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Newbie questions

2K views 13 replies 9 participants last post by  h8ten 
#1 ·
Given it is March and I saw a vast number of M3s waiting to be delivered when I collected mine last week, I'm guessing there are now a lot of new Tesla owners with questions great and small. Rather than start a thread for each one, I thought I would post a list here and ask more experienced forum members for any answers they can contribute. Feel free to extend the list, and thanks in advance for any help!

Tesla questions so far:
  1. The car will not connect to wifi from 4 metres away, even though my iPhone links easily from the same position. Is it possible there is a wifi fault?
  2. Show battery % and range simultaneously - is it possible?
  3. Pre-heating makes a very, very noisy racket - is this normal?
  4. Air temp turns cold after about 10 minutes of driving. Can be really cold if it is cold outside, much colder than the set value. Could there be a problem with the heat exchanger?
  5. Adding 2nd driver - do they need a separate Tesla account? Will their phone identify their own profile to the car?
  6. Is it possible to automatically unlock the charge port when unlocking the car (so charging cable can be removed before driving away) rather than fiddle with the phone app to do it?
  7. Tesla “T” has disappeared from the top of the screen with the update. Not mentioned in the release notes. Where has the manual gone, for example?
  8. I accidentally left my phone in the car the other day and only remembered as I was walking away, because the car did not automatically lock. If the phone is left in the car, does it mean anyone can drive it away or does the car lock after being empty for a time?
  9. Is it possible to turn off and on the sat nav voice as needed? I have tried using the button on the steering wheel, but that turns on the radio instead. When I turn off the radio sound, the sat nav sound comes back
  10. Is it possible to change font size on screen. I can't be putting on my reading glasses every time I want to check something, and it is just a tiny bit too small to read easily
  11. Some mud flaps were provided in the boot, along with the cables and the floor mats. What am I meant to do with them? I should have thought they would be installed as part of pre-delivery (and the floor mats!)
 
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#2 · (Edited)
1. Wifi connection can be quite ropey, IDK where the antenna is. Try a range extender?
2. No
3. Yes
4. Might be a dodgy heat exchanger, contact the SC with exact times when it happens and they can check the car's logs. Is yours the MiC model? If so, it should have the new heat exchanger.
5. IDK
6. No but there are some good third-party Android apps that allow you to create shortcuts to do things like this. It's usually quicker to unlock the charge port from the car's screen.
7. The T was removed during a recent update. The manual can be found in the menu on the left hand side of the screen.
8. I think so. Make sure you enable "PIN to drive" otherwise anyone who steals your phone can also steal your car.
9. IDK
10. IDK
11. They are longer mudflaps than the factory fitted ones and give more protection. But they look quite chunky. You are expected to fit them yourself if you want to use them. It all seems a bit strange.
 
#3 ·
1. As above. The WiFi antenna is in one of the door mirrors, so can be blocked by the body of the car in some circumsances. However, there have been a few cases where the antenna in the mirror hasn't been connected at the factory - a fairly easy ranger fix, I believe.

5. A second driver can use your account just fine. The car will still save the profile from that driver separately. The only slight snag is that the car can prefer to load the passenger profile rather than the driver profile. Lots of speculation as to why this is, but the only reliable work around I found was to always make sure that, if my wife was the passenger, she had her phone turned off until we were both in the car. Failure to do this would almost always cause the car to unlock and set her profile as the driver (she's a lot shorter than me, so the give away was the seat trying to crush me against the steering wheel).

9. Yes, just use the left scroll wheel to wind the sat nav voice down so it's inaudible, when the sat nav voice is speaking. It's a bit fiddly, as the scroll wheel volume control works for both nav and infotainment, and can only adjust the nav volume when the nav voice is speaking. I think there's also a mute setting in the nav settings as well, although I never used it.

10. No. The fonts were made smaller and, for me, very difficult to see when driving (I wear varifocals). The annoyance at not being able to quickly read things on the screen at a glance was one of the reasons I got rid of my Tesla yesterday . . .

11. The longer mud flaps won't survive their first encounter with a speed hump, or bit of uneven road, before being ripped off. Been commented on a few times since Tesla handed the kits out free to all existing owners, and started fitting them to new cars.
 
#5 ·
5. A second driver can use your account just fine. The car will still save the profile from that driver separately. The only slight snag is that the car can prefer to load the passenger profile rather than the driver profile. Lots of speculation as to why this is, but the only reliable work around I found was to always make sure that, if my wife was the passenger, she had her phone turned off until we were both in the car. Failure to do this would almost always cause the car to unlock and set her profile as the driver (she's a lot shorter than me, so the give away was the seat trying to crush me against the steering wheel).
There is an option in the menus to prefer one phone over another when both are detected in the car, at least there is on mine. Look on the KEYS menu.
 
#4 ·
1. If it's not seeing it at all then check if your wifi is on channel 12 or above. As a US-licensed bit of kit, the model 3 can not use the higher 2.4GHz channels. 11 or below.

8. Use PIN to Drive. There is no earthly reason not to, and I wish other cars had it.
 
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