Ellen received an email from Caitlin @ Tesla Motors this morning. An option is being added to the wood trim on interior. Earlier the wood grain went vertically. Tesla is optionally installing the interion wood in a horizontal wood grain. We went with the horizontal. It looks like it will emphasize the width of the dashboard and of the automobile.
I do not see this as a big difference, but was surprised that Tesla emailed to give us the option.
Also today, I dropped a pair of old tires off at Custom Alignment in Mountain View for recycling. Some time ago I had wanted to replace my front “extreme contact” tires on my Subaru WRX and keep the rears, but the tires were not available. I replaced all 4 tires with michelines and kept the continentals for later use. Well the continentals were discontinued. Sometime in the past four or five years I discovered that old tires are unsafe, the rubber disintegrates over time and can suddenly delaminate. Today I took the old tires to Custom Alignment to be recycled. These guys are great and do exceptional alignment work. In passing I asked if they had ever seen a Tesla in for tire replacement. Tesla had done all tire work in their service centers (SC), but recently changed their policy.
The custom alignment guy (Dave was not there) said they had replaced rear tires on an S with just 6000 miles on it and there was a problem with the Tesla S rear alignment that could have to do with raising the car’s height programmatically via satellite (cell phone/wi-fi actually). This is plausable as the S automatically lowered at highway speed for better mileage, but with the recent colision and fire issue they could actually be raising the car at speed). I “googled” Tesla S rear tire wear and there is a thread on Tesla’s website about excessive tire wear on the 21″ high performance tires. It does not appear to have to do with raising/lowering the car (at least not yet). It looks like read camber on some of the S models from the factory is set too negative. Some people stated that they are seeing the tire cord on the inside 20% of the tire with little wear on the outside. This is an issue, for sure.
I am getting the 19″ wheels/tires, but I’ll be looking for tire wear in the first 10-20K miles.
Here’s an article about the Tesla S suspension, geekie to be sure. It shows that serious thought went into the design of the suspension system for the sedan. This is not just a car with a bolt-on electric drive train.
Ron