[carthick1000]

My model 2019 3 standard range + is about 3 years old now and I have done 48200kms in it. It had it's official first service today and I thought it would be interesting to maintain a thread on the service updates (and possibly software updates too). I wanted to write the report for a very long time, but somehow keep forgetting it and finally here it is.

Broken Sun Visor visit

The very first time I need to go to the service center was during the first month of delivery, as they delivered the car with a broken sun-visor mount, which they fixed under warranty.





Got rear ended

Around 2800km mark, a VW up rear ended while I stopped for a red light. Slight damage to the bumper and the cable glands running inside, on the frame where the bumper is mounted. The other driver's insurance paid for the fix.





Stone hit windshield replacement visit

Around 46000km mark, there was a stone hitting the windshield on top corner (driver side). Since it is at the corner and also bigger than the size of a coin, it was not repairable. Hence got a new windshield under insurance.



First service after 3 years / 48200kms!!!

So far the reasons to visit the service center were not part of regular maintenance. But today is special, because it is technically the first service. Or atleast I am assuming it is, as Tesla did not ask me to service the car and neither was a notification in the car. Only I thought I am just over extending the wiper blades and the cabin air filter life, which starts to show up. For this, I have to open the tesla app and book a service appointment (link). I have added the following work orders there:

• Windshield wiper blade replacement
• Cabin air filter replacement
• Slighly higher road noise felt

And Tesla service guys deemed that these are not any major things to bring the car to the service center. Hence they planned an appointment with the Tesla mobile service unit which will come to my home to get the above things done. I made the appointment via app 2 weeks ago and today the mobile service vehicle came promptly. The mobile service vehicles is a model S modified to accomodate a driver+ a lot of storage and sliding tool racks inbuilt.



The guy came and asked for my key card. We spoke over the work orders raised. He suggested that he will also perform the airco cleaning after replacing the cabin air filter. It took about 45 minutes for replacing cabin filter, windshield wiper blade and the airco cleaning process (runs for 20mins). After that he took a short test drive to identify the reason for slightly increased noise. On return, he checked all four tires and mentioned that they started cupping slightly and might be the reason for increased noise. So he suggested that I can visit the service center (whenever I want) to rotate the wheels (FL to RR and FR to RL) and that should reduce the noise. I will be doing that sometime this week. Other than that, he checked for brake disc/pad wear and brake fluid levels. They were all okay and no need for changing(pad/disc) or topping up (brake fluid) anytime soon. He bid good bye and I hope the next time I have to service something is after 3 years .

Periodic visits: Summer-Winter tire swap

Around every autumn and spring season, I go to an independent garage to swap from summer to winter tires and vice versa, respectively. Until now the summer tires have driven about 28000kms and the winter tires about 20000kms resp. A typical swap session is in progress:



Some statistics

There has been about 49 software updates in the last 3 years at an average frequency of 17 days. There has been numerous useful features added in the last 3 years, all free of cost. I started using Teslamate for datalogging after about 2500kms and hence I miss data for the first 2500km. But still the rest of the usage is all well covered in the statistics.

Driving



Charging



The DC charging curve is deduced from all the samples of past DC charging sessions



The below numbers indicate how many times the vehicle was charged or discharged to a certain SoC level:



Efficiency



Yearly overview



If I had to have an ICE vehicle, I would have been to the service center for quite some times just for regular service alone. But with an EV, it is just like having a refrigerator or washing machine. It runs and runs and runs without much maintenance.I will keep updating this thread on newer service or software updates.

Cheers,
Karthik

[ajayc123]

Nice update. Thanks a lot.Just a couple of quick questions:

1. Is there any schedule for preventive maintenance like every 10k or every year kind of stuff ?

2. Does Tesla have dealers for service, or do they do it directly?

3. Can you buy a Tesla car directly from the company or is it via middlemen (dealers)?

[Piyush Kanthak]

Please give us more insights on how the quality of the Tesla has been so far. How are the interiors holding up? How is the touchscreen and autopilot functions working?

Do you use Sentry mode? How does it effect the range?
Has there been a range drop in these 3 years?

[carthick1000]

Originally Posted by ajayc123

Just a couple of quick questions:

1. Tesla mentions the following recommendations see quoted text below) under maintenance section of owner's manual, which I am clearly overdue . But I also did not get any warning / notification from the car, as the car did not find any issue per se. The only warning I used to get from time to time is "windshield washer fluid low", which goes off as I top-up.

Service
Your vehicle should generally be serviced on an as-needed basis. However, Tesla recommends the following maintenance items and intervals, as applicable to your vehicle, to ensure continued reliability and efficiency of your Model 3.

Brake fluid health check every 2 years (replace if necessary).
A/C desiccant bag replacement every 6 years.
Cabin air filter replacement every 2 years.
Clean and lubricate brake calipers every year or 12,500 miles (20,000 km) if in an area where roads are salted during winter
Rotate tires every 6,250 miles (10,000 km) or if tread depth difference is 2/32 in (1.5 mm) or greater, whichever comes first

2 Tesla does not have dealers at all. What they have is basically and experience center/showroom coupled with or without a service center. Tesla does the service themselves. But for basic things like changing tyres, windshield replacement, tinkering, you can always rely on any 3rd party who has experience doing it. When I did the windhsield replacement at a 3rd party, that garage requested for Tesla mobile service to come and do the calibration of camera unit, which Tesla did.

3. You can buy a new Tesla only from the company. Tesla has no dealers or middlemen. The whole purchase process is a Direct-to-Customer model where you place the booking online and complete all the steps online until your car is ready for pickup. Even you can opt for touchless pickup, where you can get the keycards from a lockbox and driveaway your new Tesla without meeting anyone.

Originally Posted by Piyush Kanthak

Please give us more insights on how the quality of the Tesla has been so far. How are the interiors holding up? How is the touchscreen and autopilot functions working?

Do you use Sentry mode? How does it effect the range?
Has there been a range drop in these 3 years?

Interesting questions. Thanks for asking. Nice to have in this report thread.

Holding up well

The car is holding up really well after 3 years. There is not much of a difference I find from day one and today. The seats, steering, armrest etc. hold up really well. There is no strange noises/rattles and the fit and finish is quite intact.

Touchscreen troubles

The touchscreen interface also is quick and snappy. There were 2 times I have to do a reset of the touchscreen. One was a hard reset (Press and hold left and right buttons on steering wheel + brake). I did this as the turn signals did not give any audible feedback and hard reset fixed the issue. And another time, I have to do a soft reset (Press and hold left and right buttons on steering wheel) to fix an unresponsive display while the car was parked.

False positives and limitations of ACC
I do not have the full self driving, but only the adaptive cruise control. This works fine and is getting better over the years. Still very rarely, the car brakes while on adaptive cruise control, when there is a heavy shadow of eg. an overbridge or a big board on the highway, esp. on sunny days. And when the sun is really low (during twilight), the cameras get blinded and the ACC cannot be enabled. Similarly on winter days, if the cameras get blinded by snow/ice, then too ACC cannot be enabled.

Sentry and Range

I use the sentry mode at locations other than my home and office. You can configure to exclude locations where the sentry can remain off. By default it is set to be ON, which is indeed a very useful feature. It consumes about 1-2% of SoC per day if Sentry is ON.

Capacity degradation / Range drop

I checked the Teslamate data from 3 years ago and this week. 3 years ago, the projected range for 100%SoC is about 370km and currently it is about 350km. So a range drop of 20km in other words a capacity degradation of 5.5% over the course of 3 years/48200kms. I guess the initial few years have the worst degradation and then the degradation is quite slow.

[carthick1000]

Originally Posted by carthick1000

After that he took a short test drive to identify the reason for slightly increased noise. On return, he checked all four tires and mentioned that they started cupping slightly and might be the reason for increased noise. So he suggested that I can visit the service center (whenever I want) to rotate the wheels (FL to RR and FR to RL) and that should reduce the noise. I will be doing that sometime this week.

Wheel rotation at 48550km

Yesterday dropped in by Tesla service center nearby to perform the rotation. Boy, it is so busy now-a-days. Parked the car at entrance, handed the key card to the service personnel inside. They asked for my vehicle reg. number. Based on that they can pickup the work order , generated by the mobile service person who serviced my car a few days ago. They asked me to wait at the waiting lounge. I went with my 2 year old daughter. So I didn’t go into the waiting room as there were ppl working with their laptops and we didn’t want to bother them. So we went inside the showroom and looked around. Then we took a stroll around the area. In the app, the car showed as ‘Service mode’ after some time and when the service was over,
I was informed over an app notification that service was over. So returned back to get the car. It took about 1hr in total. Got back the key card, finished the billing and left.

While leaving, heard from the mechanic, that due to the slight cupping and now after rotation I might feel the drive and steer behavior a bit different until I get used to this. He also said that it takes few hundred kms for the cupping to be levelled and then slowly I might notice the car becoming silent. From the drive back home, I didn’t feel much difference except that the steering felt slightly grippy and the self aligning torque bringing back the wheels to 0deg faster than before.

[Piyush Kanthak]

Interesting questions. Thanks for asking. Nice to have in this report thread.
I do not have the full self driving

Thank you for the insights sir. I do have some more quires.
1.Do you plan on using the Full Self Drive Beta?
2. How are the sentry mode videos stored? External Hard Disk?
3.What could have been better?
4.Does the screen distract while driving?
5. How was your experience at a supercharger?

[carthick1000]

Originally Posted by Piyush Kanthak

1.Do you plan on using the Full Self Drive Beta?
2. How are the sentry mode videos stored? External Hard Disk?
3.What could have been better?
4.Does the screen distract while driving?
5. How was your experience at a supercharger?

1. No, probably never.
2. Sentry videos are stored, if you connect an extrernal hard disk to the USB port in center console. In some instances of accidents, the videos are also stored in Tesla's servers, which you can request. But I just prefer to store it locally and hence have a portable hard drive connected to one of the USB ports in center console. In recent models, for safety, they moved this functionality to a USB port within the glovebox. In this way it is even more secure, as the glovebox can be locked with pincode.
3. I could have used some physical buttons for 2 of the most used things: Open/Close charge port and Glovebox. And the noise insulation could have been better like BMW i4 or Audi e-tron.
4. Not at all. In fact having the screen in the middle, it leaves a lot of space directly in front of the driver. This helps having a very low dashboard and helps improving the visibility. I don't think any other passenger car in the world has such levels of visibility outside.
5. Tesla superchargers are the best. Because unlike other superchargers, where you have to authorize with an app/a card/rfid tag to start charging, Tesla is just plug and charge. No extra steps required at all. Also it is one of the best supercharger networks with a large presence here in Europe.

[carthick1000]

Software update
Yesterday got the 50th software update which is version 2022.20.8. In the last 3 years, the median time between updates is about 17 days.





If you want to checkout the release notes of each of the above releases, it is available here.


Version 2020.20.8
This latest update adds (and improves) a feature where you can input what type of Tyre (summer/winter) and wheels (aero/non-aero) are used. Based on this, and the charging and discharging behaviour, the range prediction algorithm computes the range for forthcoming trips. In the past few months, the range prediction is becoming much better and welcome these sort of minute additions to improve the user experience. When you are doing longer distances, better range prediction helps a lot esp. to plan charging stops.

[mobike008]

Originally Posted by carthick1000

Software update
Yesterday got the 50th software update which is version 2022.20.8. In the last 3 years, the median time between updates is about 17 days.

Firstly, Congratulations on your Tesla Model 3 Karthik. Glad to know that you have thoroughly enjoyed your ownership.

It's amazing to know Tesla releases updates at such close frequency. Once every 17 days is awesome.

Very few companies run such agile processes assuming their average sprint cycle is 15 days or less as it takes a few days for test and final deployment into production.

Kudos to their agile dev teams.

Since you have owned the Model 3 for 3 years, do these updates really provide significant changes?

Or, significant changes comes a couple of times in a year and rest are just bug fixes and minor enhancements that don't even catch your eye.?

I understand the latest update fixes the position of the camera (bottom left corner) to 2 other positions with a simple drag and drop? Did you get this fix as well?

Does you car have the "Summon" feature?

Now I am going to keep a close watch on your thread for obvious reasons.

[carthick1000]

Thanks for the kind words.

Originally Posted by mobike008

Since you have owned the Model 3 for 3 years, do these updates really provide significant changes?

Or, significant changes comes a couple of times in a year and rest are just bug fixes and minor enhancements that don't even catch your eye.?

Most of the updates are bug fixes and minor updates, but on an average once in a year, there are significant updates to the UI and things we use day to day. I like also all the minor improvements as there are some very clever features sitting in those minor updates. I will mention 2 nice things,

1. The door open chime (when the car is stopped) and other chimes was sounding normal like in other cars. Then a guy called Joe complained on twitter to Elon Musk that whenever her daughter is asleep in the back and if he picks up or drops someone, the door chime was waking up his daughter. Now a normal OEM doesn’t give a shit. Tesla being Tesla, they added a toggle to reduce the volume of all the non safety alerts. And guess what they named it? Joe mode. This was in 2020.

2. Then few months ago, they added a configurable child lock for rear doors. So you can configure the lock from the display which side u want the rear door to be locked for child safety. This is quite handy as sometimes u want only one rear door to be locked.

Originally Posted by mobike008

I understand the latest update fixes the position of the camera (bottom left corner) to 2 other positions with a simple drag and drop? Did you get this fix as well?

Does you car have the "Summon" feature?

The drag and drop of blind spot camera view is not yet available. It is expected soon though. No, I don’t have summon or any full self driving features.

[carthick1000]

Software update - Version 2022.24.5

Yesterday received this OTA update, which has a most awaited driver profiles feature. With this update it is now possible to synchronise various settings like seat, steering and ORVM adjustments per driver across all the Tesla products linked to the account. Also the recent and favorite destinations are now linked to the driver profile. So if you add a favorite destination to one of your Teslas, then you dont have to repeat the step for other Tesla you have. This is a welcome feature and in the future will pave way for ease of use when renting a Tesla or using a shared car platform.

Originally Posted by carthick1000

The drag and drop of blind spot camera view is not yet available. It is expected soon though.

Originally Posted by mobike008

I understand the latest update fixes the position of the camera (bottom left corner) to 2 other positions with a simple drag and drop? Did you get this fix as well?

As expected, this update also contains the drag and drop feature for the blind spot camera view. Now 3 possible positions to move around. The ones on the left is not very handy as they are hidden by the hand on the steering wheel. So I guess the optimum position is the one on right, but have to experience for few days to see if this is useful. Moreover, I find looking IRVM, ORVM and over the shoulders already good enough. I find myself hardly using this feature.

[mobike008]

Originally Posted by carthick1000

Software update - Version 2022.24.5

Congrats Karthik. I know this update is a big one. I'm following a few YT'ers and saw this update features already.

What it essentially means is that to enjoy this feature, you need to own more than one Tesla.

Are you buying another one?

[carthick1000]

Originally Posted by mobike008

Are you buying another one?

No plans as of now. One car and 2 bicycles are more than enough for our family at the moment.

BTW, to enjoy 'Tesla profiles' feature you need an extra Tesla. However, the 'Driver profiles' feature improvements that came with this update is very much useful even if you have one Tesla with different drivers. This helps to couple recent and favorite destinations to the driver profile. So I don't have to scroll through all the favorites my wife has saved . And vice versa.

[carthick1000]

Software update - Version 2022.24.8

Got this 2 days ago. This update has an improvement to how the routes with traffic information is shown on maps. In older versions, the traffic density/slowdowns are represented alongside the route (orange lines to the side of the route in blue). But now it is shown as part of the route line. Again a minor improvement.



Observation from previous update

After driving about 2 weeks with the previous software update, noticed that the regenerative braking at the highest level is slightly less aggressive. This gives a good balance between slowing down on highways and one pedal driving within city. Earlier the regenerative braking was felt a bit too aggressive esp. when let go of the A-pedal on highway speeds. Now it feels more natural. It feels like the regenerative braking is not the same anymore at city speeds and highway speeds. It took some time getting used to this. This seems to be a powertrain improvement which Tesla did not mention in their previous release notes.

[carthick1000]

Software Updates - 2 Minor and 1 major

In the last 4 weeks there have been 3 software updates. The minor ones were not very interesting, but the major one is quite a useful and insightful update.

2022.28.1 & 2022.28.2

These 2 have been minor updates improving the Theater mode and Portuguese voice navigation. The Theater mode update is quite useful as when you are watching something at a supercharger stop, you can minimize and look at what charging % you are in or any other things you want to check. This was not possible earlier.



(NOTE: 2022.28.2 is just a bug fix on 2022.28.1 and hence had the same release notes)

2022.36.2

As mentioned earlier, this update brings some insights into energy usage, some useful features to the phone app and additional info about supercharger locations.

Energy App

Earlier when planning a trip, using energy app we can see the efficiency graph only. But with this update, the efficiency along with energy usage while drive and park (2 extra tabs) is given with a bit more insight into which components consumed what % of energy. Also how your driving behaviour influences energy based on trip energy projection Vs actual usage chart. This is very handy. Also Tesla gives some tips to improve range.



Based on the display selection % SoC or Range in km, the values are given in % or km. The below 2 shots are after a short trip this evening. As you can see, Tesla didn't like my aggressive accelerations and it is tipping me to be gentle on A-pedal





Cabin overheat protection

Earlier you can configure to turn the cabin overheat protection ON or OFF. This turns on the Airco when the cabin exceeds 40degC when parked. With this update, this temperature is now configurable instead of fixed 40degC.



Tesla phone App

When you plan a destination in the car navigation, now the Tesla phone app shows the ETA. This is quite useful as sometimes when me or my wife is using the car, the other person can check when we will be home without bothering to make a call while driving. After using this the last 2 days, me and my wife find it very useful.



Also you can see what media is being played on the car . Not much useful, but still a nice to have feature.

The phone app also now provides notifications if you forgetfully left the door open. This is a rare occurence, as always the doors lock when the phone bluetooth gets disconnected / out of car's range. But it happens when you leave (with phone) away from the car and someone else is getting out from the other doors (like kids) and forget to close the door.



Supercharger locations - Additional info

On the car navigation, when you select the supercharger navigation, now the historical site occupancy data and elaborate charging fees (ie peak and off peak rates) is also displayed. Earlier there was no site occupancy detail and only a fixed charge price shown. With some modifications to peak and off peak energy pricing, this is now visible in the navigation and the site occupancy helps you to avoid any overcrowded chargers on the way.



And an additional language - Lithuanian Sveiki also supported