What a day!
Birmingham Collection
The new Birmingham delivery centre in Small Heath is big, there must have been at least 50 M3s on site and lots of activity whilst I was there, a handful of staff kept fairly busy with a steady flow of people coming in to pickup their cars. New superchargers are being installed and look like they could be ready for use within a few weeks (they're in place, but still construction works going on).
I spotted my car right away from the reg, it was sitting right outside the show room next to a couple of others with the same spec. After going inside to let them know I was there I was handed the keys and told take your time, come in when ready to sign & accept delivery then off you go. At no point did I have to show driving licence which was a little odd I thought, but confirmed name. There's no rush at all when it comes to how long you're given to check the car over, I got the impression you could spend all afternoon there if that's your thing!
Well, it took me around an hour to properly inspect the car. I ended up with a big list of issues. The first was immediately apparent when looking at the front of the car, the bonnet/bumper didn't sit flat (see photo attached). This was a disappointment as it was a fairly major issue right off the bat. However, I thought that should be able to be fixed, so I noted it down and carried on the inspection. The next fairly major issue jumped right out at me when I glanced over the interior of the car. The back seats had some bad crease marks in them, so did the drivers seat but no where near as bad as the rear seats. I've read these forums a lot over the past few months but it really hits home when you're looking at a very obvious issue and think how did this pass QC?! Clearly, the QC is non existant.
Anyway, onwards, I checked the exterior thoroughly over the next 30mins or so and noticed around 8 issues - mostly paint work, everything from what looked like rust spots to paint drips and chips/missing paint patches. There was also another misalignment issue with the side of the boot. Disappointing to encounter so many issues.
Onto the interior. Aside from the state of the seats, the front pillars had dark grubby marks on along with a few other areas in the car. There was also an issue with the rear speaker housing that had popped up on one of the sides at the back and scratch marks inside the front boot.
At this point I was thinking surely I must have just got really bad luck. It sure does deflate the car collection experience spotting so many issues. Whilst inspecting I looked at the other cars around to see if there really was an issue with my car or whether it was the norm. What shocked me was almost every car I looked at around mine had something fairly obvious wrong with it that you could spot right away. The car to my right had a boot that didn't sit at all right and a lot of the other cars around shared the same alignment issue with the bonnet/bumper to varying degrees. I
f you're picking up from Birmingham in the next few days, give your car a good look over! No doubt this applies to everywhere else too.
Once I had compiled my issue list, I went back in to get one of them to come out. Unfortunately for the most part I hit a complete brick wall with him, his stock answer was "that's within tolerance, we wouldn't fix that". Sounds very familiar after all the posts I've read. It was quite incredible showing him what was obviously a fault (there were other people collecting around the same time and they spotted some of the issues I had right away too). The big creases on the back seats, yep, "within tolerance" - I mean, what!?! Everything was seemingly "within tolerance"! I told him it's not within my tolerance, certainly not when spending £50k on it and asked to speak with the site manager otherwise I would be rejecting the car. He said there's no point, he'll say the same. At one point he even said.. well the cars are made by robots so you should expect variances and that the defect is it's 'uniqueness' and not something wrong with it!
This was quite disappointing as I've found on the Tesla employees I've spoken to at various contact points (test drives, sales centres, on the phone, etc) have been fantastic. Now, when it matters, I was dealing with a brick wall. Politely I made it clear that I would like to speak with the manager and so the manager soon arrived.
Hurrah, the manager agreed that a lot of the things were not "within tolerance" and so we went through them one by one and he made a note of each on his phone (only in the notes iOS app though). He reassured me that a lot of these issues would be fixed with a service centre visit (all the major ones at least and most of the minor) and he wizzed it round to the detailer to clean some of the dark marks off the interior. With this reassurance I was happy to accept delivery - largely because the wait for another could be many months and I've already spent a tough few weeks without a car; plus, I have no confidence that the replacement would be any better after looking at the state of the cars around mine!
I wanted to get them to officially note the issues on my account there and then and book me into a service centre appointment or, at the very least, have some signed proof that they would indeed rectify these issues as discussed however I hit a roadblock there too. What felt like excuses came out to say why they couldn't - the first was along the lines of: "I can't book you a service appointment now as I don't know your availability". When I said I'll provide my availability right now and I'm very flexible when they book this in (I don't mind waiting a couple of months if necessary), he changed it up to it's just not possible, not what we do. We left it with him reassuring me he would email me this evening confirming that they will fix all these issues that he said they would and noted down. He took the vin, my email etc. As of the time of writing this, no email...
This has all left a sour taste. I was prepared for build issues but not this many and not the brick wall response of "within tolerance" when it's so clearly a defect.
The flip side is the car drives fantastic, it does help make up for some of these issues but these issues and the customer service received is really sub-par for such an expensive car. You just would not get that at your german dealer. Whilst they can't keep up with the demand for these cars at the moment, there will become a time when us early adopters (or not so early anymore!) dry up and they're selling to people who just would not put up with this experience when putting down so much money. All this has been said before by other posters time and time again, come on Tesla, put some of that $5Bn you've just raised into firming up your build & customer service!
Tomorrow I'll proceed to log all this in the service section of the app - we're talking 10+ issues exterior/interior. I hope the manager at Tesla has made notes on my account and follows through with his promise to email me.
All in all a mixed day, the excitement followed by a big deflation when realising just how bad the build quality is, then a smile put back on my face after driving! If they fix the issues then I'll be very happy. Good luck to all those who are collecting this month.
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