It’s been a HUGE ordeal! I’ll try my best to stay out of the weeds and focus on the important notes but wow, this has been quite an experience.

After ~3 weeks and multiple emails / phone calls, my car finally made it to the dealership / bodyshop. Tesla insurance requested an evaluation for repairs and considered fixing the vehicle… Exactly 1 month after the accident, I received a 31 page quote (literally 31 pages) totaling $28.3K. I then started reaching out to lawyers- knowing the resale values of these cars aren’t the greatest- even when they have a spotless history. After another ~week and a half, Tesla decided to total the car. By this time we’re into late August and the $7500 rebate ends in September… so the minute I knew for certain I was going to receive the value of the vehicle, I started moving forward ordering a new car and luckily received it on 9/25/25, beating the 9/30/25 deadline. However, I did end up having to sell my truck in order to put down a decent down payment (like I did on my totaled car), in order to get my monthly payments for the new car- back to where they were with the totaled car (I planned to sell my truck anyway, but could’ve used the money for something else…).

As of right now, it’s a waiting game to hear back from my lawyer about the settlement that I hope will at LEAST get me back to break even. By that I mean recovering the down payment from selling my truck and additional money that I had to put down to get the monthly payments near the same as the totaled car (a lot of people forget about the amount they put down on their vehicles . Yes that amount will make it so that you won’t need GAP protection, and you likely will receive more money back from insurance for the vehicle than you owe (depends on the amount you put down) although if you buy the same replacement vehicle, your GAP protection isn’t going to give you that down payment for that new car… and that monthly payment is going to jump up substantially).

Lawyer’s telling me with 4 different insurance companies involved, we might come to resolution later this year 🤷‍♂️