Hello everyone! I just became a new Tesla owner (woohoo!) This Christmas. I thought I’d share my experience on my first drive with it, and the mistakes I made which led to me being stranded at a casino.

I acquired a 2014 Tesla Model S P85 used from a third party dealership about a week ago. My current residence is in a fairly remote area with limited supercharging/at home charging capability (I haven’t installed any sort of charging station yet), so I had the car shipped to my residency, and requested that the dealer fully charge the vehicle prior to shipping it off. (Mistake 1)

Upon receiving the Tesla a few days ago, I left it outside of my house as temperatures plummeted to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and neglected to check how much charge the vehicle actually had. (Mistake 2)

Fast forward to today: my family and I wanted to drive to civilization and do some post-Christmas shopping now that everything has calmed down. I saw my vehicle had around 90 miles of charge, which was just enough to make it to a supercharger along the route we were driving on. I thought about how cool it would be to take the new Tesla instead of a regular gas vehicle because, well, its cool! Upon nearing the supercharger however, an error appeared on the dashboard saying “supercharging unavailable, please add a payment method to your Tesla account”. I had yet to make a Tesla account, but after some quick googling I saw that others were able to use a one time payment in the car to pay for supercharging so I’d be able to do the same. (Mistake 3)

After plugging in the vehicle at the supercharger, there was nothing. No change in message, prompt to add a card, or ability to charge. This was when panic struck. I realized that I literally couldn’t supercharge the vehicle until I had the Tesla app, AND registered the vehicle with Tesla, which could take days... I called Tesla Roadside assistance but they said they could only help if the vehicle was registered under my Tesla account which I did not have. The vehicle had about 15 miles of range left and there was only a single available J-1772 plug 10 miles from us. I quickly cruised over to it and opened up the frunk to grab the adapter that was included with every Tesla vehicle. (Mistake 4)

It turns out my assumption about there being an adapter was wrong. After calling the dealership, they said that they had (1) forgotten to put the temporary registration papers in the vehicle and (2) forgotten to put in the cables and adapter in the vehicle when they shipped it. At this point I realized I was really dead in the water. No adapter, no cable, no ability to register the vehicle with Tesla, nothing! It was the perfect storm. All of these small mistakes I made compounded into having to call AAA to tow my new model S out to a casino so we could stay the night. Thankfully, the casino happened to have a spare 110V cable we could use to charge the Tesla! Keep in mind at this point the vehicle had been on “0mi” of range for an hour now. I went to the parking lot to move the car near an outlet on the side of the building with their permission and... The car refused to move. After all of this, I have a Tesla stranded in a parking lot with 0 charge and no ability to change it out of park. Quite frankly, I am not sure what to do now other than write a lengthy post about the dumb mistakes I made that got me here.

Its safe to say that my first experience in my new Tesla has been rough. I hope I can persuade some friends to make the arduous journey to rescue us stranded travelers but at this point I don’t know what to do. If anyone has any clue as to what my poor soul could do I’d appreciate it. I guess these last few days have certainly done a good job of teaching others and I exactly what NOT to do with an EV!