Is Tesla Seriously Going to Not Include Physical Keys with Cars? – CleanTechnica

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I find this news, if true, ridiculous. In fact, I’m going to go eat a mini ice cream cone to calm down and collect my thoughts before writing more.

So, let’s start with the simple facts:

• The way you automagically unlock a Tesla car and turn it on is via your phone. Once you have the Tesla app on your phone and have it connected to your car, you don’t have to do anything when you walk up to the car in order to be able to get into it and drive away. The car also automagically locks itself when you walk away.
• Tesla also provides owners with a physical key as a backup. It basically looks like a credit card. When you need to get into your locked Tesla with it, there’s a place in the pillar between the front seat and back seat where you tap the card and the car unlocks. If you need to drive away with the physical key, you just stick it in a little slot under the cupholders and you can drive away.
• Changes to text in Tesla’s owner’s manual imply that Tesla is no longer guaranteed to provide buyers with these physical backup keys, at least for the new base models.

If this last point is true and Tesla is going to stop including physical keys with new cars, I think this is ridiculous for a few reasons:

• Sometimes, your phone key just mysteriously doesn’t work. The car won’t recognize it and unlock the doors. Even if I unlock the doors in another way at that time, I still have to put the key card in its slot under the cupholder in order to fully wake up the car and get it to drive.
• You can at times have a dead phone. When that happens, you’re just out of luck getting into the car and driving until your phone has been recharged somehow?
• Edit/addendum: Also, these key cards are used for valet services! You’re not going to give a valet your phone to drive the car. (Thanks to readers for pointing this out.)
• Edit/addendum: Also, what if you lose your phone? Or it gets broken?
• It costs Tesla nearly nothing to produce these key cards and include them with a new car. Why not just keep including them?

The idea of putting your buyer into a super weird and challenging situation because you skimped on key cards is a wild one in my opinion. Just include the key cards, Tesla! We’ll see what happens, but here’s more, from Not A Tesla App, on why we think Tesla is on the verge of not including these key cards free of charge with a new car:

“Specific text that guarantees the inclusion of two key cards with every new vehicle has been removed from the manuals for both the Model 3 and Model Y following a recent update. The owner’s manual has removed various phrases that hint at key cards no longer being standard issue. In the Key Card section of the manual, Tesla has removed this phrase: ‘Tesla provides you with two Model 3/Y key cards, designed to fit in your wallet.’”

I would like to say “Tesla, don’t go down this route,” but it seems the company already has. Oh, Elon … really?