Third visit to Tesla to sort out the steering wheel buttons.

Teslas have a Spartan appearance, with most functionality either automatically done, or simplified to just the two button/scroll wheels on the steering. For example, the left button controls music volume, skip and pause. The right button activates AutoPilot (or FSD), scrolls to adjust speed, push left/right to adjust the gap to the car in front.

With great power comes great responsibility. It’s all very well to consolidate all the functionality into two buttons, but then those buttons must work consistently.

On the first steering wheel (that came with the car), the left button was difficult to move left and right to skip songs, and the right button (cruise speed) would sometimes not acknowledge scrolling one kilometre up or down. Tesla (Oakleigh) replaced that steering wheel on my first visit, after reproducing one of the problems.

Those problems were gone, with the second steering wheel. But it had a new problem. Now, pushing the right button (to activate FSD) failed about one in eight times. So, if you’re cruising along and press it for the car to drive itself, you might get a shock when it starts going off the road. This is something I need to work 100% of the time, like brakes. So, second visit,to Tesla, this time in Nunawading. The intermittent nature of the problem makes it difficult to reproduce. Even though I explained that, the service team were unable to make the problem happen. In the end, I took one of them for a drive, and showed them it not working (about one in eight times). They said they’d have to replace it again, but couldn’t that day (which was frustrating).

So, third visit (again to Nunawading). I explained again that it’s intermittent, that I’m not crazy, that I’ve done 100,000km in Teslas that did not have this problem. They couldn’t reproduce it, but replaced the steering wheel and said they won’t do it again. They included instructions in the service notes, assuming I must be doing it wrong. Frustrating on both sides. But everyone was courteous.

The new (third) wheel seems to be working great. It turns out that a third wheel isn’t useless after all 😉.

All under warranty, no cost, except time. The actual service process was pretty seamless via the app, with constant status updates along the way.