I’ve had my car a little over a week and the car was pretty flawless when I got it. I had been nervous about the delivery and what I may find based on all the chatter on the forums. The thing to remember about all that chatter is that a lot of it is dated back to early deliveries and Tesla has improved their process as well as the pre-delivery inspections.

Seat Heater Bug

While I didn’t find anything wrong with the car before taking delivery, later in the dy I found an odd problem: 4 of the 5 seat heaters didn’t work. Both front seats have heaters in all versions of the Model S, but when you add the sub-zero package the three rear seat positions also have seat heaters. All seat heater controls are on the 17″ screen. While the screen and lights worked fine to indicate it was heating the seats, oddly only the front passenger seat would heat.

I called Tesla service and reported the problem and let them know it wasn’t urgent. They booked me 3 weeks out for service. I had some trouble with the time they wanted me to drop it off given the distance and they immediately offered a valet service to drop off a loaner (just in case mine didn’t get done in the same day) and pick up my car at my office. Very cool!

Web Browser Bug

Later in the day I was playing with the web browser and I noticed some of the web sites I was trying to go to wouldn’t load. Others that I had visited before were loading fine. It seemed like the ones that loaded were cached (saved so it didn’t have to go back to the internet to load the same page) and the ones that didn’t it needed to get a current copy. The 3G connection in the car was working (slacker was playing) but the browser was hung up. After thinking about it for a while I decided to try a system reboot to see if I could get it unstuck (Tesla service never suggested this).

While brave, rebooting my brand new Model S while driving wasn’t something I was up for despite reports that it’s perfectly safe, so I parked and Googled the reboot process.

Reboot Process

There are two types of reboots:

1. Hold down both top buttons on steering wheel for 10 seconds – this  reboots the driver’s display.
2. Press in on scroll wheels for 10 seconds – this reboots the “main”/17” display.

I tried #1 and it didn’t seem to do anything at all. Then I tried reboot #2 and the main screen rebooted as expected. I then tried #2 again holding for longer and both appeared to reboot. In retrospect the odd behavior of the reboot is due to a lag in the actual reboot. I found the most reliable method for rebooting the driver screen is to press and hold for 20-25 seconds then let go and wait for 10 seconds for a response — what had seemed like both rebooting was just a delayed reboot from the first attempt and the normal reboot from the 3rd attempt. For what its worth the logo on system power on or reboots is pretty cool.

After the reboot(s), the web browser was working great and in a week since then I haven’t had it lock up on me.

After I had the browser issues sorted out I figured i’d try the seat heaters again just in case and, surprise, they all now worked. 

It had me a bit concerned that one day into ownership I already had to reboot to get things to work, but its now been a week and everything has remained working.

I do wonder about all those .NET job positions they have posted at Tesla. They need to think more Unix than Windows — LONG times without reboots please!

This article was first published on Teslarati.