In early 2021, my husband and I heard God tell us to buy an electric vehicle because gas prices were going to go through the roof. We also heard God say that global supply chain issues would get worse, so we decided to buy a car that—for what information we could find online—seemed to be manufactured and built in America. That reduced our list to about two vehicles.
We added to our list of demands that it be an SUV to support our growing family, and we landed on the Tesla Model X. We found a 2016 model with a laughably small amount of miles on it and after a short test-drive that left me and my husband a little divided, we bought it because, well, we didn’t really see another option out there.
The Cars We Loved Before
Happy Santa Fe owners! Picnicking at 1 of the 10,000 lakes Our first Christmas together with my Ford Escape
I’m not gonna lie—it was really hard to trade in our 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe Limited Ultimate XL for the Tesla. We have been a one-car family for the past few years and we LOVED that car! It was practically a little house on wheels, and we spent many-an-hour picnicking in it during our pregnant COVID winter in Minnesota. We just didn’t love the stinky exhaust (or its impact on the environment) and we knew that the 20 miles per gallon was gonna start hurting soon.
Just one year before we got our Santa Fe, it was hard to say goodbye to my 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid Limited—a car God had gifted me in the early years of my walk with him/her—but it was totaled after a car accident when I was four months pregnant. (Fortunately, no one was hurt, except my dear car.) I loved both the comfy interior of the car and the powerful-and-hybrid engine, because you could barely even tell exhaust was coming out when it was running. The 30-40 miles per gallon was also a dream!
Why am I going down memory lane if it just makes the present hurt more, you ask? It’s just to show you which vehicles set the bar for our standards in an SUV—and why I am so unhappy with our Tesla now.
The Upsides of Our Tesla
Coming back to the present, and our Tesla… before I tell you why I want to get rid of it, I want to highlight the things it does really well:
- It accelerates faster than almost all sports cars—my husband loves that
- It can tow 5,000 lbs; this is a surprise to everyone who sees our tow hitch
- It’s Dog Mode climate control allows our kid to comfortably play or nap inside it while we are working around it, even in the middle of summer or winter. When you live in a walk-in-closet, extra spaces like the one in your car become crucial to keeping your sanity
- We can turn it on from our phone if we forget or lose our keys
- The gull-wing doors make my talk husband super happy because he doesn’t have to bend into a pretzel to put our kid into the car—pure gold
- It elevated the EV industry and made the idea of electricity-based power more “normal” and accessible
The Downsides of Our Tesla
Despite those benefits, there are certainly many downsides. First, moving from gasoline-based transportation to electric-based was quite a lifestyle change! Instead of a five-minute top-up at any gas station across the world, we have to spend 1+ hours hanging out at the closest Tesla Supercharger. Although some Superchargers are near good shopping or restaurants, many of them are at a gas station, which has made for some less-than-interesting charging times. I mean, how many laps can you walk around a WaWa in an hour?
Driving across country makes using a gasless-car more stressful because along some routes, Superchargers are really spread out—and our Tesla only has about a 180 mile range before it dies. (Sadly, I discovered that its advertised range of 250 miles is woefully inaccurate under driving conditions that require some stopping and some heating or air conditioning.)
On top of that already limited range and even more limited routes due to Supercharger availability, in mid-2022, we heard God tell us to get a camper. Since the Tesla can tow only 5,000 lbs, we were limited to a the only travel-trailer model that our car could still tow and my tall husband could fit in. But towing 4,000+ with a Tesla dropped its range from about 180 miles to 70 miles! Well, there are even fewer routes with a Supercharger every 70 miles. So that put a damper on our camping plans.
Then, there have been numerous issues with the car’s computer:
- Issues with the car not charging when it was plugged in
- Issues with the windows not rolling up after a computer update
- Issues with the navigation system not loading… for ten minutes after the car starts
- Issues with the Bluetooth not connecting—for months
- Issues with the car not turning on or off when we tell it to
- Issues with the computer randomly turning off in the middle of driving and rebooting itself. Imagine ALL of your dashboard gauges disappearing while you’re driving 75 miles per hour on a highway at night. How fast are you going? You don’t know!
Having issues with the computer (or any other part of the car) would be okay if we could get it into the Service shop quickly, but we haven’t been able to do that either—neither in Maryland nor in Colorado. Being limited to only Tesla Service shops (because they apparently control their parts supply chain) makes this predicament worse. (Anyone who knows about monopolies knows that a lack of competition almost always leads to poor service quality.) Sadly, that’s been our experience because:
- We can’t reach out to connect with a human being in the Service shop through the phone or app—it’s more like a trouble ticket system like at Spotify or Apple where you send your plea for help through the internet and people message you back when they can. When you’re in the middle of an emergency like the one I had two days ago, that really, really, really blows!
- Although Tesla offers mobile service appointments for some services, they still take days-to-weeks to schedule, and half the time, do not fix the problem anyway. (We have had to have our car’s computer reset or patches reloaded numerous times by mobile service attendants and still had to bring the car into the shop later.)
- When we have turned in our car to the Service shop, the estimates for how much time or money to fix something have NEVER been reliable… not even by a factor of 2X or 3X—but one manager told us this is apparently the norm?! How is that possible?
All of this has boiled down to this one nagging feeling I have about my Tesla: I don’t trust my car and I don’t trust Tesla Service to keep my car running. As a one-car family, this makes our experience doubly frustrating and disempowering.
The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back
I thought I was mad enough at our Tesla experience, but then, two days ago, our car up and died in the middle of a four-way stop on the road with me and my toddler inside. The computer just stopped working! I did all the normal troubleshooting things but nothing worked, so I tried to connect with any human being at Tesla to ask for help but it was useless—no human beings answered the central line, there was no phone number for the local Service shop, and no one was answering my mobile service request. It was 5:30 pm on a Friday and I couldn’t reach anyone to help me troubleshoot my iPhone on wheels. So I called a tow-truck and my husband; fortunately, my husband figured out how to factory reset the car to get it home.
When Tesla Service messaged me the next day, they remotely pushed out an update to the car’s computer over our WiFi, and said everything was now fine. They asked to close the ticket. That’s when I asked them:



They don’t sound very concerned for our welfare or safety, do they? That has also been typical of our experience with Tesla. For them, this was just another software crash. One of 30 or 40 such bugs or crashes we have experienced since we bought the car two years ago! The benefits of having an onboard computer do not outweigh the frustrations and—in this case—dangers of driving an unstable iPhone on wheels. After all, if my real iPhone’s software crashes, the worst that usually happens is I don’t get to communicate remotely for a few hours. However, if my car’s software crashes, I don’t get to go to work, move off to the side of the road when it breaks down in traffic, or get my kid home late at night. The cost of that software crash is much greater!
Asking for Help
This is why I have already looked into selling our car shortly after we arrived to Colorado, but sadly, our loan is now under water because we put a cross-country-trip worth of miles on it. All I can now do is ask you for prayer and ask for God to intervene.
We want to get rid of this pain-in-the-rear car without losing money on it, and we want to get into a car that is safe, reliable, not terrible on the environment, and has a much more responsive set of service options..
Please pray for us.
4 responses to “Our Tesla Woes”
Praying 🙏🏽 but also, hopeful it’s not “too soon” to laugh about this but, I love this line “ I mean, how many laps can you walk around a WaWa in an hour?” 😂🤦🏽♀️ I think the answer is probably— “too many” 🤓
😂🤣
Praying for you, friend!
Thank you 😃 so much! 🙏
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