Someone Else's Problem: Plug Me In, Daddy - Another Tesla Model 3 Performance

Ok, at that price point I definitely need to look into those. Awesome!
 
The daft thing is it's the same underwriter as before but a different broker.

OT, but we had a similar kind of problem with policies on two of our buses. Identical in every way, down to rolling off the line together. Bought from the same company, registered to the same address, same usage, registration and insurance due on the same day.

$3000 difference between the insurance premiums.

Surely it was a mistake, so we rang to ask. Nope.
"That's what it is for each, if you don't like it, too bad. Go elsewhere."
"But WHY is it so different, can you explain the reasoning there.."
"No, we don't have to tell you anything. It just is. :tease:"

Even going to the insurance ombudsman got us nowhere. They fobbed us off too.
 
Insurance is finally sorted, the premium was decreased when they refunded me for unused mileage so the overall cancellation refund was reduced, but I did get more than if I had cancelled without bothering. I now have a new policy for 12 months that is better than before for less than I was refunded for 9 months.

I'm now looking ahead to winter wheels and tyres, this is the combo I have my eyes on:

1594593758852.png


18" tyres would be cheaper but finding 18" wheels that fit over the brakes is a pain in the arse. TSportline wheels would fit but they're 1.5 times the price before shipping to this country. Wheel Clinic in the Netherlands have confirmed that the B32 19" wheels will fit a Performance model 3.

1594594176968.png


In other news the ceramic coating is doing its job, I saw bird dollops on there early last week but after driving in the rain we had they're mostly gone.
 
Last edited:
Alloys for winter? butwhy.pdf
 
Alloys for winter? butwhy.pdf

If you can find steel wheels that fit the Model 3 I would be more than happy to rock those. :p

Maybe I should have a custom set made from 19" Land Rover steelies...
 
Brock B32s were the exact 19" I was looking at for my winter wheels. Even ordered them, too, but TÜV happened, so I cancelled and went with the "swap 20" tires on stock rims" option. Great choice imho, and they also exist in gunmetal gray.
 
I'm glad we don't have to deal with the TUV or something quite as strict (yet), the bobtail would be very illegal in Germany. This place only sells the black or silver, otherwise they're tricky to get hold of.
 
Last edited:
Time for an update on what's occurring. Not much as I haven't been far, but a couple of things have happened. A week after having the Alloy Gators fitted I went to drive the car only to find that one of the tyres was flat, the air had leaked out of the bead. I had that swapped for free, it held air fine and got me carrying a pressure gauge and small compressor with me. This turned out to be useful when...

IMG_5980_S1920.jpg

I did this entering a supercharger in a strange industrial estate. I called the nearest fitter and he said removing was the best option or it may whip around. Fortunately I was able to deflate the tyre while sitting at the charger, pull it out and re-inflate. Annoyingly it was the same protector that had been replaced the week before but it did its job.

I also attempted a foam only contactless wash, hoping the ceramic coating would allow everything to slide off. It didn't really.

IMG_5938_S1920_2.jpg


Finally I made a couple of attempts to fit it in our garage, a small one that is packed with junk. Junk that left a space big enough for the Smart but nowhere near enough for Nebs. Last Friday my dad and I hauled a load of stuff out, then put everything else in or on the old shed that's inside. This was mainly to test Summon clearance and to prove that the car will be able to drive itself in far enough to clear the door. Seems like it might work.

IMG_6068_P_2_S1920.jpg


Really needs a wash now but I need to order a brand new wash mitt and I keep putting it off...
 
Last edited:
What am i looking at with the tire? Is that some sort of trim strip to protect the edges of the wheels?
 
What am i looking at with the tire? Is that some sort of trim strip to protect the edges of the wheels?

There are better pictures of them on the previous page but yes, it's just a strip of plastic that is fitted into the bead (with metal clips) to protect the wheels. This wheel and tyre combination is very vulnerable to damage. They're much more obvious in bright colours.

1597705617933.png
 
I suppose it's time to update this as it's been a couple of months. Work decided that they wanted me back so I've been driving this to the office once a week and it now has a whopping 1901 miles on the clock. I'll come back to my commute later

So what has happened in that time? Well, not a lot really. I finished the shelves for the garage and found they if we empty it completely the car does fit.

If you drive forward you can't close the door due to the way it pivots, it hits the spoiler and would hit the boot lid even if that wasn't there. If summon could go a little closer it would be fine but this is as close as it will get to the wall.

IMG_6251_2_S1920.jpg


If you remove a shelf and reverse in you can fit. Long car is long. Had a quote to install power in the garage, frankly it's too much to be worth it.

IMG_6254_2_S1920.jpg


I went on a bit of a family holiday where I used up some more of my free supercharger miles, sadly mising out on free Ionity charging though on the route.

IMG_6302_P_S1920.jpg


Don't knock static caravans, this was a very nice one and this was the view in the other direction (the view we had from the front balcony of the caravan)

IMG_6305_P_S1920.jpg


When I got back I gave it a proper wash with a new Meguiar's mitt and an Auto Glym foam gun, replacing the Karcher one. It's much better, the foam never went on thickly enough before but it's perfect now. First coat is left to soak and then rinsed, followed by a second coat for washing with the mitt. I only need one bucket for rinsing the mitt as the foam sticks around long enough.

IMG_6404_S1920.jpg


I got a soft brush for the wheel faces and have since bought an EZ Detail brushes for the wheel barrels. I still don't have a filter for rinse water and the water in this area is hard so I chased as much water away as I could with my cordless Makita blower (ceramic coating helped a lot here) and then mopped up the rest with drying towels. It shone up very well indeed.

IMG_6406_2_S1920.jpg


I got my new winter wheels tyres delivered, the wheels are 18" Brock B32s in matt black.

IMG_6543_S1920.jpg


The tyres are in fact all seasons because we generally don't have much snow or ice in this country and have mostly wet weather with temps just above freezing. These Goodyear 4Seasons Gen3s should be much better than the Pilot Sports for wet handling/braking in the cold, plus they will be a bit more comfortable and have built in rim protectors.

IMG_6549_S1920.jpg


I was hoping to have these fitted in the next couple of weeks but we're going back into lockdown so unless I can have it done early in the week it'll have to wait until December.

Anyway now I've driven to and from work a good few times I've been able to test Autopilot on my commute. It works very well for the first part on wide roads, a good thing because that's the most boring part and where traffic usually get slowed down. There's a short section of dual carriageway that is detected as a single road by the car so that needs some work and as I get into the city it incorrectly has some areas as 20mph speed limits, I've reported it a couple of times so hopefully they will update it at some point.

As you can see by this photo the mutli-storey car park I use near the office is rammed, this was taken the first time I went in but the most I've seen on this floor is three cars. I park here because I can see the car from my office window.

IMG_6164_S1920.jpg
 
Last edited:
IMG_6302_P_S1920.jpg


Don't knock static caravans, this was a very nice one and this was the view in the other direction (the view we had from the front balcony of the caravan)

Kelly said you're now officially christened a trailer park hoe... :D

(we've stayed in a similar place in France last year..)
 
Kelly said you're now officially christened a trailer park hoe... :D

(we've stayed in a similar place in France last year..)
I've been a trailer park hoe since birth, went to this place for family holidays every year growing up, it's like a second home! It's only recently that TV shows decided that these were 'skint' holidays for poor people.
 
New boots fitted today. They feel great, ride is a little bit smoother as you would expect. Not had the chance to try any fast road handling but I don't want to wear them out straight away. We're getting freezing temperatures at night now so I think the timing was right, also wanted them on before the new lockdown that starts tomorrow...

IMG_6628_2_S1920.jpg

IMG_6630_S1920.jpg
 
Last edited:
The wheels look good. Damn the TÜV for preventing me from getting the same ones -.-

How much clearance is there around the front brakes?
I'll have to double check, I can get my fingers in between the caliper and wheel so that would be around 20mm but there may be tighter areas.
 
Winter is hopefully over and I'll be going back to the summers, but I couldn't bear to put dirty wheels away and put clean wheels on a dirty car, so I gave Nebs a bath. Ceramic coating is still working well.

IMG_0667_S1920.jpg


Neither of my trolley jacks actually fit under the car with the jacking pads I have so I'll use one of the waffle boards from Bob to bump the front end up by 40mm and give me clearance.
 
Last edited:
After all this lockdown I was itching to get out and drive Nebs again. I actually did that in April and recorded some crappy video but the point is I wanted to do a proper roadtrip style drive. Yesterday me and a mate did a 451 mile, 12+ hour trip up to, around and back from Yorkshire.

IMG_0938_P_2_S1920_2.jpg


This was the route we intended to drive after recharging at the Wetherby services:



Well, best-laid plans and all that. Wetherby has some chargers and was supposed to allow a charge to 80% @50kW before doing the loop and finishing at the Scotch Corner supercharger. Maybe doing this on a national holiday was a bad idea as the services were very busy. Contrary to my understanding, only one of the Ecotricity chargers was 50kW and it was in use. The other two were 12kW AC and only one worked, while people seemed to have as many issues with the CHAdeMO connectors on Nissans. I did wish there was a CHAdeMO adapter for the Model 3 though at this point.

The shitty app refused to accept my credit card and would only work with my debit card too, so I'll be avoiding Ecotricity whenever possible. After getting food and having a little extra charge we headed straight to the supercharger Scotch Corner, knowing that we would at least get a decent charge there and could just do the loop in reverse. I was 4th in line for a charger and eventually got on for a rather slow charge. Otherwise it was fine.

It turns out that backwards is actually the best way to do this loop as the big A roads we would've driven first are a nice way to relax after the extremely tight roads further north, these had lots of passing places but big stone walls that stopped you seeing what was coming. On a quiet day they probably would've been abandoned but people were everywhere camping or walking on the roads, some tiny villages in the middle of nowhere were just full of people. It was still worth it though because there were some amazing views and some roads sketchy enough to give Italy a run for its money. There were also sheep, some dodgy looking people hanging around the sheep and insane cyclists riding up the 20% gradients.

We headed back up the A1 to Scotch Corner again after completing the loop to charge as the next supercharger going south was too far to reach (very few on the A1, sadly). With fewer people there I was charged up quickly and then stopped for a splash and dash at Grantham, where I got a tasty 120kW.



The 3 hours total from Scotch Corner to home dragged a bit as we had been on the road so long but it was a smooth drive. I don't know if I'd recommend the route, it was interesting but some of those roads were really narrow, I didn't feel like I was going to damage the Model 3 at any point but the walls were very close! The Smart would've felt more at home but the clutch would've been an issue on the steep hills.

I set up my old dashcam on a tripod in the back, the footage is OK but blows out easily with the sun, I'll cut it together to show some interesting bits. The car overwrote all the good Teslacam footage, I thought that saving footage at the end of a trip saved everything up to that point but it doesn't. Even after a year I'm still learning!

Stats for anyone interested:

 
Last edited:
Finally got around to editing some clips together from the trip. As I mentioned above, a lot of the Teslacam footage was lost but this was a particularly good part that did exist and I have made a 2-part, hour long timelapse of the entire trip that I will release separately.


I was looking at the ROADIE last week as it automatically keeps all videos. They don't ship to the UK but allow you to download the software and buy a licence to use on your own Raspberry Pi Zero W, so I got the bits (the 256GB High Endurance MicroSD card was on sale at the time) and put it together.

It works great but the antenna isn't so good, while it can connect to my house Wi-Fi and I can view the contents I can't copy any videos to my PC or phone. A proper antenna can be added but requires some fiddly soldering, I have the kit to do it but not sure I want to risk damaging the Pi.
 
Minor updates, I washed it again last week for the first time in a couple of months, I'm slowly getting my routine right so I don't miss bits. I assembled my ROADIE the other week and should now archive everything. I had a look at what it had recorded so far and while a couple of outward trips were recorded in their entirety, the return journey clips only began when I was at least half way back. I'm not sure if the thing is waking up properly. The WiFi signal isn't strong enough to copy videos over so I'm considering getting another Pi Zero W with an external antenna. I'd have to buy another licence too though...

I've also finally edited the video from my Yorkshire trip into two sections, significantly sped up as the trip was 4 hours. You're welcome to enjoy them or not. ?

 
Top