Rocky road, More threes

My three other Tesla purchases have been smooth with each one being even less hassle than the previous. Unfortunately that trend has reversed this time around. After purchasing the car on Tuesday and handling everything I could handle I had been on basically a two day holding pattern waiting for Tesla’s preliminary trade estimate to transform into an official trade offer. Wednesday I basically just sat still but yesterday I started getting concerned since I was scheduled to pick up the car today.

Tesla’s automated purchasing system is pretty impressive, impressive until a need comes to have contact with an actual human being that is. Multiple times during the day I tried calling in, navigating their phone menu to speak to a “Tesla advisor” only to be told none are available currently and I should call later. It was maddening.

To add to the lunacy one of the things the recorded message suggests is to respond to the text you receive when buying a car which is supposed to go straight to the delivery support people. I tried that avenue as well, repeatedly and once again got crickets in return. By the end of the day I was getting very frustrated.

Then suddenly shortly before leaving work I get a text back saying my official trade offer was in. It was $300 less than the estimate, supposedly because of some of the aftermarket stuff I have on the car. I didn’t care, I approved the offer and was eager to move onto the final steps. Instead I hit yet another roadblock.

The loan details were wrong. Instead of including the loan payoff on my current car in there the system was expecting me to pay off the loan balance in cash, for some reason. So once again I was at a hard stop and responded back via text letting them know that the loan terms were now incorrect. I am now once again waiting for a human response, a hard thing to come by in Tesla-world. I am not anticipating this preventing me from picking the car up today but damn, this process has been anything but smooth this time around.

Last night instead of playing volleyball I worked on getting my car all cleaned out and ready to be traded. As I was doing this I thought about my time with this Tesla. I picked it up the week after Cindy moved out of my house in late 2021. We were still on good terms at that time. This car was the one I bought after completing the most crazy transaction of my life with Vroom where I sold my RWD Model Y for roughly 10K more than I paid for it. The car has served me well taking me to Texas and Pennsylvania along with the day in and day out long commute from the Estates.

At the same time the car also was with me during my tumultuous 2023 where I added and removed female drivers to the car multiple times. There were many fun and frustrating moments for sure. Getting a new set of wheels will wipe yet another slate, clean.

I decided to give myself a three day weekend once again. My free PTO hours had again climbed above 200 which is normally my signal that I need to use some up. I’m still feeling a little bit in a funk so hopefully the extra time off helps me get back into some mentally clear waters.