Taming the Wild Tesla

On a recent trip to Durham, North Carolina to visit family, my wife, Neema, and I needed to rent a car on arrival at the airport. I pulled up the options in Costco Travel, which provides much better prices than booking directly from a car rental company or through a travel app. There were quite a range of choices from several rental companies and different car models. I saw that there was a discount for an electric vehicle which was something I support. I clicked on it and a picture of a Tesla from Budget Rental appeared. Now I know that there is a groundswell of opposition to Tesla because of the actions of Elon Musk, on behalf of Donald Trump, wielding his wrecking ball style of management on many U.S. institutions. However, I have been very interested in the  Tesla technology and my money would be going to the car rental company, not to Tesla and Elon Musk. so I booked it.

Tesla Model 3, entry level sedan $60,000 (CDN)

After checking in at the Budget rental counter, we were directed to a numbered parking space to pick up the car. It was supposed to be unlocked with the keys inside. It was not. I went over to a small booth that was nearby on the lot and told the attendant about our problem. She came over and tried all the door handles, to no avail. She peered inside and said “Well yeah, the key is in there”. The key was not literally a key, it was a card, like a hotel key card. She didn’t seem to know any secret way to open the car, so she went back to her booth. About 15 minutes later she came back and said they had found us another car. We dragged our suitcases across the lot to another row and there was a Tesla with a door that would open. I dismissed this as a typical administrative screw up, but it turned out to be ominous foreshadowing of events to come.

One of the first things you notice after getting into a Tesla is the very large screen in the center of the dashboard. This screen is more than just a navigation display for driving directions. It is a touchscreen that also responds to voice commands, giving the driver a wide range of controls to operate the vehicle. 

This is a revolutionary design in the human/automobile interface. As the number of operator controls in cars increased over the years, additional knobs, dials and levers were added to control such things as windshield wipers, mirrors, door locks, temperature and various dashboard display options. Tesla removed a lot of this instrument clutter by incorporating the operations in a touchscreen interface.

Tesla’s design is reminiscent of the revolution of the human/computer interface that occurred after Apple released the Macintosh in 1984. Up until that time, people using a computer had to type in every command. On the Macintosh, the command line interface was completely replaced by a full screen desktop motif where users would point and click on graphical icons to operate the computer. 

Apple’s vision changed the face of computing. Almost all computers after the Macintosh adopted this graphical user interface, even though it took some time. Microsoft didn’t really catch up to the Macintosh until eight years later in 1992 with Windows 3.1 (earlier versions of Microsoft Windows were so poor that hardly anyone used them). 

Later on as cell phones and smartphones arrived on the scene, they adopted this familiar graphical user interface. Tesla continued this trend, using many familiar smartphone motifs in their driver/automobile interface. 

This innovative approach to operating a car had a big influence on the rest of the automotive world. Since the appearance of the first Tesla in 2012, many other cars have copied aspects of the Tesla design, starting first with high end cars such as Volvo, Audi, BMW and in more recent years, more common cars such as VW, Chevrolet, and Honda. It does seem that eventually most cars will evolve to use the Tesla driver interface.

When I first got into the Tesla, there was a welcome message on the screen with a QR code to install an app on my phone. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on that yet; we really just wanted to get on the road and get to our hotel. The seat adjustments were on conventional slide buttons on the sides of the seat and so I set a comfortable position. I noticed that a Save button popped up on the screen, so I pressed it to save my seat settings. There was a navigation button on the screen which I pressed. It brought up a search bar where I entered the address of our destination. It brought up a big driving map with directions. That was enough to get started and we were on our way. 

No sooner had we left the rental car lot and turned onto the airport road than it started to rain. But this wasn’t an ordinary rainfall, it was a deluge, like an Amazon jungle downpour, although I’ve never been there. The windshield wipers did not come on automatically as they do my car. I had to pull over to the side of the road and poke around until I found a button on the lever to the left of the steering wheel that turned on the wipers. But it only did a single sweep. I couldn’t find the control to turn the wipers on at high speed. So instead of following the driving directions towards the Interstate, I took an exit onto a side road where there was a lot less traffic. I had to press the wiper button every few seconds in order to see where we were going. 

The deluge finally tapered off and when I looked where we were on the map, it seemed like we had taken a big detour from our destination. Eventually though, we arrived safely at the hotel. 

There were two buttons on the screen to open the “Frunk” and the “Trunk”. I assume the Frunk was for a storage space in the front of the car. I pressed the button for the Trunk which is where our luggage was.

The last thing to do before checking into the hotel was to lock the car. You were supposed to be able to do this by sliding the key card along the door post on the driver’s side. I tried this a couple of times and nothing happened. I was tired from our travels and it was getting late. I decided I would take the risk of leaving the car unlocked overnight and added this to the growing list of problems that would require some research.

The next day when we headed out, my driver’s seat was completely reclined, like the car expected me to be taking a nap. This was not the seat setting that I had saved. I reset the seat position and punched the Save button twice to make sure it saved this time. I thought that maybe if I set up the app I wouldn’t run into problems like this. I scanned the QR code on the Tesla screen with my phone and was sent to the App Store to download the Tesla App. Then I followed the instructions on the Tesla screen. It needed a Bluetooth connection so I went into Bluetooth in my phone settings and authorized the pairing from the Tesla car. After a few moments a message appeared on the car saying “Bluetooth failed”. This was a bit of a surprise. My phone was pretty up to date and I had several Bluetooth connections that were working. As is typical with technology, no information was provided to explain the error. This was not something I wanted to spend a long time diagnosing while sitting in a parking lot. I did take a few minutes to adjust my side mirrors properly. This was fairly easy because it used thumb wheels on the steering wheel to move the mirrors in a manner similar to conventional cars. Then we headed off.

It was warm in the car and shortly after rounding a corner the fan suddenly came on full blast, blowing warm air. I didn’t know my way around the touchscreen well enough to know where the climate controls were and I couldn’t really search while driving. But I had learned a key feature earlier while poking around. On the steering wheel there was a button and when it was pressed, the car would listen for a voice command. I figured this will be easy. I pressed the button and said, 

“Make it cooler”. Nothing happened. 

I tried a different command “Reduce the temperature”. Nothing. 

After a few more tries I finally hit the jackpot: “Set the temperature to 71°”. 

At last the fan slowed down and switched to cool air. This was rather surprising. I thought that Tesla was on the cutting edge of technology and that it would have a comprehension level of artificial intelligence (AI) that was closer to a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini. It really was no better than old technology like Siri.

One thing that I had really missed on the navigation was that there were no audio directions to provide advance notice of upcoming turns. The radio seemed to be on in the background so I thought maybe that was interfering. It was easy to find a button on the screen to turn off the radio, but still no driving commands. We tried various voice commands.

“Turn on audio driving directions.” Nothing.

“Enable navigation sound.” Nothing.

It took a while but we finally discovered the magic incantation:

“Unmute navigation voice.”

Little by little it seemed that we were learning how to drive this car. 

But the next day there was a reversal. When I got in the car, my seat settings were okay but my side mirror settings were completely off and I had to set them again. When we headed out, the car started blowing hot air again and we had to reset the temperature. And there were no audio driving directions. It’s almost as if this car had a mind of its own. Then my wife remembered that there had been a classic cult film about a car that had a mind of its own. It was called Christine and was based on a Stephen King story. Had we entered some kind of Twilight Zone?

On our return to the hotel we found a parking spot close to our room. When we entered our room we could see Christine through the window. She seemed to be staring at us and glaring, in contrast to the neighboring parked cars which sported more friendly looks. Neema  went over and pulled the curtains closed.

This was starting to get serious. I needed to up my game. I spent much of that evening looking up things on the Internet. I found the Tesla driver’s manual but it was very long and I had particular problems that I needed to solve. I turned to ChatGPT. It provided answers to several important questions.

In one conversation, I mentioned that it was a rental car. This seemed to turn on a light bulb in the mind of ChatGPT. It said that the rental car company remained the owner of the vehicle and because I was not registered as the owner, I would be restricted from a number of operations. That probably explained why the Bluetooth connection to the Tesla App didn’t work. ChatGPT also suggested that I might be able to solve the problem of many of my settings not being saved by creating a new profile instead of using the default profile. 

The next morning we headed out with a renewed sense of confidence in dealing with cantankerous Christine. However, when we got to the parking lot, we saw that a Tesla Cybertruck was parked right beside our car. This truck looks more like an army tank and it dwarfed our little Model 3.

We wondered if somehow Christine had gotten wind that we were going to engage new tactics to control it and had called in some reinforcements from Big Brother. There was no turning back. We hoped that the new knowledge and clues we had gained from ChatGPT would defeat the Tesla Empire.

I proceeded to create a new profile on the touchscreen and made sure my seat settings, side mirrors, navigation audio and temperature were set. We headed off.

Triumph! For the rest of the day, Christine cooperated without any interference. 

I had yet to figure out how to lock the car. I was a bit worried that if I locked it, I might not be able to unlock it. Then we would really be in the soup. But with my newly acquired confidence and mastery of this car, I decided to try it. After several swipes I found the correct angle for the key card and the car locked. And the car door opened with the same magic swipe. What a relief!

There was one more thing I was a little bit worried about. When we had picked up the car, the battery level showing prominently on the screen was 70% and even though we had just been doing short drives around town, the level had already dropped to 30%. It looked like we would have to recharge the car before the end of our trip. In addition, the rental car company stipulated that the car should be returned with at least a 70% battery charge. 

I went back to ChatGPT to find out everything I could about charging a Tesla. It seemed pretty straightforward and simple . . . if everything worked. 

The next morning before setting off for the day, I brought up the navigation screen where there was an option for Tesla charging stations. It was quite a long list. A Tesla Supercharging station was less than a mile from where we were. I selected it and followed the driving directions. Although it was really close by, it was a circuitous route with turns through several side streets until we arrived behind a plaza where there were charging bays for about 10 cars. Most of them were empty so I had no trouble backing into a convenient spot. I unhooked the large charging cable and pressed the button on the handle. A small panel on the car next to the tail light opened up, revealing a large socket where I could plug in the charging cable. A green light lit up indicating that the car was charging.

I had read that with a Supercharger it was optimal to charge up to 80%. after which it would charge much more slowly. It looked like it would take about 15 minutes to reach that level so I walked around to the front of the plaza. There I found a Freddy’s and bought an ice cream cone. When I got back to the car, it took only a few more minutes to reach 80% at which point I pressed the button on the screen to stop charging. The bill was $10. But I couldn’t pay it; there was no option to use a credit card. Since Tesla recognized the car and had an account for the owner, the charging cost was billed automatically to the owner. Several weeks later after Budget received the bill from Tesla, they passed on the charge to my credit card. 

I was pretty impressed. Charging had worked really well. It was highly automated which made it really simple for someone who owned a Tesla. And there were no complaints at all from Christine. Then I realized – of course, if there had been any disruptions, the car wouldn’t have been charged and Christine wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

The next few days were fairly smooth sailing. There was one minor seat revolt when I came out to the car one morning and found that the driver’s seat was reclined flat. However, when we dropped Christine off at the rental car lot at the end of our trip, I felt that we were parting on fairly good terms.

After we got home, we were still intrigued by the idea of Christine, the rogue automobile. We discovered that the film was available on Netflix, even though it had been released back in 1983 and starred a 1958 Plymouth Fury. We made a bowl of popcorn and settled down to watch the classic movie. After seeing what a rogue car was capable of, we felt that we had just escaped by the skin of our teeth.

Christine Trailer