Apologies if this post is an incoherent mess, it was written in dribs and drabs - this week has been a whirlwind let alone the M3 side of things. Woke up this morning and realised I didn't need to check the shipping forecast...and breathe...
Hum the tune..
Start the Crawl:
Pre-Collection Stress
Wednesday - my phone multitouch died, the screen was working and I saw numerous messages from Tesla and wasn't able to get into it to read the messages. Took the phone to be repaired in the evening and they couldn't (long story) so I picked up a new phone.
I loaded the app up but the SMS messages would be unknown, so there was a chance my car wasn't going to be at the SC today as per
@Sirricardo who was due to pick up same time as me.
Collection
Thursday - I got the train to West Drayton and arrived at the SC about 09:30, two hours ahead of allotted time, half expecting to hear the worst, were the unread messages bad news? Handed over my driving license and the staff confirmed all was well and pointed me in the direction of the waiting area. Freshly cooked cookies, Barrista making coffee, seating, free wifi.
The large number of staff at the SC were brilliant. Thanks to Anthony R, Oliver and the many others who answered questions. The first being I had a load of texts, any chance my Reg was in those. They quickly looked up my reg and I was able to complete on my insurance.
Someone kindly put the Rugby on the TV - streamed from their phone I think, and it was nice to chat to many of the staff and soon to be owners.
There was a presentation done at one end of the waiting area by Oliver, it was every 30 minutes or so - as I turned up early I joined in with the audience for the first of the day. The audio from the Mic / speaker wasn't brill, would recommend sitting near the front if like me you can't lip read and your hearing could be better.
There was a RHD M3 parked up in the waiting area so plenty of opportunity to look over it and get a feel for the setup. The round lumber button on the seat didn't appear to work, or more likely I couldn't get it working, but all of the controls made sense. Navigating the menu is mainly intuitive and guidance is given on screen.
Outside there were a lot of M3s being driven around with protective film on door handles as well as car transporters coming and going.
Some staff were taking groups to their cars and some people like me got a 1 to 1 - I was probably singled out for being particularly clueless.. The staff said take as long as needed to check over the car but more importantly take your time when you get the car back home.
In the end I didn't spend too long examining the car at the SC, it looked great. Ten miles on the clock and just over 100 miles of charge on the battery.
Journey Home
Driving the car out of the SC and to the nearby supercharger was a moment of super cautious driving, I was only marginally quicker than continental drift.
The chargers were busy - I waited for 10 minutes and got parked up. I am glad the car has ultrasonics and cameras as I was super cautious about parking up.
The SuperCharger at the SC gave a slowish 27kW but was enough to give me 50 miles more so I could get home without needing to stop off. This was at least an opportunity to fiddle with screen and setup spotify etc.
Heading out of the SC was a juggling act of concentrating on an unfamiliar road and getting my head around the screen layout and notifications.
Needless to say there were a few new M3s on the roads out.
Driving is very intuitive, press accelerator gently and it will move with very fine control. The brake and hold just did the right thing so that was no issue at all. I got a few notifications about pressing brake and accelerator at the same time, brake wins and motor is not powering. Obviously I was left foot braking though this was on hills whilst 3 point turning and slowing right down. I was worried about rolling the wrong way, once I stopped overthinking things it was fine and the M3 stopped nagging me.
Once the calibration notice disappeared (20 miles or so in) and I was in fairly consistent traffic I was able to try out the AP/FSD things. They seemed to be ok - though there is a definitely a moment of "I hope it will steer" when on bends.
Heading down the M3 (motorway
) I noticed a blue MX in the rear view mirror (with probably the best MX registration in the UK) we had a car checking out session whilst driving and thumbs up and then I zipped off.
I pulled into Fleet services southbound & parked up at the yet to be commissioned SuperChargers as the car park was very busy.
Quick pit stop then out onto the M3 again - floored it on the slip road and had to very quickly ease right off as I was nowhere near the point of joining the main carriageway and the speed would have reached a number that I wouldn't have liked to merge into the traffic at.
The rest of the drive home was great, the biggest part of the journey was that the seat was without question the most comfortable I have ever sat in. I usually get a pain in my hip from driving, I thought it was part of getting old, it appears to be due to my car.
Got home, the kids had a little look in the car, needless to say the whoopee cushion feature was most loved.
TeslaMate
Due to the phone debacle I didn't have VPN set up on new phone so I wasn't able to check if
adriankumpf/teslamate was functioning for the journey home. One home I logged in via computer and restarted the docker containers and the car appeared. Shame to have missed out on my first big journey and data but, that's life. TeslaMate is really, really cool. Nice to see what's going on, plenty of stuff to look at, map of the drive is awesome as moving the cursor across the graphs updates the dot position in the map. Sample screen grabs:
Another spin with passengers - should have taken 'one of those bags, like on planes'
Took the family out for a spin, nice and easy until I had to get up to speed from a standing start to join a main road, up to legal limit in no time at all, however, my other half felt really, really nauseous, so I took it very easy for remainder of the 30 minute drive. Massive negative of the car is it's so quiet the kids were driving me crazy with demands for whoopee cushion noises, at least I had a co-pilot to deal with that.. Also with kids in the back seats I got quite a few seatbelt warning notifications as the kids kept leaning on the middle rear seat to see where the whoopee cushion was.
The biggest negative was squeezing into my garage - I've got a steep short ramp up, a bit like going up a very big drop kerb. This is at the narrowest point going through the doors. Originally I measured up and thought I had 3 inches clearance either side, it's more like a 1.5 inches at best. The steep ramp means I have to give the car a real boot, it seems to resist this at first and then goes in with quite a lurch, this is moderately terrifying. I'm not yet confident enough to do this without a banksman. I've tried summon outside but I have a gut feeling summon will freak out trying to enter the garage as the gap is too tight.
General Observations
Nobody asked to see insurance.
No issues with wind noise - seems fine.
No spooky pedestrian alert sounds at low speeds.
I had one incident of a red-screen background notification(?), a car in front of the car in front was having a moment at a roundabout and was straddling two lanes. Kind of wish I had that recorded as there was a lot going on and it was all very brief. Seemed to me that the radar had spotted something ahead that was not particularly visible from driving position.
I've plugged an SSD in but haven't checked the footage yet.
Haven't had a chance to properly play with the tow bar...
The plate holders aren't exactly elegant - I feel a stick on order being made very soon.
I only noticed MSM & White M3s in the SC, was looking out for a blue and didn't spot any.
If anyone is worried about driving their M3, try not to worry!
Snags
I took the car out in the rain and when I got back I noticed that the rear light clusters seemed to be a bit fogged up on the inside. I will raise this with Tesla as I don't think they should be like this.
Best of luck for everyone waiting - look forward to seeing you out there