Critical Suspension Fault...
OK this is currently a story without an ending that I'm just relaying for anyone interested or maybe some insights.
The car left me high and dry the other day. I was driving from Los Angeles to Portland to move my daughter out of school - about a 16 hour drive that we usually do over two or three days. This is a trip we've done several times, and I really enjoy the tempo of EV road trips. So I stopped in Redding to charge at a Supercharger - that's a couple hours north of Sacramento and about a little more than halfway between LA and Portland. As a former Tesla owner I just really prefer the simplicity of the way Superchargers work.
When I get back to the car and unplug, I get in the car and have this "critical suspension fault" message saying to pull over safely. Having had a P3 for over a year now I know (very well...) there can be random little errors that pop up and then disappear, so I pulled out just to see how it was driving, and it did feel a bit rough, like the air suspension wasn't working right or something. (it rode kind of like a Tesla!)
So I pulled over in a spot where I could try some things to clear this issue. Googled the message and didn't find things really helpful – some people had cleared it with just waiting, or various resets, and others ended up with their car in the shop for weeks.
So I tried everything I could think of because I was in a pretty screwed up situation, halfway between home and my destination. I wasn't able to do the hard reset using the brake and the down arrows on the steering wheel - it just did nothing - and then I also started to get the "PARK" icon on the screen flashing, which I hadn't seen before. I tried putting the car into reverse to see how it was driving and it just immediately started taking off backwards. Weird. I put it into drive to move back into my parking spot and it did the same thing, just took off forward. So at that point I accepted that the car was not gonna be drivable in this state and I was screwed.
After trying everything I did a full factory reset just to see if that would get rid of the message - I figured why not - and it didn't fix it. I'd already been on the phone with Polestar support and they were sending a tow to take the car to the nearest service center, which given this is a Polestar was about 3 hours away in San Rafael, north of San Francisco.
Turned out I was lucky (hahaha) that the car broke down in Redding, because they have a small municipal airport and I was able to catch a plane to Portland via San Francisco that afternoon so I could at least get to my destination and rent a car to deal with the move out and then probably fly back to LA.
Now the car is in the shop in San Rafael and I have no idea how long it's gonna take or how I'm gonna get the car back. The woman at the service center in San Rafael did mention something about "reuniting" us with the car, I guess by shipping it down to our home in Los Angeles, about seven or eight hours south. My wife talked to Polestar and it sounded like we'd get some compensation for a few days of renting a car but obviously we've incurred a bunch of other expenses that I feel are Polestar's responsibility, like flying from Redding to Portland and then flying both my daughter and home.
So I guess I'm wondering if others have run into the same problem, how the solution worked out, if I should have handled it differently, etc. We love driving the car and the software issues have really settled down from the way it was in the beginning, but this once again makes me lose faith in the car. It's really too bad they didn't get this stuff all worked out before they put it on the market because it really is a pleasure to drive.