Lightning hits my Tesla

2015-08-10 20

I was at the supercharger as well as another owner. I heard the crash, and just a second or two after about 9 errors popped up on the dashboard. Some of them were low charge warnings, saying it would disable some functions. Others were on how the car needs to be serviced. I was also getting that the car can't be charged, and that the 12v battery is low. After the storm died down I got out of the car. The charging port wasn't lit up, and when I tried to remove the cable it wouldn't come out. I still had most of the functions in the car, including the touchscreen. The other car that was charging just a couple stalls down from me was completely fine and drove away, though I didn't get to talk to that owner afterwards.


So, I call Tesla which took forever because they were getting a ton of calls. They had to send a tow truck to jump the 12v battery so they could disconnect the charger and tow the car. About this time the 12v battery got too low and the touchscreen shut off. When the tow truck got there, he connected his battery pack to try to charge up the 12v battery. The touchscreen still wouldn't come on at this point, so he had to recharge his pack and do it again. Once the touchscreen finally came on the car still wouldn't disconnect from the supercharger. Since it couldn't disconnect, the car couldn't be towed. I also had opened the sunroof to vent earlier because it was getting hot in the car. We tried everything we could to try to get the sunroof closed, but it wasn't responding. So I had to leave the car at the supercharger. On Monday, they manually disconnected the car and towed it to the service center. They pulled the logs from the car and sent it to engineering, and we're currently waiting for them to analyze them.


Tesla customer service was amazing. They were very responsive, and offered to rent me a car from enterprise so I could come home. I said I would rather stay with the car for a couple days to see how it all played out. I am from Atlanta and I