Frozen Falcon Wing Doors

There's nothing like walking-up to your car with two infant carriers and a three year old, in moderate snowfall, and finding you can't get them into the car. You press the button on the keyfob, you press the button on the door; you pop into the driver seat and use the central console. Hold to override doesn't do anything. The falcon wing doors simply won't open.

Uh-oh.

This is where you start thinking about the three year old and two six-month olds and the -8°C temperature outside the car. First call was to my wife– who fortunately just got home–to come get everyone; second course of action was to get my daughter into the passenger seat; third was to verify the trunk opened, drop a rear seat, and use that and the trunk space to fit the two infants. Fortunately, that worked, and everyone was warm while I called Tesla support.

The trunk worked, so I could get the infants out of the cold.

Tesla support involved a couple pauses on hold, and took just under nineteen minutes, with a couple minute break towards the end to get everyone out of my car and into my wife's Volvo XC70 when she arrived. Standard procedures, of restarting the car didn't help. He had me brush-off the sensors (little circular things past the falcon wing doors, along the center of the body), although with the rate of snow falling and pooling water from melting snow, this seemed a fool's errand. Eventually, the manual open button did prove to work, albeit very slowly (it looked as if the car were fighting an unseen weight to open, although this was presumably it being extra careful because it thought there was really really really an obstacle in the way it was about to hit). Accessing the inside controls (on the pillar between rows) from the front is a bit of a contortion, but may be helpful if you find yourself in a similar situation–don't forget to disable (and then re-enable) the child-locks, though.

The always reliable Volvo XC70 to the rescue! Roadside assistance was still trying to find things to try as we loaded the kids into the Volvo

Frustratingly, even though rebooting the car didn't fix the problem, it resulted in the media interface failing to load–not slacker, but the entire interface—meaning that I couldn't even access media over Bluetooth. When I got home, the door sensors seemed to have adjusted; presumably the media controls will be available in the morning as well.

Media player just showed a spinner… …while the dash just showed a placeholder At least the doors worked after driving 15 minutes.