I've been waiting for my car since OCTOBER. Now 5 and a half months. Don't cherry pick what you need to make it fit your narrative. And when you are told you are getting your car on a certain date and they push it and push it, and quite frankly treat you like dirt when you are now buying a $92k car, I'm sorry that's not right. The reason they get away with this stuff is people like you who excuse it. Common courtesy emails and dialogue could have helped. People should do EXACTLY what I'm doing and call them out. EV choices will be plentiful in the next few years and they need to get their act together when it comes to customer service. At least in the Los Angeles area.
My understanding of your story (correct me if I'm wrong) is this:
- You ordered in October 2020, were contacted in December with a view to take delivery. You had a few questions that weren't answered, so you abandoned (?) it ("Needless to say I didn't take delivery"). How did they "push it and push it" if you rejected delivery?
- At that point it's unclear what happened. You said there was a "period of darkness where nobody knew anything". I don't know whether you were waiting for Tesla to call you to answer your questions, whether you followed it up, or what. From my limited knowledge of Tesla it seems to be the case that if you refuse delivery of a specific vehicle then it gets allocated to someone else and the onus is basically on you to let them know when you
will take delivery (assuming they have something available then)
- Later the refresh was announced, and you were offered $2k off (this is what everyone was offered). I would say that it was definitely wrong of the sales assistant to promise that it would be "locked in on pricing no matter what happens" when it wasn't even known at that point definitively that there was a refresh coming, what form it would take, or what the price delta would be. All anyone knew for sure was that manufacturing was shut down for a period of time. I can't second guess the exact context of that conversation with the sales assistant.
- After that it seemed that you had more questions and wanted a test drive of the refresh, presumably before you'd consider ordering, and they told you why that wouldn't be feasible when they don't have a car for you to use. In an ideal world Tesla would have cars for people to test drive, but as said before clearly they have enough people buying sight unseen, who
aren't asking questions and
aren't demanding test drives, who are just happy to order. I'm sorry to say that if you're skittish about buying the refresh car, then you're naturally going to end up queueing behind customers who are willing to buy the car sight unseen.
I'm not going to say that Tesla is perfect at customer service, far from it, but as said I think you have to consider that as a customer you're "competing" with everyone else who wants the new car. Demand will be exceptionally high. If Tesla are selling these cars hand over fist to people who are buying them sight unseen, which clearly seems to be the case, then for everyone person wanting to question this and that, get test drives, etc they have 10 customers who are willing to pull the trigger without any of that.
Whether or not that is objectively bad customer service or not depends on your perspective. There will be people who have paid in full for the refresh car, as soon as it was possible to do so, who are just waiting for a delivery date (or have one already), who don't care about questions or test drives. Those people are probably perfectly happy about their purchasing experience.