Ohhh, my god! Cruise control, in itself, sounds dangerous as it is, and like a case of taking the driver for a ride. As for Teslas, I would to purchase a Tesla if somebody paid me to do so. They sound too dangerous.
This is such a wild story, and I don’t know how to parse it. Can anyone just guess valet codes for a car? Was he actually able to charge the prior owner for supercharging? Who fumbled the transfer?
Locked in valet mode, battery constantly drained, and a car that won’t stop honking, this Tesla Model S owner was at the mercy of the previous owner’s remote access for over a week.
I have owned, and sold, two different Model 3s. The first was traded back in to Tesla when I picked up my new one. With that one, my access to the car was removed within an hour of them taking possession. The second was sold to a 3rd party online company. With that car I was able to track where it was for weeks. I ended up removing the car from my account manually so that whoever bought the car would be able to activate it.
It is not just Tesla, we were able to track my wife’s Ford truck for weeks after selling it to Carvana.
I bought a used car that had Sirius XM radio active. I had never had an account with them. XM worked fine for the next ~3 years I owned that car. I don’t know who was paying the bill, but I expect it was the prior owner.
It seems cars are another item we need learn to wipe upon selling. Just like phones & PCs.
My current car, and I suspect most modern cars, is registered on the manufacturer’s website to me. I got the car used. It seems there was a bit of a process to tell the website to remove that VIN from [whoever] and attach it to my account instead. Had I not bothered to do that, I don’t know what the consequences would have been. But I did not want to find out the hard way.
All my stories involve non-Telsas.
Tesla must not have much brute force protection on the valet code. I don’t think that is a big deal, because to even attempt to enter a valet code you already have to be in the car with a key. The threat model is a valet pulling up your personal information, or doing 3.5 second 0-60 runs on the way to the parking garage, not a valet sitting in the car for hours trying codes.
A payment method must be associated with the Tesla account to pay for supercharging. (I think you can do a small amount of charging before payment is required.) So yes, if the car is associated with an account with an active payment method, then it will supercharge on someone else’s dime. This particular car had lifetime free supercharging, so the new owner was using “idle fees” which are accrued by staying plugged into a supercharger after charging has finished.
Whoever the new owner bought the car from fumbled the transfer. This is just the digital equivalent of getting parking tickets on a car you sold, because as far as the DMV is concerned, you still own it. There are procedures to transfer ownership of a car, and they differ by state, and procedures to transfer ownership between online accounts, and those will differ by manufacturer.
First thing I’d do after selling any car is file a DMV “not mine anymore” form, and then remove it from any online accounts I have.
I usually factory reset rental cars when I return them. No need to have my contacts’ information in the head unit, or my destinations saved in the map. Plus it saves the next user the pain of having to figure out how to delete a phone from the radio, because the maximum number of saved bluetooth pairings has been reached.
As to rental cars, I simply never connect my phone to their car. OTOH, I don’t rent cars for weeks at a time. For the e.g. 4 days I’m in City X I can suffer with doing my nav on my phone and the local FM station for entertainment.
But I do enjoy poking around in the settings to see how many other phones connections are still stored. It’s often lots.
A few months ago, my team was out of town on a business trip. One co-worker arrived late and the Hertz agency at the airport offered him either a twelve-passenger van or a Tesla Model X/Y (one of those). He took the Tesla but then found that the charging adapter was locked in the glove compartment by a previous renter. Hertz didn’t have the code to open the compartment and would need to reset the car to regain access to it. Without that adapter, he would have to find a Tesla supercharger station to recharge; the EV charger at the hotel parking garage wasn’t compatible. So the next day, he returned to the airport and swapped for another car.
Most likely the old owner canceled and the service was never shut off. It happens all the time. I canceled my Serius once and it still worked for like three months until it got shut off. When my friend met his future wife, she had owned her car that she bought new for almost a year. She didn’t even know that she had a satellite radio. He showed it to her and it worked…for over two years until it finally shut off.
On the other hand, I had around six months left on my Sirius when I sold my Honda to Carmax. I got a very cheap subscription so I decided to leave it as a gift to the new owner. Two weeks later I got an email saying that my subscription was canceled and my card got credited for the prorated amount left.
With thousands of attempts, why not? And it sounds like the prior owner refused to cooperate in transferring ownership. The article gives no hint of why, though.
Teslas not only sound not so great, but downright dangerous, to boot! I would not purchase one if somebody paid me to do so!
I’m not a tesla fan, either but you do realize you replied to an issue with buying a used one, where the original owner was an a-hole?
- If you buy new,
- If you buy used & they do the transfer properly, or
- If you buy used, they bork the transfer & the prior owner isn’t a prick
then this isn’t an issue, right.
I would not only not buy a Tesla, whether it was used or new, but I would not buy a used or pre-owned car…period, because when one purchases a used/pre-owned car, s/he runs the risk of buying somebody else’s bag of troubles. **That’**s one risk that I would not take if and when purchasing a new car.
I have decided that if and when I get a new car, I’d rather get a new hybrid (Hybrid cars run on both gas and electric, and don’t require plugging into a charging station. I know, because before I purchased the car I presently have, I had a hybrid. It was great, especially because I only needed to gas up the hybrid every couple of weeks, rather than once a week. I’d get one again, and I plan to, if I need it.
You do you, but you’re picking a remarkably expensive way to mitigate a small risk.
I bought a 2023 Hertz-fleet Bolt with 5,700 miles on it for about 40% off brand-new and have been satisfied with it. Being a fleet car it is missing a lot of options. Number one on the list of options I wish I had is adaptive cruise control. Without it I use the CC only on the openest of highways.
Number two is heated seats. I found out to my chagrin the resistive cabin heater chews through more battery capacity in our 40-degree winters than the heat pump does in our 110-degree summers. I came to understand why the members of the Bolt owners message board living in Minnesota were unhappy.
This guy won arbitration with Tesla plus legal fees over the issue of delivery of FSD. Not the usual kind of article, because it includes some of the plaintiff’s post-arbitration comments both within the article and then in the comments section.
In Teslas the air conditioning (or heater) can be turned on remotely from the phone app so the car is at a good temperature before it is time to drive. Never having to get into a 120F car is a great feature, and well worth the little bit of battery used to pre-cool the car.
On very hot days, pre-cooling sets off the car alarm.
Any alarm sound near the car isn’t lasting very long, because I’ve never heard it. I only know because I get a notification from the phone app that the alarm was triggered, and then a minute or so later a notification that there was suspicious activity recorded by the camera.
It the Model X at least you can leave the car in Doggie Mode when you go into a store and the care will remain comfortable for the dog, even on hot days.
Yeah, that’s a great feature. Last week I used it for a dog and a human! But this thread is about how Teslas are bad.
I guess if I had to pick one bad thing about the X it would be the sun visors.
Our’s broke and it wasn’t cheap to replace It’s the only repair the car ever needed.