Elon Musk may or may not be buying Twitter, but if his version of the social media service is anything like his cars, we may be in trouble. Case in point: Glenn Howerton, of A.P. Bio and long one of the stars of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia recently revealed that he had a doozy of a time with his Tesla. What was the problem? He couldn’t get in.
As caught by Insider, Howerton recently told his horrifying Tesla story on The Always Sunny Podcast. Last weekend, he found himself locked out of his car because the key fob broke. But his Plan B didn’t work either. In case of issues with the key fob, owners can always turn to the app. But Howerton was in the bottom floor of a parking garage, where he was unable to connect to WiFi. (Tesla introduced its keyless entry system in 2017.)
His Plan C — replace the key fob battery — didn’t work either.
Howerton was forced to leave the car in the garage overnight. It took him till the next day to discover he could simply place the fob on a designated area of the car. He was able to get in, but he still wasn’t able to start the car, as his fob was mysteriously not “talking” with his vehicle.
Customer service didn’t help either. “I had a very difficult time getting through to any of these people,” he said. He eventually decided to call Tesla’s sales department, and was soon being tossed between two different departments. But that wasn’t easy either. “We’d get to the end of the call and they’d go: ‘I guess there’s nothing we can do,’” Howerton said. “And I was like: ‘What do you mean there’s nothing you can do?’”
Eventually, he was able to get the car towed. Since then he’s been able to drive it using the app, though that means avoiding areas without WiFi, on the off-chance that his Tesla won’t work.
“I was like, ‘You guys lost a customer today. I’ve been a Tesla customer for 10 years,’” Howerton recalls telling one of the Tesla staffers.
Tesla headaches are so prevalent they’ve become their own genre of news coverage. Who can forget the Finnish gentleman from last year who, faced with an astronomical repair fee, simply blew his car up? Meanwhile, the company’s owner is busy deleting Kanye tweets and threatening the world with a ‘friendly’ robot.
You can watch Howerton’s podcast appearance in the video below.
(Via Insider)