Tesla cars can sometimes find themselves with a software gremlin that requires a reboot. Its not that common, but its certainly something that all owners need to be aware of as it solves the majority of issues.
The following reboot options exist. While some are possible while driving, we recommend that the car should always be stationary and in a safe place before rebooting the car.
Press and hold both scroll wheels on either side of the steering wheel for up to 10 seconds and the main/central screen will reboot. While rebooting you may seen the airbag icon become visible in the dash and the clicking noise from the indicator will not be heard.
Press and hold both buttons above the scroll wheels on either side of the steering wheel for up to 10 seconds and the drivers dash/screen will reboot.
This reboot is a little harder to do. You need to be sitting in the car with the doors closed and not open them for the duration of the reboot. Place your foot on the brake and keep it there, although some believe this is optional, it does no harm.
Now press and hold both buttons above the scroll wheels, and the scroll wheels on either side of the steering wheel (MS and MX) for up to 10 seconds and the drivers dash/screen will reboot (centre screen on the M3).
Wait, keeping your foot on the brake. Eventually the screens will restart.
Like option 3, sit in the car with the door closed and don't touch anything or open the door other than to follow the instructions. This is also best done where its quiet as being able to listen to the car can help.
Go to the main screen, bring up the service menu and select "Power Off".
After a while the screens will have gone out, the interior light will have gone off and the system are shutting down. If you can hear the car, you may still hear some background noises from the car. If this is the case wait until the car is quiet.
If you can't hear the car, then wait for about 3 minutes - it seems a long time but it is worth doing to ensure the car is fully shut down. Then press the brake pedal to reawaken the car.
We don't advise doing this but if you are stuck and Tesla support is unable to help, then this can be tried. The process is the same as Option 4.
Some people report their car screens rebooting randomly. There have been a number of software glitches over the years that can cause this to a greater or lesser extent. If you are experiencing frequent reboots and the steps above do not help, then the following has been known to help some.
Your car stores up a history of your driving and clearing the trip computers has been known to improve the stability of the computers, especially if one of the trip computers has a significant amount of history captured.
If you are using a USB dashcam or have a USB stick with music on it, then try removing it. Similar to the trip computer, a large amount of data can cause problems and in the case of music files, the car reads these in and stores the information to make the contents available to the driver. If this cures the problem, then try reducing the number of files on the USB stick and seeing if that solves the problem while regaining the utility of USB music.
You may see a pattern here, if your phone has a lot of contacts then these will be loaded into the car. Disconnecting your phone for a while will help determine if this is the problem.
None of the above options are ideal, the car should be handle the situations, but if one works then you can try and narrow down what is causing the problem, it may be a rogue MP3 file, or a phone contact with some corrupted details.
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