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After seeing so many people doing it the wrong way, I decided to make my own video

Hi all, I had my windscreen replaced some months ago by my local dealer. Everything went well, except... I didn't noticed they had broken (and glued to hide their mistake 🤬) the retainer for park tickets! Since, I was not able to prove this several months later, I've bought a new one to replace it on my own. A good opportunity to make a tutorial. P/N : 3V0 867 333 - 0.72€ First of all, wash your hands before starting to avoid dirty finger prints on the trim panel, especially if you have light grey or 'ivory' interior, To remove the A-pillar trim panel, use a large and flat lever (a wooden spatula should be ok too ). Insert it on the upper part between the door seal and the trim panel, so that you can push approximately the center part of the panel on the rear side to unclip it: Then repeat this at middle height of the trim panel to keep on uncliping the trim panel. In red circles below, the 2 clips once the trim panel is uncliped. Now, you just need to pull the trim panel upward to remove it completely. Once this is done, if you have a sun roof, start uncliping the water drain hose of the sunroof (red circle), to get a better access to the spreader rivet which fixes the park tickets retainer (both in blue rectangle): Then you just need to pull the spreader rivet head (if necessary, use a small fork ;)): Now put the brand new park tickets retainer in place and press the spreader rivet head to fix the retainer. You can now start reinstalling the A-pillar trim panel. Be sure to engage correctly the lower outer corner in the door seal and the lower inner edge in the dashboard: Then get out of the car and stand along the A-pillar and adjust the trim panel height, looking thru the windscreen: Check the lower clip is in front of the slot in the A-pillar. Do the same for the upper clip Then just press firmly the trim panel, starting with the lower clip. If necessary, don't hesitate: A firm hit with your closed fist 😁! Press the trim panel at the upper side to completely clip it. You may then have to make some slight adjustments to get a nice positionning (no bump, no dent under your fingers, when sliding your hand along the trim panel). Done! 😎

Back in March when I got the Tesla I was asked if I would do a post about how it was going. Obviously events have meant I have yet to get much driving done, though we did manage to fit in a trip over to Belfast so I do have somethign on which to report. First up, having driven a Leaf for the last two years I am used to the instant torque and crazy accelaration, though the model 3 takes this to a level where I have yet to have the nerve to fully floor it. It is that powerful, mine is the base version so it only has 245 bhp. Handover was in the first week of lockdown, so it was totally touchless. I had to wait outside at a distance, they brought the car out, and then went back inside before I could approach the car and drive away (having paid the night before). Firstly, you'll have heard of issues with build quality. Right now it seems that Tesla haven't a clue about quality control and it is a lottery whether you get one that's perfect or a nightmare. In fairness most of the issues are related to the bodywork and the cars are driveable. It's not like a mechanical failure on an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. Mine had:- 1) a scratch across the boot 2) a mis aligned bonnet (frunk) 3) the nose of the car hadn't had dirt removed before they painted it so it needed a new front end 4) driver's door misaligned 5) driver's door window wouldn'tclose properly 6) a rear quarter panel mis aligned 7) and it later emerged there was insufficient coolant in the battery cooling system (more of which below) These were all reported at handover - something you do via the app, and then attach photos. Tesla then allocate a repair appointment. The repair process is actually very slick though it was not great to have so much chance to witness it. Having had 10 Skodas starting with an Estelle and finishing with a 2015 Octavia I have never been accustomed to this level of defects. It was also filthy inside, covered in dust and grime from transit. I put this down to the fact that they were trying to minimise exposure to covid. The first appointment available due to COVID was 2 months later. 8 weeks passed and at the end of May they took the car in (touchless again) . They fixed the door and the window but the rest would have to await parts. More weeks, and then months, passed and since the defects were by now just cosmetic I didn't chase them. Last week, at the end of August, the car started whining and buzzing really loudly. It sounded like there were fans running and there was a lot of liquid gurgling sounds. I asked on a Tesla forum and was told off by Tesla fanboys - "all normal", "stop moaning". Basically don't question the sacred Tesla, if there's a fault I was told, the car will tell you via the screen. Except it didn't and there really was a fault. I logged it with a video. Within 12 hours an engineer phoned, they had connected to the car, run tests and established that the coolant level was very low. Seriously impressive. So a service appointment was booked, and I asked about all the other faults. "Faults? We've got no record of any faults?" Turns out they had forgotten totally. The merits of dealing with a new company that is selling cars as fast as it can make them. They then fixed everything within a week. So this week I have had my car fully repaired, everything looks like it should and they have filled the coolant to the level it shoud have had when it left the factory. So what to make of it? Well it is phenomenally efficient. EVs measure economy in miles per kWh (Tesla use Wh per mile but they just have to be different it seems). My leaf was pretty good and in the Summer would get around 4.5 miles per kWh, in the winter 3.8 was normal. So far since March I have been getting around 7 miles per kWh in the tesla. The equivalent in MPG terms is somewhere in excess of 200 MPG - Impressive. I can't comment on the supercharger network as they are few and far between in Scotand and I have been using the standrad Scottish Government chargers instead. Not all of them though because again Tesla haven't complied 100% with standards because quite a few of the older chargers simpoly do not detect that the car is connected. Driving it is different from any other car I have driven due to the large central screen, but you quickly get used to it. It's not though as good in many respects as Android Auto which I had in the leaf and the Octavia. Yiou ahve to pay £120 extra per year for data connectivity to use spotify or Tune in, no other apps are available. I used to use waze and pocket casts but those are not available to me. Elon says there's no need. Spotify is available but it si not as good as normal spotify, your music is in an entirely random order, nothing as boring as being in alphabetical order. You can of course use voice commands exceot they don't work anything like as reliably as google's version.One example, today I said "play Radio Scotland" to get the radio retuned. It played something called Hooked on a Feeling by a Swedish folk band. Don't even try asking it to navigate "command not understood". I aksed it to navigate to Drumnadrochit (ok that's a tough one but google can do it) - it thought I was trying to say something about a drunken doorkit and said it didn't understand. The excuse given to justify the 15 inch screen instead of buttons is that yuou'r esupposed to use voice commands, but in my experience they work only around 20% of the time. I can turn the heating up and down but pretty much nothing else works. ANother issue is that the sat nav is, well, pretty random. Not all the time but a heck of a lot of it. I asked it for a route from my house to my parents, around 12 miles. It suggested a 70 mile detour to the other side of Scotland. Like I say, random. When we went to Northern Ireland, the obviosu route is via the M77 and A77 - not for Tesla, It suggested a variety of B roads. Often re planning the route produces a more sensibke route but the point is if it is doing this on routes I do know how can I trust it when I am in strange territory? Answer is I can't. So i have gone back to mounting my phone in a cradle and using that as my sat nav. speaking of phones, like many people I have 2, one for work and a personal phone. In Skoda and Nissan I could connect both to bluetooth at the same time. WHichever one rang it was OK I could answer hands free. In the tech marvel that is the Tesla?? Sorry, only one connection at a time. Baffling. Speaking of Northern Ireland, that was somethign of a nightmare. We have done the trip in a leaf without issue, but the leaf uses the much older chademo charge port, rather then the eurpen standard CCS which is in the tesla. For unknown reasons Northern Ireland has only 14 rapid chargers, that's bad, but only half of them have CCS, the other half afre CCS and chademo. To make matters worse many of them are in shop car parks and these are locked shut when the shops close. In a SUnday you can only charge from 1pm to 5pm. More of a criticism of NI than Tesla but coming from Scotland where we have a very pro EV governmen and charging hubs springing up around the country it was a shock to the system. So how would I sum it up? It is an amazing car, probably the most advanced car I have ever owned, and yet lacking in every day tech like a sat nav that works or smart phone integration. Telsa want you to use their system and pay £120 per year extra for it. It is also badly let down by the abysmal quality control. Quite how they can send cars out of the factory with dirt underneath the paintwor is beyond me. Taking 5 months to fix it? Well it was cosmetic so didn't stop me using the car but it is hardly ideal. I had been due to buy a VW ID3 but they messed me around no end and couldn't guarantee I would get a car so I jumped ship. Now that the ID3 is arriving I am feelign a touch of regret. The model 3 is bigger than I really need and the VW would probably be a better fit with my needs. And yet 0-60 in 5 seconds is fun when you have a BMW M3 trying to ride your back bumper. Bottom line though is that with the SKoda Enyaq coming in December and more models likely in 2021 they are going to face a lot more competition. Even now cars like the e niro have a 7 year warranty and on a 50 kW charger it wil actually charge faster than the Tesla (don't tell the fanboys but this is true I have seen it with my own eyes).. Actually that last part may change on my car now that Tesla have actually filled it with the collant fluid it should have had from day 1, as I understand it that is used to both warm and cool the battery to keep it at the optimum charnign temperature. SO it's a mixed bag, it is impressive, and frustrating. I'm in a £40k+ car where I have to use my phone to navigate and a bluetooth headset to ensure I can answer both phones. I had to wait 5 months to get the car in a state which it would have been had there been a proper PDI carried out. But the way you can ghet a diagnosis remotely from a Tesla engineer is very impressive. But competition is growing and Tesla won't have it all their own way for long. Polestar 2 is starting to arrive in numbers and VW will be delivering at scale by the end of 2020. Would I buy another one? On balance, probably not. PS I forgot to add, not only does Spotify cost you an extra £120 a year, the car comes with no spare wheel, no tyre repair kit and you're advised to take out separate recovery as Tesla recovery will only recover you within 50 miles of a Tesla service centre (there's none on Norhtern Ireland and only one in Scotland (ie 33% of the UK land mass)