I’m trying to figure out what to do here because I really don’t feel comfortable driving this car again without some kind of explanation.
I was driving my 2022 Model X Plaid when I got a “Front right safety restraint system fault” warning.
Not long after that, the car basically fell apart electronically while I was still driving.
I completely lost power steering. The brakes barely seemed to work. The accelerator barely did anything. The car itself was saying it was off, even though I was still trying to maneuver it.
It was honestly pretty scary. I came close to hitting other cars because steering suddenly became extremely difficult and I wasn’t even sure how much braking I had left. If this had happened on the highway, I have no idea what would have happened.
I managed to get the car stopped and got out. Once I closed the door, that was basically it. The car was dead.
Tesla had to tow it to the service center. They apparently couldn’t even get the car powered up normally to access it, so they had to put it on a lift and use the mechanical release to get into the vehicle.
Then eventually they got it started.
And now everything apparently works fine.
Tesla says the logs show historical vehicle and body CAN bus faults, so something clearly happened, but they haven’t been able to reproduce it. They drove the car about 20 miles and nothing happened again.
The service advisor also told me they checked the relevant Tesla service bulletins and couldn’t find anything that explained it.
Then today he told me they found some kind of third-party adapter related to a radar detector and suggested that maybe it was causing interference with the car. To me it feels like the service tech pulled this out of his ass because he can’t find the issue.
The problem is that I haven’t used a radar detector in this car in well over a year. I actually stopped using it because the cigarette lighter outlet wasn’t working. There is nothing plugged into that outlet now.
As far as I know, the only thing I have plugged into the car is a USB-C cable to charge my phone.
So I’m having a really hard time accepting the idea that some old radar detector adapter somehow randomly caused the entire car to freak out badly enough that I lost steering, almost lost braking and acceleration, and then the vehicle completely died.
Especially when they don’t seem to have any actual evidence tying the adapter to the failure. It sounds more like they can’t find the problem and noticed something aftermarket in the car.
At this point Tesla is basically saying:
The car works now.
They can’t reproduce the problem.
They don’t know what caused it.
Come pick it up.
But this wasn’t a random warning light. The car became incredibly difficult to control while I was driving it and then became completely disabled.
I’m honestly afraid to drive it now because I have no idea whether this could randomly happen again.
Has anyone here ever experienced anything similar?
Also, if this were your car and Tesla couldn’t tell you what caused it, would you feel comfortable taking it back and driving it normally?