Sign in

Between Little Rock and a hard place

Between Little Rock and a hard place
This is not fine

Short version: The car power system failed again, so we will fly home while the car and trailer get transported home. That's really all you need to know. But if you want the full story, read on.

Saturday started great. After a good night sleep in the RV, the drive started easily. We crossed from Alabama through Mississippi and Tennessee into Arkansas. In addition to overnight charging at the campsite, we charged the car at two DC fast chargers along the way. (We took extra stops since, with few chargers along the route, we stopped at most locations rather than taking a chance). Then we stopped to charge the car one more time in a small town in Arkansas. As soon as we plugged in, we got the same errors as a week ago: "Power Limited", "Vehicle may not restart" and "Acceleration and top speed reduced". We decided that we would have better options if we could drive the one more hour to Little Rock. This also gave us a lot of chance to talk through the alternatives.

Once we reached Little Rock, we had our plan. Although there is a Tesla service center in Little Rock, getting the car serviced in Little Rock presented some large problems:

  1. We don't know how long the service may take
  2. We would have to wait for the service or return to Little Rock
  3. We are no longer confident that the car would be reliable afterwards, and service centers would be much more scarce along the route

We decided that our best option would be to hire a car carrier service to transport the car back home, where we aren't stranded if the car fails again. We used one that worked well when our son Ari graduated college, so that was easy. The RV was a bit more complicated. We could either rent a truck to pull the RV or hire an RV transporter. There are not a lot of companies that rent trucks that can tow an RV; the quote we got for a one-way rental was about $2000. Alternately, finding a reliable RV transporter was not easy. Eventually, Greg searched the IRV2 forums and read that people used Shiply to get quotes. Within minutes, we had quotes from 9 different companies. We hired one that had more positive reviews than the rest. Meantime, Amy picked up a rental car that we can use to drive around Little Rock.

This is basically the end of the road for this trip. We had a great time overall. There were some locations we enjoyed enough that we have added them to our travel to-do list.

Things break. Plans need to be changed. That's life. Most importantly, nobody got hurt. And as Greg says, most problems can be fixed with a sufficient application of money.