My autopilot quit completely after the latest update and I finally discovered why today. I had hit the dumbest coyote in CA while on a trip to San Diego to buy a set of Arachnid wheels. Front bumper was trashed, but everything still worked fine until the update a couple weeks later. Santa Barbara service center troubleshot the system and discovered the bracket holding the radar unit was partially broken in the impact, misaligning the radar and disabling the system. Evidently the previous version wasn't quite as fussy about it's inputs. They didn't have the part to fix it, so it will have to wait until the body shop does the repair of the bumper. They were nice enough to do all that troubleshooting, correct my clock for daylight savings time, add the Arachnid wheels to my avatar and wash the car for no charge! Guess showing up with donuts was a good plan.
Aha - another Sound of Silence (annual Black Hills Tesla Rally in Custer, South Dakota) alumnus!
Condolences, glad it worked out, and don’t feel bad. I hit a Darwin Award-winning coyote outside of Needles at about 0200 one Saturday morning a couple years back as I was on my not-so-merry way from Los Angeles County to Vermont. By Flagstaff just past dawn, AP quit working completely. Tesla said my closest option *along I-40* was 1800 miles east (St. Louis SvC), and that rangers in between didn’t work weekends.
So I drove a 5000-pound car, that makes not a ton of differentiable noise at speed, 1800 miles without cruise control for the next 2 days and showed up at the SvC at 0915 Monday morning.
They met me in the parking lot, had a double crew get the front clip off the car in 8 minutes, recalibrated the radar module (there was no damage otherwise - just a bunch of fur stuck in that honeycomb area), and had me on my way in at most 2.5 hours.
The best part? No charge. They said no matter whether it was the coyote’s fault, my fault, or Tesla’s fault, as long as no parts had to be replaced, there would be no charge. Incredible.
I wound up stopping by a year or so later for something else and the service again was stellar.
And that, folks, is why the St. Louis Service Center remains to this day my favorite service center continent-wide.
