All 2016 and above Tesla Model S models are equipped with the usable, sleek, and quite roomy center consoles. Tesla was able to save this much room for the console by moving the Gear Selector / Gear Stick or Gear Stalk (as Tesla Manual is referring to it) to the Steering Wheel Column. This design is similar to what Mercedes Benz uses in their cars and does not signify sports car interior design. In other words, you will not find gear stick on the wheel in BMW or Audi cars. The sport car lovers like their gear sticks under their right arm to quickly shift when needed. In case of Tesla’s single gear design, this shifting is not needed. Going back to center console, there is plenty room for cups, phones, wallets, hair brushes, and other items. The console also has a sleek sliding cover. As with any design, there is always something that does not quite fit or was not accounted for. For example, if you decide to leave your credit card or a parking garage card or anything thin for that matter on top of the console as you see in the picture below, you are running a high chance of loosing this. As weird and awkward as it may sound, my parking permit was swollen by Tesla center console and I want to share the steps that I took to retrieve this card. How did my card ended up being swollen by the Tesla Center Console? The card quickly fell into the thin opening on top of the center console as you can see in the picture below.
Disassemble Tesla Center Console
One option is to take apart the center console by first removing the side walls. There are a lot of YouTube videos describing how to remove side walls and put them back in. At the end, you end up revealing the center console unit but you still need to remove the whole unit in order to reach the back wall opening where the card will end up falling.
This option is a lot of work and I was too lazy to do this without having any evidence that I will be able to retrieve the card at the end.
Remove Tesla Cubby Shelf
This option seemed to be much more promising and much less work than disassembling center console walls. The steps are simple:
- With both hands, pull the Tesla Cubby Shelf down. Apply force on both sides of the cubby:
- Eventually and with enough force, the Tesla Cubby should start pulling away from the center console as follows:
- The removed Tesla Cubby should look as follows:
- Tesla Cubby shelf is actually Made in USA and the part is actually called: CUBBY.
- At this point, the rear center console wall should be visible. This is where I found the parking permit:
- The Tesla rear center console wall with wiring underneath the touch screen unit:
I hope these simple steps will help everyone to retrieve their lost cards in the Tesla Center Console.
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