Julia Hailes MBE

Sustainability Pioneer

Tesla arrives on April’s Fools Day – Teething Problems (Apr17)

She’s called Tess…  And she arrived today.  Glistening, blue and beautiful.  I’ve never been so excited by a car.
It’s April Fool’s day.  A bit worrying.  Was it an omen?
Quite possibly.  Rather nervously I approached the car and tried to work out how to open the door.  It didn’t work properly.  Pressed the chrome strip and the door slid open – but not all the way.  The delivery man wasn’t primed to help but he did come and investigate.  On further exploration, we found that the driver door opened a little way and then shut again.  Was it us or was it the car.  With new technology, it’s not always clear.
There’s no instruction booklet.  It’s all on the screen in the car.  But the screen wasn’t bright enough and it didn’t explain how to make it more visible!  Eek.
The key was a miniature model of a Tesla X.  But, why had they only supplied one?  Actually, it turns out the box had several layers – like chocolates – and another key was inside.  I think there may be a third one too, but we haven’t worked out how to get to the bottom section!
Jamie and I got into the car and he managed to get it started.  Silently and nervously we brought it round to our yard.  It then requested a re-boot to get the system going.  But we thought we’d move it out of the way first, because this was apparently going to take over an hour, and we didn’t want to block the other cars in.  That was a mistake.  Having moved it forward the message about re-booting disappeared and we couldn’t get it back again, despite lots of pressing different parts of the screen.
Back to the doors.  Pressing the button to open the driver door resulted in it showing it had noticed by opening a little way and then closing again.   A bit despondent, we decided we needed breakfast before tackling it again…

 

We know who to ring.  But it’s Saturday.  It’s April Fools Day.  And we have a new car called Tess that doesn’t work…
Next instalment to come….