October 25th
Arizona
White Hills
Go Seahawks!!
Well this trip could have gone better
Not only the game, but my car crapped out again at a low state of charge. This time it read 8 Rated Miles remaining when it shut down a little less than a mile to the Tucson-Rita Rd. off-ramp. I was able to coast as far as the off-ramp but no further. Super maddening to be stuck less than a half mile from a supercharger with the Nav still telling me I would arrive with 3% remaining.
I realize many will say/think it's my own fault for cutting it close, but I never hear about stories like this from other Tesla owners with the car shutting down with the battery showing miles to spare. It's now put me on a tow truck twice, but there have been 3-4 other times where I was getting massive warnings in the instrument cluster as I was pulling into a supercharger with 5-15 Rated Miles still on the dial. I definitely think there's some underlying issue with this car, but I've had no luck getting any answers from Tesla. It's always just the company line of "you shouldn't have run the battery down so low." Obviously it would be very nice to know what the actual zero-point is on my battery lol.
So this time was worse than last. Last time I ended up on the tow truck I was able to charge when I got to the supercharger. This time the car would not take a charge. There's just one hotel near that supercharger, a Hampton Inn a quarter mile away, and I felt fortunate that they had a room. I checked in (this all happened around midnight), slept a like 4 hours, then started spamming every Tesla email address, phone number, phone app, etc. that I could. There's no way to call the Tucson service center directly, which was super frustrating. You didn't even get the menu where you could "check on car in for service" or whatever. It just sent you straight to a call center which then put me on hold for 20 minutes before I eventually gave up and hung up.
I did eventually get a text response from what seemed like a human telling me to tow the car to the service center and that they would let them know to expect it. I arranged that and then just as the tow truck arrived, I got a call from a guy at the service center. He advised that I not tow it because he wanted to send a ranger out to work on it. By this point the car was so dead that I couldn't open the doors, trunk, frunk, chargeport, etc. so I couldn't even put it in tow mode. I agreed that I didn't really want it dragged up onto a tow truck, so I sheepishly canceled with the tow truck driver and gave him 20 bucks for his trouble.
A ranger did come out and change out my 12V battery rather quickly and seemingly competently. With the new 12V I was able to supercharge and eventually get back on the road. So far my supercharging seems slightly slower than it had been before (already throttled to 108kW max, but now it's tapering much more violently), and it's also making a lot of noise when it superchargers at rates above 60kW. The whole process did not take too long once it got going, but the initial part of not being able to get a hold of anyone to figure out what to do is just maddening. Also the late night people on the Roadside Assistance number were not very helpful. Apparently, I should have asked the tow truck driver to jump my 12V battery after dropping me off at the supercharger and I probably could have supercharged and at least been able to drive it in to a service center and avoided some of the stress and confusion. But I had no real way of knowing that and no one on the Roadside Assistance line suggested that I try it, in fact they never even mentioned the 12V battery (I did, but didn't get any response).
At this point, I'm waiting to hear back on some "remote diagnostics," but I'm pessimistic that I'll get any real answers. It looks like the new 12V will be enough to get me home (I decided to just cut my trip short and head back after this), but I'm not convinced that it has solved the long term issues with this car/battery pack. Probably the only way I can find out is to run it down very low again and see what happens! But I won't be doing that on this trip. I've had enough of the tow truck scene for now.
