not be fully jumped again.
Okay - so here is the full timeline.
I took delivery of my beautiful model 3 on Friday. I went over it with a fine tooth comb and was shocked to find absolutely NO issues. Exterior fit and finish was absolutely perfect. I was impressed, I had expected issues. The car is much better nicer than pictures - as others have said. I can’t wait to get it back.
I decided to do a little road trip to work out any issues before my work week started. Everything was going great - we drove about 200 miles, stopped to charge at a friends house and two hours later got the error message:
Rear drive unit needs service - exiting and reentering the vehicle may restore operation.
We tried all the normal techniques to reboot the car - the strange thing being the car wouldn’t actually ever sleep. For example - if we tried to power off from the touch screen - the screen would just flicker and come back on. In hind sight, this may be because the 12v battery didn’t have enough power to disconnect the HV pack. At this point I called Tesla and they recommended to leave the car alone and arranged a truck to tow my car 200 miles home to my local service center.
While I was waiting for the tow truck, I continued trying different reset techniques. At this point the error message changed to: “Car needs service - car may not start” and “Systems powering up - shift into drive when this message disappears“ Now the AC blower motor was also failing to start - this really should have clued me in to it being a 12v issue but I was thinking it was a firmware problem.
Finally, about thirty minutes after the tow truck driver arrived - the message changed to “12V battery needs service”. He jumped it - was able to shift into drive/neutral and line up the car with the truck. At this point the remaining systems started to power down. The tow driver actually got stuck in the car and I had to remind him to use the emergency release. He was unable to re-jump the 12v battery to a sufficient charge to shift the car into drive again, in fact he couldn’t even release the parking brake. Eventually we couldn’t even get the touchscreen to come back on - although strangely the car was still responsive on the Tesla app for another 15 minutes.
As widespread as this issue seems, I hope this post will help someone understand what is happening if they get a series of confusing error messages like I did. And, if you get the car to start by jumping it, move it quickly to a safe place and then be prepared to lose all power to the vehicle!
Can’t wait to get the car back!
