After seeing a couple of alarming looking videos on YouTube of folks in the US nervously trying to get their Model 3s either into or out of garages that have ramps or slopes down to the roadway, with very little ground clearance to play with, it got me to thinking about my driveway, which is a little higher than the street level, so has a bit of a hump that needs to be negotiated before getting on to the level.
Over the 15 years I've lived here I've never had any problems with any previous cars I've had, but I note the M3's ground clearance is 5.5 inches, whereas my current car is about 7 inches, and my wife's car is nearer 9 inches. Just wondered if anyone on here with a similar driveway off-road parking set up had experienced any issues with the Model 3. Most of the threads I've seen about ground clearance here on TMC seem to relate to concerns over grounding the car on speed humps.
I did rather cheekily ask my nearest SC whether there was any chance of a longer test drive so that I could bring the car home and very carefully put it to the test rather than discover there was a problem only after I'd paid £40k+ for it, but as I'm over 50 miles away, even the fearsome acceleration of a Tesla wouldn't have allowed me to do the return journey in the 40 minutes or so allowed!
Maybe I'm worrying unnecessarily. I keep thinking, if the car can't cope with my driveway, there'd be no chance of it negotiating the ramps in some of the multi-storey car parks I've had the misfortune to use. And then I remember the tradesman who came to do some work at my house a few years ago who attempted to reverse his Ford Transit van down my driveway as he was leaving, only for the towbar on it to gouge a great chunk out of the tarmac in the road outside my house - thankfully long since resurfaced by the council!
Over the 15 years I've lived here I've never had any problems with any previous cars I've had, but I note the M3's ground clearance is 5.5 inches, whereas my current car is about 7 inches, and my wife's car is nearer 9 inches. Just wondered if anyone on here with a similar driveway off-road parking set up had experienced any issues with the Model 3. Most of the threads I've seen about ground clearance here on TMC seem to relate to concerns over grounding the car on speed humps.
I did rather cheekily ask my nearest SC whether there was any chance of a longer test drive so that I could bring the car home and very carefully put it to the test rather than discover there was a problem only after I'd paid £40k+ for it, but as I'm over 50 miles away, even the fearsome acceleration of a Tesla wouldn't have allowed me to do the return journey in the 40 minutes or so allowed!
Maybe I'm worrying unnecessarily. I keep thinking, if the car can't cope with my driveway, there'd be no chance of it negotiating the ramps in some of the multi-storey car parks I've had the misfortune to use. And then I remember the tradesman who came to do some work at my house a few years ago who attempted to reverse his Ford Transit van down my driveway as he was leaving, only for the towbar on it to gouge a great chunk out of the tarmac in the road outside my house - thankfully long since resurfaced by the council!