Rocky, have you been happy with your Model S?
Oh yes, still love it. At the end of this week, "Electric Cruisebeast" will be 6 years old from delivery date, and I have about 75,500 miles on it. I bought it to keep for the long haul, so I am not going to replace it with a newer one. I get asked sometimes about how the auto pilot or self parking or other features are, but I have to tell them that I was willing to be a fairly early adopter to help things get off the ground, so those other newer features came after I got mine. But I don't miss them.
I was confused when I kept seeing other Tesla owners talking about autopilot or TACC being this "must have" feature, and I didn't get why people thought it was so useful. Then I realized the difference in where they drive versus where I do. Most Tesla owners are statistically in the L.A. or San Fran area and have these soul crushing 2 hour commutes through bumper to bumper highway traffic, where it is simply preserving your sanity to have the car follow what's in front of you. Living in the Boise area, there usually just isn't much traffic, and it's 15-20 minute segments on the highway where I could even possibly use autopilot, so it's just not very relevant here.
I will mention a couple of things I would change. I feel like the Model S is an inverse Tardis. The outside body of the car is really large, and my wife and I have always preferred small cars for the ease of parking and maneuvering. And yet for being a very large "full size" car, the roof is so low that back seat headroom is really bad, surprisingly. I don't have the pano roof, which makes it lower too. I can't tolerate sitting in the back seat of my car because I do carry a lot of my height in my torso, so I am tall when sitting. The Model 3, amazingly, was built like a Tardis--bigger on the inside than the outside. I got to sit in the back seat of a Model 3, and was really impressed that it has about 3 extra inches of headroom than my Model S has! They accomplished some of that by lowering the seat, so some people are grumpy with how either your knees are up high, or you kind of cross your feet in front of you, but that seemed fine to me. And of course Model Y will be nice for back seat headroom.
One of the other things that's getting a little borderline is the slowed Supercharging with these older cars. I haven't had to run into it much yet, but apparently it's the way things are now with these older 85's. My wife is not patient, so the longer charge times while traveling will probably start to become more annoying to her when we do other trips again. I try to mention this occasionally as a bonus point about why the Model 3/Y are better, with so much faster charging, so we can eventually replace our 2005 Civic Hybrid, but that hasn't happened yet.
I did have a few things get repaired during the first few years, as I kind of expected with a young car company, but in warranty. I did not go for the extended warranty, and so I've been paying as I go and nothing too extensive since then. The fancy-pants slide out door handles were just not a good idea. I've been fairly lucky with those. I had one repaired in warranty, and one just barely after warranty that they were nice enough to comp me on, since it was so close. (Irrelevant side note: it was just stupid for them to use solid metal door handles that burn your hands when you touch them in the summer. That's why NO ONE uses solid metal handles!) And then recently, I had failure messages about the tire pressure monitoring system being unable to read. I waited on that a few months, thinking it might go away when I got new tires and had them rebuild the sensors as Costco, but then it started throwing other warnings, so I had to deal with it. I decided to do the retrofit upgrade from the old Baolong system that couldn't identify individual tires or display the actual PSI numbers to the newer Continental system that has those features. That was about $1,100 all-in with the labor included. But I was OK with that to get an upgrade that I liked anyway.
I've really enjoyed getting to be a bit of an adventurous road tripper through these last several years when charging resources were more interesting to find, and I got to do a fantastic 5,000+ mile road trip across the country that was a blast. Up until very recently the routes to Bend, OR and Winnemucca, NV were challenging, but they both just got CHAdeMO stations in the last couple of months, so most places around Idaho are pretty good now.
Also, side note, I am still using my original mobile charge cable from 6 years ago as my regular daily charging hanging on the garage wall, and it still works fine. I got one of those signature black wall connectors from the referral program, but I still haven't installed it yet.
? It sounds like you are saying that you still think you have to go to SLC to get service. Did you read this to understand that you don't have to go to SLC?
