My Single Worst Experience with my Tesla

For those of you who don’t know, I drive a 2024 Tesla Model 3 affectionately named Teezo that I’ve owned for about five months. Aside from a few bumps in the road, it has been an absolute joy to own. A full account of what it’s like to own the car is on the way so look out for that blog post in the future. But today I want to focus on one particularly harsh “bump in the road” that I encountered hours ago.

What happened?

Earlier today, I spent some time hanging out with my dad because his birthday just passed. The entire time I used Full Self Driving and let my car drive me all over the city. It worked flawlessly. First, we ate some food and then headed to Top Golf. We had a great time and on the way out I decided to use the Smart Summon feature to tell my car to come pick us up at the curb. While this feature has given me some issues in the past, like driving the wrong way up a parking garage, it worked flawlessly this time. Until I got into the car and tried to drive away. It shifted into drive like normal but when I tried to turn the steering wheel it wouldn’t budge. An alert popped up on the screen saying “Steering assist reduced”.

What is Steering Assist?

In most modern cars the front wheels aren’t turned purely from the force applied by the driver on the steering wheel. Turns out wheels are actually pretty heavy and hard to turn. The vast majority of cars use hydraulic steering, where hydraulic cylinders and pumps supply additional force to turn the steering wheel. Higher-end cars (and Teslas) use electronic steering where sensors are installed in the steering shaft to guide an electric motor to apply additional force. In Teslas specifically, the electronic steering system is essential for features like Full Self Driving, Smart Summon, etc to work. Steering Assist is just Tesla’s fancy term for power steering.

Back to the story

For whatever reason, the computer in my car just decided that it didn’t want to use the electric motors to help me turn the steering wheel. I could barely turn the steering wheel, much less drive home. With a lot of prying, I was able to get the car back into a parking space so it wasn’t just sitting at the curb. Not without the steering wheel letting out a few cracks and pops from the amount of force I had to use on it. Then I got straight to Googling. One result said to reboot the car; I then watched a YouTube video on how to reboot the car because that’s not something I’ve done before (you hold the two buttons on the steering wheel simultaneously until the screen turns black). I tried it twice and it didn’t help, I still couldn’t turn the wheel. Eventually, I found a response to a one-year-old forum post where a guy had the same issue. The reply said to literally just “let the car sit for an hour”.

By the way, Teslas come with free roadside assistance. I could have called to have someone come out and diagnose the car and tow it if necessary but I’m too hard-headed for that.

Out of options, I decided we’d just let the car sit for an hour. So me and my dad just walked the Las Vegas Strip and pretended to be tourists for a bit. Eventually, about 40 minutes later, we came back to the car and sure enough, it worked just fine and we drove home.

Conclusion

I’m not going to lie I was silently panicking the entire time lmao. My car is still under warranty so even if there was something seriously wrong it would likely be covered, but it’s still not a nice feeling. It’s also genuinely an insane issue for a car to have. I mean imagine if I had to get somewhere quickly. For it to come without warning and leave just as mysteriously as it arrived is even crazier. And I still have no clue why it did it. I’m going to be very vigilant driving my car for these next few days and I’ll report back if it happens again. I still absolutely love my car.