Today, I parked my car by the wilderness on a high use highway about 30 minutes away from cell coverage and urban areas, so that I could look at storm damage that had removed that highway. I heard a hissing from my car, so I inspected. Immediately I was afraid that something had gone wrong in my air suspension system, because I've had that happen a lot, in my Mercedes, but then I realized that I don't have air suspension, so then I decided the most probable place it was was in the tire, so I started the inspection there. Quickly, I found a nail with the hissing air coming out around it.
Unfortunately, I realized this put me in a predicament that I had to immediately take care of this before I got stranded far from everything without contact, which could become a multiday deadly camping and travel affair with huge costs.
Never hesitate.
I jumped into my car, hoping to use up enough of the air left in the tire to get as close to possible to the rest of the urban network as possible. I intentionally picked a non-heavy direction so that commute traffic would not be in my way, and went toward the bigger urban areas with more support, rather than the satellite areas with less support.
Almost 20 minutes later, my cell coverage started to come back on some of my devices, so I called Tesla Roadside Assistance (using bluetooth), and told them the situation. I used Plugshare to find the best charger destination I thought I was likely to reach and to give them the address in an urban area that has a lot of good service structure and not a huge amount of rush hour traffic problems for that area, and told them I should make it there. This way, I would have the best of all worlds, if everything worked out: quick destination, a simple address for both me and the tow truck to arrive at, and no muss or fuss, and I get to charge at the same time. That was the theory anyway. I would make the best of it as it unfolded, anyway.
I went all the way down to 25PSI, and was able to make it to that charger location, within about 40 minutes from my discovery. I was lucky because somehow during my winding driving the nail worked its way out of the hole (whether toward the road or back into the tire I don't know nor care). I don't know exactly how long that drive took; TeslaFi shows "data accuracy 29.4%", so I was out of coverage and/or the car computer wasn't working 70.6% of the way. Maps.Google.Com estimates 35 minutes drive without traffic, but I know the last 10 minutes had a lot of traffic due to heavy rush hour time, despite being off-peak direction.
Most of you who experience Tesla Roadside Assistance for a bad tire know how this works. The nice lady on the phone was helpful, proactive, and took care of everything. The experience was great. She arranged for a tow truck, called me back, made sure I made it to the address I gave her (which I had), told me the tentative plan with the company in question, had arranged they should pick up a Tesla spare tire and take it to me, swap it out, and take mine back to the service center, which would contact me for service within 3 days to have it fixed and re-swapped back onto my car.
I had to fiddle with the darn charger quite a bit because it kept throwing errors. Finally, it started charging.
I had just settled into some other logistics tasks in the car (various work and duties, even scheduled a convenient pickup on the way home for some products for an hour later), when the tow truck pulled up before I had even had the confirmation call about them coming. They went about their business. I had to fill out the contract in triplicate (carbon paper isn't something people carry anymore, and no wonder -- last time I bought some, it was $20 for a good pack). They were almost done when I had completed the paperwork. They hand-lugged and hand-torqued the spare wheel (
which they told me are aluminum studs and the nuts get torqued to 130lbft), finished the paperwork, packed up my bad wheel and tire combo (the hub cap stays with the wheel) and left, and I still had a bit more time to charge left.
(I was about 60% charge when the discovery happened, 50% by the time I got to the charging station, and charged up to 85% while there, almost 30kWh but I did have the A/C running so that was some loss). I spent a total of 46 minutes at the charging location according to TeslaFi. That plus the 40 minute drive there and the drive back to the store where I was getting a pickup totaled about a little over 90 minutes, plus the drive to get back approximately where I was before another half hour, so about a two hour ordeal, but I made the best of it by having a good state of charge, picking up some stuff and doing some chores I needed to do anyway, and maximized my probability of success and least amount of hassle for me and the service personnel.
This reinforces I think my best lesson of this story, which l learned long ago: if I foresee a problem and think I have enough
whatever (in this case leaking air still in my tire) to continue toward a better probabilistic outcome by going toward the direction of that outcome, to immediately set out in that direction and get as close to that as possible. In my case, I lucked out and got all the way to a safe and comfortable outcome. If I had instead spent time looking at my tire hissing away, I doubt I would have gotten home yet, and definitely not have been comfortable about it at all. It's another example of self-actualizing successful outcomes.
I wish I could go back to some other mistakes I've made in the past where I knew this was the right approach and tried to optimize in some way that failed. What I did above is plan for the best outcome from the second to worst case scenereo (that the tire would go down but not so quickly that I couldn't use it some). In other cases, someone might have a worst case scenereo (tire all the way down); I partially had that the first time my tire went out. In other cases in my life, I've had situations where I should have planned for worse outcomes and knew what path to take to optimize for that but wanted things to work out better, which it sometimes didn't, and I lost a lot as a result.
Cars are sometimes easier than life, so this has a sort of simple cathartic outcome of leisure about it compared to the goings on of more serious things (like employment, health, family, etc.). Anyway, I had a good tire outage today (if there is such a thing).
Not wanting to tempt fate, I skipped the observance of the highway outage, and instead resumed the rest of my original plan to take a leisurely drive through nature all the way on Summit Road from Highway 17 to Mt. Madonna Road, then followed the GPS operated mapping route software all the way home from there, and all worked very nicely. Certainly some of the roadway looking out over God's country took what seemed like forever, with operating speeds often from 1MPH - 10MPH, and no attention on anything but everything in the roadway. If I wanted to observe a greater input of nature, I had to plan it in between road ruts, often having to stop for the experience. TeslaFi tells me the whole trip took me 91 minutes, which it unsmartly split into 3 trips; the first trip was 41 minutes at 556Wh/mile at 35MPH avg; the next 25 mintues was 347Wh/mile at 12MPH avg; and the last 30 minutes was at 212Wh/mile at 37MPH avg. I'll just leave the trip unmerged, since I like that rather rough breakout anyway; I can merge it later if I want to (I think).
p.s., for my reference later, I used this trick for Google Drive on TMC image embedment:
Code:
If you edit an uploaded picture, you'll see a URL in the form
https://docs.google.com/document/d/FILEID/edit
where FILEID is a very long sequence of characters. Edit this so it reads
http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=FILEID
