"To prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances (such as grease, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tar spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc.),"
Not washing it could fuck it up. Got it.
"CAUTION Failure to put Cybertruck in Car Wash Mode may result in damage (for example, to the charge port or windshield wipers). Damage caused by car washes is not covered by the warranty."
I don't know about the Cybertruck or its charging port, but cars do have rain sensors to activate the wipers automatically when it rains. Car wash mode likely turns those sensors off to prevent damage to the wipers.
Have you seen other people in a car wash? Park, reverse, drive but they start holding the brakes when the track pulls them along, leaving antennas up, not closing windows, opening fucking doors... A vast majority of the human population is some level of braindead.
Fuck me, I've seen someone pull up into a manual car wash bay, open all their doors, and wash the INSIDE of their car. This was not a washable interior like a Jeep Wrangler or something, it was a typical sedan with carpeted floors and cloth seats.
And these people (theoretically) are licensed to drive, right next to you.
So then it didn't run after the car wash -- unless we're ignoring the mandatory steps needed to get it working again, the headline is pretty accurate. Or are you considering "bricked" a permanent condition?
It always ran. The owner drove it home, and when they parked it in the garage the center screen started acting wonky (they didn't explain what that meant). All the other screens worked, and the car was drivable, but it's a bit dangerous to drive a Tesla without the center screen since that displays everything (no dashboard screen) and is how you control everything (no physical buttons besides a few on the steering wheel). So the owner did a system reset and the screen didn't turn back on after the estimated "two minutes".
The next day they called the service station, but then went back to check on the car, everything was working. Basically instead of taking 2 minutes to do a hard reset, it took over night. The service station said this was a known issue and it would sometimes take upwards of 4 hours.
This headline is massively misleading. Hell, the article itself was massively misleading. The owner said something like "I thought it was bricked" on social media and the author just ran with it apparently.
Bricked is a permanent condition. And if they were able to get it working again, I wouldn't say it was bricked. More like broken or crashed in the software sense.
Still, it wouldn't run after the car wash either.
I meant more like, even if you wash a car with the doors open and water goes in everywhere and damages the car, you can still turn the key and it will start.
Also locks the charging port, turns off the AC, locks the doors and windows. Still nothing that should prevent the car from breaking in a car wash....
Also, upon reading the article, seems like the car was fine after a reset, it just took 5 hours. Didn't have anything to do with the car wash it seems.
It's worse than that, washing the car even in wash mode will damage the car because the fucking thing is made out aluminum stainless steel, you know, a mineral that corrodes if exposed to water long enough. It's mind boggling how badly designed this car is.
There's a few things wrong here. First, it's made of steel, which is iron and not aluminum. Second, neither of those is as mineral. Third, aluminum has pretty good corrosion resistance in terms of metals.
None of that is to say that Tesla had any idea what they were doing when designing this monstrosity.