Life in the green fast lane
How much does it cost to fix a broken door handle in 2026 on a 2013 Model S? I replaced the driver side door handle for $506.24 with mobile service that took one hour. The appointment wait time was three weeks. The original two week appointment was canceled as the service technician was ill that […]
It has been a few months since I wrote the original post about replacing my Model S. During this time my decisions have drastically changed! I subsequently test drove the Polestar 4 and really liked it except for the rear view mirror. Not so much because it is a digital screen but that it is […]
I am starting to explore the next car to replace my 2013 Model S 85kWh battery with 145,000 miles. I could easily buy a car right now, wait till the Model S is a brick, or worst case buy one at the end of 2026 when the current tires will likely be at the end […]
I have suspected over the last few years that my battery has degraded. The overall range seemed to lower enough to make long trips a bit more burdensome due to the increased need to recharge. Finally at 140,945 miles I decided to charge to 100%. The total available range now is 226 miles at just […]
I had a set of tires last me 29,000 miles! Honestly I could have probably squeezed them to 30,000 but this is a record for the Tesla. Three of the four tires were at 4/32 and one at 6/32. I had no noticeable toe wear or other alignment issues and rotated the tires every 6,000 […]
In mid November on a quiet Sunday morning, I spotted my first Cybertruck in the wild. As I live near Tesla’s last headquarters in California, I have seen many early versions of various vehicles. The vehicle has a MFG manufacturing plate and happened to travel in the same direction as I was driving for about […]
The title of this post is technically incorrect – my Model S is actually 10 1/2 years old. I have lost quite a bit of enthusiasm for both posting and Tesla in general so a significant delay occurred before writing this post. For newer readers to this blog, I started my electric car journey with […]
About two months ago I started to have problems charging my car. I would sporadically get a few warnings the most common being “Charge cable not fully secured. Please adjust the connection to improve charging.” The problems occurred a bit sporadically and started to increase over time. I didn’t document every step of the process […]
On a pleasant sunny day just driving up my street my Tesla began to give me a scary warning. I don’t remember the exact words but the warning was to the effect that the car won’t likely restart. A bit alarming but I was glad I was very close to home and parked the car […]
Here in wildfire and drought stricken California, we have experienced somewhat frequent power outages over the last few years. I have considered many times various solutions for backup power and settled on a $3,000 option. The majority of outages are a result of weak trees or weak branches falling on power lines. These are local […]