TL;DR — The future is now … kind of
Written March 25, 2019
So, you guys know Nipunn drives a Tesla. I asked to borrow it this weekend so I could go on a trip with my friends to the mountains. The drive there was pretty long, so I stopped at a super charger to fill the battery about 80 miles from my destination. I figured, 280 miles of charge was more than enough to go to the cabin we we’re staying at and back to the super charger, even considering the battery would discharge a little bit while being idle.
So I’m driving driving driving to the cabin after charging and the miles are dropping off. Fast. From 280 to 200, 180, 160, 140. What the heck? I only drove 80 miles! That was when I learned the cold would adversely impact the battery performance. But it was 1am when I arrived and I decided to deal with it Later™.
The next day, someone asks if they can have a ride back with me. So then I started thinking, maybe I should try to charge the car a little more, because in the case where I don’t have enough to get to the supercharger that person will have to wait with me multiple hours while I charge at the slow charger, too. I check the car. It discharged 40 miles over 36 hours — 10 miles more than I had planned for.
So I plug the car into a regular outlet and start planning. I call Nipunn. He tells me outlets made for washing machines charge about 25 mph, and there was an adapter in the trunk. I back the car into the garage, drag the dryer away from the wall, and try to put the plug in. But it doesn’t fit! Apparently there is some other 99% similar plug type that won’t work for this charger adapter.
Oh well, I plug back into the regular outlet and go back inside to do more research. At some point I opened the Tesla app on my phone, to see how much it was charging, but it wouldn’t connect to the car for an update. I went out to the car and tried the handle, but the car said to use the key card to open the door. I didn’t have the key card, and I was very confused. Less than an hour ago I used my phone to pull the car into the garage. Obviously my phone was connected as a key. I opened my phone again, and saw the app just said “Vehicle Connection Error”. Then the horror crept in. My mind immediately envisioned a world where Nipunn would have to drive three hours to bring a physical key card to unlock the car.
After some brief googling, it seemed to be that the car had lost internet connection when I pulled it into the garage, meaning reconnecting my phone would be impossible. It didn’t seem fair — I had only moved the car 10 feet and now it couldn’t connect anymore! And besides, that shouldn’t matter anyway because the phone key works via Bluetooth, which should not be affected by internet connection loss.
I wasn’t going to be able to get into the car. I told my friends to start making another plan for my passengers to get home. I called Nipunn to see what he thought but he told me that I should call Tesla. So I called them, and they said that they didn’t have roadside assistance where we were so we would have to go with another towing company and pay for the cost out of pocket. Kind of a rip, but I did want to leave soon so I had the customer service agent contact tow companies who might be able to help. The tow truck was to arrive in 45 minutes.
I devised plans of how to reconnect the phone when the tow truck arrived. I was certain we could do it if we could get internet connection to the car. Just connect to the house’s WiFi and we’re off to the races.
45 minutes go by. An hour goes by. 90 minutes go by. Tesla calls and says that the tow truck has broken down and it’ll take 45 minutes to send another one. After those 45 minutes are up, the tow truck finally arrives.
The mechanic uses a device similar to a blood pressure cuff to separate the window from the body of the car and unlatch the door. Relieved he could get it open, I sat in the passenger seat and tried to put the car in Drive. Again I was prompted to use the key card. “Just keep pushing buttons until one of them puts the car in Drive” I thought. Thankfully, the very first menu I opened showed a password protected keyless drive mode.
It worked! The app showed that I had 2 minutes to start driving before the transmission would revert to Park-only mode. I pulled the car out of the garage and into the driveway, where it would be able to connect to the internet again. Paranoid, I left two of the doors open (in case one shut by accident).
We finished packing up and cleaning the house, and I got into the car to get going. And now the menu which contained the keyless drive feature was completely disabled. The car required internet to use it, and for some reason it was not connecting to the internet again, despite being out of the garage.
So we tried all kinds of tricks — data hotspots, house wifi, praying, etc. We even tried moving the router closer to the driveway, though the cables were short so I’m not sure it helped. Nothing. Could not get the car to connect to anything. It kept spitting out random errors for the networks. Either the password was wrong (it wasn’t), it couldn’t be assigned an IP address, the firewall settings were wrong, or there was a DHCP problem. They were random enough that I felt motivated to keep trying in case it would magically work just one time.
After pressing buttons, and clearing errors, and holding my breath, one finally went through. We all cheered! It was time to go! I immediately put the car in drive and pulled out of the driveway to start driving down the street.
The back door was still open though. “Oops”, I thought. “Can’t drive with an open door!” So I put the car in Park and closed it. Well, that was when I learned the 2 minute rule did not allow multiple Park to Drive transitions.
You guys.
I was one picometer away from breaking down.
I told my friends they should get on their way anyhow, since they had been waiting on me for the past five (!) hours. I sat in the car and took a deep breath. And that’s when I realized the data on my phone had stopped working, too. I was sitting there, blocking the entire street with a car I could not turn on, without any way to connect to data unless I went back inside the house. The car couldn’t connect to a tether. Even if I could get it to connect to WiFi by dragging the router out, I couldn’t keep it connected and relock the house up again unless I got out of the car.
I called Nipunn, as my friends drove away, and explained what happened. I sat in the car. He mostly suggested a bunch of stuff I already tried. And then for some reason I decided to try one more thing. I went back into the house, pulled the router all the way towards the garage, moving furniture to do so. Opened all the doors between the bedroom and the garage, and opened the garage door.
Miracles do happen. I was able to connect on the tiniest smidge of wifi. I put the car in Drive and drove directly forward into a snow bank. Leaving the car in Drive with the door open, I ran back into the house as fast as I could, closed all the doors, repositioned all the furniture and the router, and locked the key in the lock box.
I was free.
And, surprisingly, the last failure was not even the most frustrating part. As I drove out of the mountains, I realized the estimate range on the car’s display was not decreasing. Actually, it was increasing. Because I was gaining so much energy from driving down a mountain the car was able to operate at negative energy cost and store the excess momentum. So that was when I learned just how different the ranges are for driving uphill vs downhill.
In fact for the first 45 minutes, I did not lose any miles from the estimated range at all. Needless to say, I did not have to stop at a slow charger in between the cabin and the supercharger. I arrived with 60 miles to spare.
Which is to say, if I had done nothing as I originally planned, everything would’ve worked out fine. It was just the pressure of inconveniencing someone by not being prepared that sent me into a damage control mode that caused more damage than I would have experienced if I did nothing. And doing nothing would have caused no damage whatsoever.
Fortunately, both my friends and the Airbnb host were very understanding about the situation, and their calmness helped resolve it with minimal problems.
