At the end of the day, given that Hyundai/Kia, VW, Ford, et. al, are all sold out of EVs for the year, we decided we'd just rather do without a new car than buy a Tesla. Hang in there, l'il 2011 Leaf; you've served us well so far.
Like, a friend recently received delivery of a Tesla. They went to the dealer 4 times before they got the car. Each time it was "Your car is available, come pick it up" and then when they got there the car wasn't actually there. By the last time they demanded that the person at the dealership actually walked out to the car and physically touched it, verified it was actually the correct vehicle, before they would go out again
It's not hard to find those kinds of stories. It is not a luxury experience.
It's apparently called Express Delivery where you "Take delivery at a Tesla location"
https://www.tesla.com/support/taking-delivery#express-delive...
If you sell it to Tesla, they often remove FSD and resell without it; but that's no different than anyone else modifying a vehicle they own and then selling it in its new state.
https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-takes-away-autopilot-us...
That's definitely not a standard practice, but I can see how that would happen by mistake (e.g. forget to remove FSD from the spec sheet) and then be difficult to get fixed. It's near-impossible to reach the right human at Tesla, so when things fall through the cracks, it's a nightmare. I suspect that's the issue OP is quoting, too -- there's likely a reasonable person at Tesla who can and would help if they knew about this story.
It does transfer to a new owner in private sales.
I think you are referring to the point that you can buy it for one Tesla, and it doesn’t transfer if you upgrade to a new Tesla.
I have a model y, and I will say that all of the “little duck bites” are vastly overrated for my use case. I can imagine someone for whom these duck bites may be an issue, but I am not one of them, and none of my friends who own teslas are either.
I imagine that you will enjoy your new Tesla immensely, and you will wonder what all of the negativity was/is about. Imho, it’s just contrarian yipping against something trendy.
And it better be a new Tesla, otherwise who knows what will happen with the features that were sold as is second hand. Tesla might just turn them off.
I'm on my second Leaf. Was eyeing an EV 6 but that's an unnecessary expense.
Every car I've had was used, I DO like that the ecological "cost" of the car is paid by the previous owner.
However if you buy a new car and drive it for its entire life (15 years) that seems similar to buying a used car. Especially if by doing so you put your old ICE car off the road.
Better of course if you can live with less cars and use public transport instead.
Nowadays, I have chatted with numerous folks that have purchased alternative EVs.
The Tesla owners still seem the giddiest (There's a lot of 'em around here), but I have not heard one ounce of buyer's remorse from any of the other brands.
The one that brought the Rivian, is every bit as giddy as any Tesla owner I know.
I think that Tesla has managed to establish itself, and will last, but the free ride is over.
If it weren't for the crappy dealership model I probably would have bought the Hyundai Ioniq instead.
I basically gave up on that vehicle not because I can't wait or am not willing to play the price, but the BS process of going through one of these dealerships is too infuriating. Rivian I put my order in and at least I have an order date and understand that I'm in the queue and should be sometime MY24. If Cadillac came out with the exact same process as Rivian and it said I could get my vehicle ordered and enqueued for 12month deliver I would do it.
In Utah, where I am, it’s going to be a bit of a hill. I hear we have some laws to protect the local dealerships. Tesla dealers are just showrooms here and I don’t think they sell anything on-site. Could be wrong about all this.
The Ford CEO has mentioned earlier this year that they're less than pleased at the various markups applied by dealerships, and would want to do set price, online sales (eg. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/ford-wants-to-sell-evs-onl...).
Is that "Model Year 24"? So they gave you an estimate of a year-long window, but also did not guarantee the date? How is that much different than "Youre on the list" with a traditional dealership?
It seems like there is no EV that is free of something stupid that the car manufacturer is making you put up with.
Maybe Tesla it's these general annoyances. Or collision repair or out of warranty service annoyances.
I test drove a VW ID.4. It sounds like if I bought one I might deal with annoyances (markups, delays) trying to buy the car because dealers are annoying. The flip side is if I bought one and it needs service I can walk home from the local VW dealer to my house pretty quickly. Hyper Local service is rather nice.
I went looking for a Bolt EUV recently (that price point for Super Cruise is really attractive), but they were marked up everywhere by upwards of $6K and it's impossible to reserve one from the manufacturer and actually get any guarantee that it will be purchasable at the listed price.
I have also been seeing various flavors of BMW electrics, for some time.
A chap around here, owns one of those BMW electric "supercar" looking things (i8?). I don't know him, personally.
An $18/month subscription for heated seats. This is quite frankly absurd. And I know, Tesla is the one that started it (partially), but for things such as heated seats, this is taking it completely to the next level.
Soon enough we will start seeing microtransactions to even turn the car on? Not a good look for the automotive industry as a whole and shame on BMW for this.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/ind...
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.
Went through the same thing with a recent starter replacement. They no longer offer OEM bosch (this was oreilly not sure about AZ) and they no longer sell Bosch OEM even remanufactures.
Again they explained to me this was due to BMW themselves.
I'm going to ride my 328i into the ground, but once its repairs outweigh the value of the car (doing the repairs myself now, had to become my own mechanic to avoid a $1700 bill and 2 week wait for a starter replacement),I am never touching one of their vehicles again.
When in the dealership in Seattle 2 years ago for an oil change and fluid top off/inspection it was a horror show.
They only added about 3 quarts of oil to my car out of the almost 7 needed after a change (light came on immediately as leaving and oil level was - null-). They never did their whatever-point inspection, never did the fluid top off, and left my oil filter cap loose! My 'account manager' was supposed to go over some stuff with me- never saw him. Was told he'd left notes on my file- did not.
While waiting I saw three different people come in with problems with their EV batteries no longer charging. The 1st two were told they'd be covered under warranty. I heard the reps talking amongst themselves about how bad it was getting and whether there would be a recall. 3d person was a lady who was pissed as she'd just had her battery replaced under warranty, it'd happened again and this time they wanted her to pay for a new one. She threatened to sue and they comped everything they could think of for her.
Now with this heated seats fiasco BMW has officially nuked the fridge.
Edit to add- if anyone is interested check out the starter replacement [1], absolutely fucking ridiculous the way cars are now engineered to stop the layman from affecting their own repairs.
Used to be starter replacement was something anyone could do and was all of two to four bolts and a wire and took ten minutes of time. You could even just replace the solenoid half the time for a few bucks.
I've now replaced brakes, rotors, control arms, shocks, struts, starter, window actuators, headlights, radiator, mass airflow sensor, ECM, spark plugs and ignition coils, cleaned the O2 sensors etc. Some of the steps are insane especially the radiator which was 600 just because California ones have a stupid sensor on them that cant be used on an off-brand radiator.
So much blood and sweat because why leave room to work on anything.
Seriously fuck BMW.
Fwiw my car was delivered in the middle half of the original ETA, but I know that others have had lots of issues with their ETAs.
For Hyundai specifically I was looking for the Limited trim, and I've been told they're only allocating custom orders to dealerships with level 3 chargers. And even then the order bank for MY 2022 had already been closed when I started shopping around. I would have had to wait for the MY 2023 bank to open.
I remember when everyone was excited to pre-order Teslas when their actual production was several years out...
Even with that and the limited range, I bought the right car for our usage pattern and have been overall extremely happy with the car. It's been relatively trouble-free (one visit to the dealer for some combined warranty work on the battery, Takata air bag recall, and some other recall or other, all of which were taken care of for $0 and included a free loaner car while it was being done), otherwise requiring two sets of wiper blades, some washer fluid, and one tire to have a nail hole plugged.
When I say we bought the right car for our usage pattern, we paid around $21K (net of government credits) for a car that will still do 75 miles on a charge. Before COVID, my commute was 16 miles round-trip and had chargers at work. After working remotely, I drive the car much less and our two-driver family has a traditional ICE car for any longer trips. We both prefer the LEAF for around-town errands and it gets more drives than the ICE car does. I think once in 7.5 years we had a conflict where we both had more than 100 miles to drive in a day and I worked it out by charging the LEAF during my day. It's been a non-issue and getting a car that's given us >7.5 years of drama-free service for $21K has been great.
According to the US DOE, we have 4450 CHAdeMO stations and 4583 CCS stations in the US at the moment. No major charging network has started building CCS-only stations yet, though EA plans to in the future. I don't see why you're feeling that remorse, your charging network is large and continues to grow, despite your car being discontinued in the next 2-3 years.
I've owned two Nissan LEAFs (2012, 2018). The things that would give me buyers' remorse are faults of the car, not anything external. Like, not charging any faster than 40-50 kW, charging at half that speed once the battery gets hot, losing 10% of its range to battery degradation after just 3 years, and offering no upgrade path to keep the connectivity features working after AT&T shut down its 2G then 3G networks.
I drive a VW ID.4 now.
Yeah, that's a bit annoying. In the US, many(most) still do, but there aren't going to be many (if any) new CHAdeMO installations. Even more so now that Nissan itself dropped CHAdeMO in the US. The Ariya will be CCS.
That said, if you are in a city, L2 should continue to expand and hopefully you'll be able to top off during your normal activities.
The charging situation for electric cars for road trips is still a thing... It seems to have found a standard in CSS. I expected there to be adapters, but apparently making adapters is slightly non trivial as there is a lot of chatting between the car and charger.
I know a Bolt owner though, and they seem pleased.
I also know someone that has a Fusion plug-in hybrid. He loves it.
I have seen the F-150 Lightnings around, but don't know anyone that got one (yet).
My wife loves the Model Y she replaced it with. They’re vastly different vehicles, but I can say with confidence I will never again buy a GM vehicle.
But now, your choices are among legacy car makers and their dealer networks, which were never a joy to interact with most of whom, Hyundai and maybe Nissan excepted, are just bringing out their first serious EVs.
Yeah, Tesla is overhyped. But their competition mostly, still, sucks. Nobody has, and nobody will for at least another year or two, make even a slight dent is demand for Tesla cars. Yes, Cybertruck is dumb. Yes, there is no roadster. But VW has apparently completely screwed their software stack. That is a much bigger failure.
The same can be said about SpaceX. SpaceX's value is highly dependent on a kind of telecom network that was a failure several times before when tried by Motorola, Microsoft, etc. Starship could fly soon, or next year, or in 5 years and it would still revolutionize access to space. Cost overruns? <cough>Boeing</cough>
It's all relative. Hype and image polishing is everywhere.
Are you assuming that this is news to the naysayers? Or maybe the naysayers are fully-informed, and they still say, "I'd rather deal with a traditional dealer than buy a Tesla"? Because that's what this naysayer is saying: better to deal with the devil I know...
So i’d posit, you actually don’t know that particular devil.
The software support in terms of updates is very good, and you still get updates to years old software.
Where they struggle is not enough service capacity and parts shortages. What you would expect from a car maker growing 50% and the service capacity has not grown as fast.
One of them has had what I would describe as a luxury car experience - fit and finish is perfect, and every detail of the car has been clearly thought about carefully and engineered to work precisely, and it was the cheaper of the two cars.
The other person got the Tesla. It's an acceptable car, but is wasn't cheap, nor is it luxurious. The quality just isn't there.
The only solid reason I've heard to buy Tesla over others is for the Supercharger network if you travel a lot or can't charge at home. Everything else comes down to preference.
This strikes me as a result of Tesla's whole "ignore everything known by car companies and act like software companies" approach. So far the software industry is young enough that most companies can expect that anyone approaching them for support is the same person who bought the software... but that's not at all the case for cars, what with resales, inheritances, etc being standard practice.
I think a lot of software companies are going to be in for a rude awakening over the next 25 years or so, as hand-me-down devices and accounts become increasingly common. I wonder how many lawsuits it's going to take before companies purporting to "sell" software actually take wills into account.
Yup, the Silicon Valley strategy "letting the fires burn". As long as you can acquire new customers with less effort than servicing existing ones, why bother? It worked at Paypal and it has worked so far at Tesla. We see year after year of 50%+ sales growth but nowhere near 50% increases in service capacity. It's the reason we see people waiting months for replacement parts (those parts can go into a new car, for a new customer!) and its the reason they pressure you into accepting bad workmanship so that the problems with the car become yours and not theirs and its now on you to convince them that it is not, in fact, "in spec".
This is a 4 year old thread but Tesla still makes the same service mistakes (like the OP) today: https://twitter.com/grainsurgeon/status/1054732768465305600
Consider Steam, right now. What happens when some judge eventually rules that it's entirely reasonable to put your Steam library in your will and divide it up between different people?
Reputation and the customer relationship are worth more than the company's sense of "fairness", especially when (as in this case) you're not even deterring future customers from doing anything, because the customer who's affected is not responsible for the error.
Bingo.
One of the issues with conventional large corporations (mostly outside of tech) is that middle management incentives often align poorly with this type of philosophy.
A few companies have gotten this right, at least at times.
Costco comes to mind in the present. They go out of their way to save their customers money, and to fix issues customers have as easily as they can. Their returns policy is pretty legendary.
Amazon, somewhat ironically given recent issues, had a philosophy early on that, if a customer was talking to them, they probably didn't want to be! ...And it's probably because something in Amazon's process went wrong. So while I think their reputation has fallen greatly, they did spend a lot of engineering effort into "harmonizing" their purchasing and returns process. Mostly because Bezos saw the value in that. And despite all the bad press, I think they still have that not 'right' but 'decent'. Becuase, while I've had a few issues with amazon, they resolved them really quickly and easily for me as a customer. (I think you get screwed as a vendor though...)
Another example I can think of is Vortex optics. Most optics companies had a pretty good guarantee, often lifetime. Vortex just heavily marketed it and took away the edge cases. So while leupold wouldn't replace your scope if you sent it in along with a video of you driving over it with a truck, vortex would. That allowed them to really rapidly acquire a ton of market share.
At the end of the day, customers are human and despite tech's best efforts, they still try to interact with companies as humans would each other. Fucking over your neighbor while being technically correct still leaves you with a pissed off neighbor who will not respond well to anything you bring to them in the future.
And like many, Musk's behavior has dissuaded me from purchasing one, and instead likely a Ford.
He also goes on to talk about John Wayne and Sean Connery in equally deliteful manner.
The elongated muskrat is out there today being an ass; spreading misinformation during a pandemic, perpetuating racist behavior in its factories, and a growing list of sexual improprieties. I think it is fair for someone to not want to give money to someone like that.
He can overpromise to the point of outright lying about functionality and delivery schedule.
The CEO is not 'just one guy'
Trying to hold Elon to a standard in his companies gets you fired, not him: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/spacex-fi...
If people knew or cared all the dumb shit all other car CEO said in their live, or all the corruption they engage in with the Union bosses and the list of things goes on.
Compare working at Tesla and working at Lockheed Martin for example. How can self respecting engineer work there? You are literally building bombs that illegally blow up US citizens (and weddings) around the world.
So if 'CEO fired a some people who clearly were not on board with CEO management style' is the reason for a moral panic, there are a whole lot of places you can never work at. And that's fine, but lets be clear about that.
Also, firing the CEO when the company is growing at breakneck speed while also having industry leading margin. Just for example, Tesla NetIncome this Q matched Ford and GM combined at 1/10 the revenue and in a Quarter where Tesla main factory was mostly closed.
So I guess the question is how highly do you value image compared to 12 years of amazing growth.
If Tesla somehow folded overnight I'm sure all the other car companies making BEVs would be ecstatic to scoop up that newly available talent.
I think you're overstating the "brilliance" of the engineers. I have no doubt the core of them working on the battery tech could be in the brilliant category, but the rest of those thousands of engineers are run-of-the-mill automotive engineers.
Would you describe Ford as being composed of thousands of brilliant engineers?
Absolutely.
I've seen people believe that creating a browser is no big deal, can you imagine developing, manufacturing, compliance certification, marketing and distribution of actual vehicles, planet-scale?
Hell, when was the last time Tesla released a new car? The Big Auto companies are rolling out new models every other week. Fact is, Tesla blew a lead and aren’t impressing.
Of course in the last 6 month they have sold less then 10k EVs, about what Tesla does in a week or so. But I guess they announced many new models.
> Fact is, Tesla blew a lead and aren’t impressing.
A lead in what? They are dominating both in terms of volume and in terms of profitability. A few years ago everybody was hype about how VW would blew Tesla doors within a year or two, well turns out Tesla still matches VW for growth.
> Hell, when was the last time Tesla released a new car?
The question is, what is the goal? To release a car because you have released a car? Is that your goal?
Because what matters in the real world is growth and profit. And if you have a fixed supply because of chips and batteries. Just building more different models while you can still sell your existing model is just financially idiotic.
Other manufactures like VW spend billions to turn the ID.4 into a Skoda that is basically the exact same inside.
I don't do business with people who are assholes to their customers.
Anything you are leaning towards buying?
Yeah, that's me. With all of the nonsense with Tesla, why would anyone do that to themselves? Just buy another car. It's not like there aren't plenty of other EV options in the world.
This week, I begin shopping for an EV family car. On my list of options are the Ioniq 5, EV6, and odel X.
What a great time to see how Tesla treats customers.
OK, I think I agree. How do we build things that are harmonious?
Back to square 1 looking at the competition.
Its incredibly profitable for the ruling class. Too bad you aren't in it.
I think you forgot to spare anything.
Meh. This is a software configuration issue like we've seen before. Like lots of devices in the modern world, the cars can be configured with common hardware but disjoint behavior. You might have the hardware for FSD, but you didn't buy it so you can't use it. You might have the same motor as the performance car, but the current limit is set to long range. You might have the mobile radio, but if you don't pay for the service you won't get satellite pictures.
Or you might have a large battery, but be configured to use only a fraction. And in this case they messed up and accidentally granted a customer access to a feature they hadn't paid for. And the mistake wasn't discovered until the car got reconfigured when it was sold.
I just don't see the "ransom" here. It's a messup. No one ever paid for that extra battery capacity they enabled. Should they honor the mistake? Maybe. But we really need to turn down the rhetoric in this community.
The fact that you can do so was actually my whole point: You can totally justify this! ...and yet... someone still feels like they got fucked. ...and people on the internet agree. That is the antithesis of harmony. Some amount of dissonance is unavoidable, but there are many brands and businesses out there that make sure if a mistake was made, customers leave feeling good. The point is that there are better ways to do business and maintain more harmony between you and your customers, and I've seen many companies be deeply rewarded for that as a whole. It does however often come at the expense of degraded metrics middle managers are commonly evaluated by. Penny-wise pound-foolish is very old wisdom. I think the real key is to evaluate from a systems perspective how that kind of dissonance can be avoided.
The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional weird issues and huge cognitive dissonance in your customers, it's the wrong business plan. Also... the number of people this applies to is likely so low that Tesla really screwed up by not erring on the side of the customer. (They didn't buy from Tesla, but they're still a customer buying servicing from them.) If the bad publicity alone causes even a tiny fraction of the population to choose another manufacturer, the've lost their $4,500 and then some.
Harmony is a really underrated concept. When things are harmonious, you don't have problems like this, and you can still make money.