Tuesday March 29.
Pre pick up details:
- Had issues getting bank account to connect with pay app. Got “account not found” error messages. Gave up and brought a cashiers check.
- SC was kind enough to move my pickup appointment 3 hours later with the assistance of my sales rep.
- Last minute decision to trade in 2021 MX to Tesla, their price was $10K over CarMax and as much or more than used dealers that specialize in Teslas. With sales tax savings, didn’t make sense to pursue any other alternative.
Pick up Inspection:
- Interior=excellent. Could not find any issues. White interior was clean, crisp, beautiful. Even had some sort of a new car chemical smell.
- Exterior=not so great:
- paint chip on bottom of left front fender where black plastic was slightly pushed in. Why could they not see this and fix it prior to delivery? Did it leave the factory like this or happened during transport. They has the car for several days prior to me picking up so no good excuse.
- one FWD pretty good, no noticeable gap issues. Other FWD goes down a bit too far showing alignment offsets. Weatherseal on top folded over a few inches. Both obvious to even the untrained eye.
- hood had a slight elevation in one front corner creating a bigger than normal gap.
- Paint quality looked very good throughout, no drips or other weird flaws.
- headlights/tail-lights clear and as expected. No condensation issues.
- new style charging door and “badge” symbol for Plaid. Personally, I like both of these. Reps commented this was the first badge symbol they’ve seen recently others were coming through with letters.
- Delivery education: non existent.…here’s your car, figure it out. Personnel was friendly enough but just didn’t have the time to walk me through anything more than they have to like “sign here saying you accept the car”. Fortunately I had a buddy who‘s been a long time tesla owner and very techy to help figure out the refresh nuances...much different than pre-refresh X’s.
- Driving experience:
- Seats= A+. Comfy!
- Yoke=driving down roads is a dream, armrests allows for relaxed holding of bottom of yoke. Just need to adjust height & depth of yoke to desired spot. Parking lots with tight turns were a bit more challenging, hand fly’s off the yoke sometimes when one handed turning. Periodically would hit some control buttons by accident; wiper, etc. Still trying to adapt to the maneuvering part, think I’ll figure it out once I have a few more days with it. Starting to like the blinkers and windshield washer controls better than stalks, time will tell.
- Screen=amazing resolution. Don’t mind swiping into park & reverse, its very quick to react. Previous X had delay or sometimes would meet to flip stalk to drive twice before it would actually change gears. Horizontal screen is better than vertical. Back up camera and side cameras seem different, more of a fish eye lens for a wider view than what I remember my previous X had.
- Ride=Much quieter than older X’s probably due to double pane glass, suspension seems improved. Still a little road noise from tires where undercoating would help. No Active Noise Cancellation found in software settings (likely old version).
- Speed= Crazy Fast…no words to describe other than “HANG ON!!” My hand actually fell off the yoke when I stomped on it. Must have been the G-forces.
- MCU= while sitting in the car at SC adjusting settings, had the screen go off twice. Thought it was just powering down. As it turns out, after leaving and driving down the road, screen & dash would go black without any reason. A bit unnerving when driving a new car at night and losing all information (speed, nav, etc). Car continued to drive normally and headlights/blinkers etc. worked fine. Shut down 8-10 times over the next two hours of driving. Used two thumbwheels pressed at same time to reboot. Screen came back up and either worked fine for a while or would get stuck loading and shut back down. Not fun dealing with that on the highway. Fortunately my techy friend was triaging the software while I focused keeping the car in my own lane and adjusting speed based on other cars.
Immediately made a service appointment citing the above items and my SC advisor is looking into them already. Went to a body shop for paint chip repair that specialized in Tesla’s, they are submitting a claim to Tesla under warranty.
Are these issues acceptable for the price of the car? No way! Should quality control at the factory or SC catch these and fix prior to delivery? Absolutely! Future competition will eventually force Tesla to address these earlier on.
Fortunately, after reading hundreds of pages in this forum, I knew what to expect and am not surprised at all. I’m confident all of them will be resolved in short order to my satisfaction and I will then start to really enjoy the car. Next task is PPF (paint protection film), window tint, Ceramic coating.
Thanks to all for providing a support mechanism and knowledge base to learn from.
Photos for your benefit:
