Well, I didn't think it would happen to me even after hearing about this happen to other folks on here, but the rear motor in my car just seppuku'd while we were out of town on what was supposed to be a little bit of a weekend road trip. It's a P3D with <10000 miles on it.
Decided to take the wife and baby on a fall trip out of town to get some nice scenery. On the way there I noticed that the car started behaving a little bit strangely-navigate on autopilot would say that it was unavailable for the rest of the drive for no clear reason. Thinking back, the car had done the the day before as well but I had reset it and the message had gone away. This time though, Navigate on Autopilot would keep shutting off for the drive then randomly turn itself back on. For what it's worth I also oddly didn't get the latest firmware update-usually I get updates within the first 24 hours or so of wide release-not sure if the hardware issues somehow flagged it not to update?
Either way, about an hour and a half into the trip we decided to stop for lunch and grab some fast food. We were eating in the car when suddenly the whole car shook and I heard a loud "thunk" from the rear of the car. Initially I thought someone had rear ended us in the parking lot! I looked around and got out of the car and obviously nobody had hit the car. I was confused but we finished eating and I went to shift into reverse...and all the car started beeping and showing messages that the car was shutting down and to pull over safely and another message that the rear motor was disabled but it was OK to drive (clearly not OK to drive since it won't shift out of park).
Needless to say it had to be flat-bedded to the nearest SC. Unfortunately, the service center is in the opposite direction of where we live. But I figured I'd be able to go and get a loaner or a rental at the service center and be on our way. Yeah...turns out the service center closes very early today and would be closed just 10 minutes before the tow truck could get there.
I think OK, maybe I'll call up and see if they can wait ten minutes for me and the car to get there. By this point I'm starting to panic a bit since this service center is like a two hour drive from home. I call several times and I can't get through to anybody. So then I call roadside assistance figuring that they have some special priority number they can get through on. They call and can't get through to anybody either (seriously, they really need someone to pick up the phone at the service centers). On the bright side, roadside assistance was actually very helpful in figuring out how to get us home. Everything ended up taking quite a bit of time to set up because all the rental car places near where we broke down were closed and their original plan was to get us to Enterprise for a rental car (seriously there were like eight Enterprise locations within fifteen minutes but all of closed them at 1pm...what the heck Enterprise?!) But they set me up with Uber credits to tide me over until I can get a rental car near my home.
Now I guess I get to find out how long it takes to get the rear motor swapped on a Model 3. From what I've read it seems like the rear motor going out knocks out a fuse or a circuit of some sort from the battery. I wonder if the motor was already starting to go bad and causing other things to malfunction earlier in the drive. Now that the motor's out I noticed that the GPS location of the car no longer updates in the app and the car also seems to believe it's charging even though it isn't (it's just sitting outside in a parking lot).
At least we got lucky and had it break down in a parking lot and not while I was going 70 on the highway. Took about an hour and a half to get a flatbed to us so if we were on the side of a highway it would have been utterly miserable. Really very surprised this happened since most of the stats seem to suggest that the Model 3 powertrain is pretty reliable, but now I'm starting to wonder if the rear drive units might not be all that reliable and honestly I'm a little bit worried about taking the car on longer trips in the future. Would have really sucked if we had gotten further on this road trip before the car broken down, I'm not even sure how I would get home from 5 or 6 hours away!
Can't get the image upload function here to work but here's the error messages on imgur:
Imgur
Of course now the wife is telling me that I should have just bought a boring but reliable Lexus SUV or something. Sigh.
