***CROSS-POSTED FROM THE MULTI-COAT RED TRACKING AND SEQUENCING THREAD***
I've had my multi-coat red Model S for about three weeks now. Life got crazy so I haven't had time to sit down and put my thoughts in order, but wanted to finally put pen to paper so to speak and throw my thoughts out there. The car is absolutely every bit as extraordinary as I expected it to be and was more than worth the wait. I echo all the other sentiments and accolades out there about how wonderful the car is, so I won't bother repeating them here when they have been expressed so much more eloquently by others. What follows is simply my (long-winded) first thoughts and impressions after owning the car for about 500 miles.
DELIVERY
Took delivery on a beautiful Sunday afternoon after about a 7 month wait. It came from the Atlanta service center on a covered car transport. Had to take delivery at a local school since the transport couldn't make it up my road. The driver was prompt, courteous, efficient, and everything went swimmingly. No real due bill items, although I may ask Ownership for the chrome license plate holder that others seem to have gotten.
FIRST GLITCH - CHARGING
After dubbing the car "Nikola" (cars and boats are women, so Nikola here is a female name - I knew a girl named Nikola in high school so I'm calling it okay), I drove her home, looked her over, started learning how she works, and then plugged her in. At which point absolutely nothing happened. Uh oh. Unplugged and plugged in again. Still nothing. Uh oh again. Okay, so now I'm getting nervous that I've got a bad UMC and am getting ready to call Tesla when I decide to start troubleshooting. I trade out my NEMA 14-50 adapter for the plain old wall outlet adapter and try that. Bingo, the car starts charging instantly. Interesting. So I switch back to the 14-50. Still no go. Okay, I call my electrician buddy who installed the thing in the first place and begged him to come over. He comes over, plugs in a tester, futzes around a bit, we plug it back in, and success! He swears he didn't do anything, but I think he was just covering his ego. ;-) Regardless, have been charging no sweat ever since.
GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH THE CAR
Honestly, I don't think I've gotten particularly comfortable with the car yet, overall. Like so many others, I've spent FAR more on this vehicle than I'd ever even dreamed about spending so I think, deep down, I'm basically just scared of it at the moment. It drives like a dream (and when you gun the accelerator, a wet dream) and I love it, but damn, it's fast! Ridiculously, frighteningly, stupidly, insanely, unbelievably fast! And it's huge! We have ridiculously tight parking spaces at work and I get nervous pulling into a spot every time.
After driving a rental car during a business trip this week and thinking about it a bit more, maybe my problem is that it's simply too different from anything I've ever had before. It's SO nice and SO fast and SO smooth and SO beautiful and SO well put-together that I think I'm actually having a hard time even thinking of it as a "car." I think in my brain it's still segmented off as this crazy future device that has accidentally fallen into my hands and the time traveler who owns it is going to take it away from me at any moment. The rental car was a sh*tbox but I was surprised at how much more comfortable I was with it - I wasn't afraid of it because it was, well, just a car. The Model S is something… else. And I obviously haven't gotten totally comfortable with it yet.
ICE AFTER ELECTRIC
I now understand what everyone means when they say you're instantly spoiled by it. I was driving my old Honda CR-V the other day down the interstate when I needed to pass someone. I put my foot down on the accelerator and… nothing. An increase in noise and vibration, but absolutely no additional forward momentum. Thinking something was wrong, I took my foot off and did it again. I had to hold it there a long time before the car started even thinking about gaining any additional speed. It was something I was completely used to just a few weeks ago, and now it took me by surprise. Additionally, taking my foot off the accelerator and NOT starting to slow down immediately was startling. Again, shocking how something so new (regenerative braking) starts becoming expected so quickly. That's going to be problematic when I have to drive anything other than my Tesla.
CLEANING
This car is going to be damn near impossible to keep clean. Between fingerprints on the chrome handles and accents (which is where most people seem to want to grab to close the doors), dust and pollen that seem attracted to the paint like a magnet, black floor mats that show every single speck of dirt I track in, and bugs that seem intent to not just die on the front "grill" like any normal car but that rather want to SLIDE all the way up the hood since the car is so aerodynamically shaped… my OCD is really kicking in. Again, I'm sure I'll get better with time, but for the moment I'm noticing every single little spot and it's driving me nuts. ;-)
SEATING POSITION
Maybe I just haven't found the perfect seating position yet, but so far the car isn't terribly comfortable to sit in while driving. The seat itself seems perfectly fine but I find that my right leg doesn't really know where to go, so it gets tired, which gets uncomfortable. I finally came to the realization the other day that I think that I'm nervous about resting my leg against the corner of the screen for fear of damaging the leather there (every other car I've ever had has had cheap plastic where I would normally rest my right leg, so I never gave any thought to resting my leg there).
SWITCHGEAR
I REALLY wish Tesla had put the turn signal in the "normal" location. Not because I'm not getting used to it (because I am) but because I'm now expecting to find it in that location on every OTHER car. Annoying no matter which direction you approach it from. ;-)
SECOND GLITCH - JUMP SEATS
About a week in I had my first glitch: after showing them off several times, all of a sudden the jump seats wouldn't fold out. I could pull them out of the storage well, and I could unfold the top of the headrests, but I couldn't get the headrests to snap into the bottom part of the seats. It looked like the pieces that were supposed to latch together had gotten misaligned and were hitting each other rather than latching. I sent an email to Tesla and got a response the next day instructing me to take a pair of pliers and bend the misaligned piece back into place so that it would latch. They said that they'd seen this issue before and that it came from slamming the seats down into the storage well which would bend the connecting pieces ("not that I'm suggesting you've done that," the guy backpedaled instantly). So, with some serious trepidation I got out a pair of pliers and bent that little piece back into position… which worked a charm. Jump seats functional again, although I do admit to being a little concerned about a safety item which I have now repaired myself with a pair of pliers.
GETTING NOTICED
I have the first Tesla in my county. I know this because the County Court Clerk's office had to manually enter "Tesla Motors" in their system in order to register the car. That and every person in the office who looked at the documents asked, "What's a Tesla?" ;-)
I surprised the hell out of a motorcycle (by accident) on my first day of ownership by blasting away from him on an on-ramp. He caught up with me later and gave me a very approving thumbs-up. I also got an enthusiastic thumbs-up from a VW Eos driver the other day.
I haven't gotten a ton of looks on the road yet that I'm aware of, but I've also been too damn scared to take my hands off the wheel and my eyes off the road to really pay any attention. ;-)
Everyone at my office (tech-oriented company) is absolutely blown-away. I've given several rides and the unanimous reaction is that of amazement and awe. One guy decided to make a dig about it being built with "my tax money," but he was doing that with a smile to egg me on since we don't see eye to eye on politics. I've gotten congratulated several times, which is a little odd - I've never been congratulated on a car purchase before. A couple of people were interested in my decision making process since I've never been known as a buyer of flashy cars, so it's lead to a lot of Tesla time. I don't know if I've made any sales yet or not, but there has been a LOT of web traffic to the Tesla site from people at my office looking into it over the last few weeks. ;-)
PICS
A few pics taken after its first wash:
