By David Waterworth, from conversations with Majella Waterworth
I live in an unusual household. I don’t have a cell phone (shock! gasping for breath!). My wonderful wife has a cellphone, and since we are rarely apart, we think that will be enough. However, the law of unintended consequences follows.
When we switched from dinosaurs to a Tesla 3 SR+ 3 years ago, Majella discovered her hidden superpower: the Tesla app.
Control your Tesla from the app.
Majella is a gemstone hobbyist. They faceted beautiful gemstones on the nearby lapidary club. Sometimes I’m at home writing and I have the car. Recently I didn’t pick up the house phone (yes we still have a landline) so she caught my attention by ringing the Tesla horn 3 times. Very handy.
She also likes to have fun with the app, like the time she scared the life out of an apprentice mechanic. I was back at my old service center to have new tires fitted. After paying the bill, I was talking to the young mechanic about Tess when the horn went off, the windows opened and closed and the lights flashed. A ghost car maybe? I had some explaining to do. She also plays with the heated seats and air conditioning when I’m out with friends and she’s bored at home.
The app has some serious uses. We can check the charge status, arrange maintenance, turn on the air conditioning while we’re shopping, and Majella can check where I am when I’m on the road (I’m on a short leash). If we were still running our consultancy business, we could plan our departures.
Charging Statistics
This morning, after reading a disturbing article in Choice magazine, Majella showed me the Charge Stats. This tells me that we usually charge at home (unless we are traveling). It gives us the fuel savings, showing that we saved over $227 last month. We would have saved even more if we were driving instead of sitting at home with Covid-19!
Fuel savings in a slow month
This shows that we save much more on fuel then Choice seems to think. It would be good if they could collect real-world data from drivers to give their advice. We don’t spend $700 a year on electricity to fuel our Tesla.
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