We have one in Littleton, one in Evans and a third in Superior (all suburbs of Denver BTW) that should be online sometime next year. That's three within about a half hour of each other in the Denver area. This is terrible planning. If they instead put the same three service centers in Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins they could greatly increase the ability to help their customers and make sure their problems are minimal. But instead they place them all in the same city when the next closest center is about a 12-hour-drive (w/Supercharging stops) to Salt Lake City Utah. After that the next closest is Scottsdale, AZ with the next locations being in Kansas City, MS and Minneapolis, MN. Try to picture all of the states that fall in that massive area and how under-serviced the area is right in the middle geographically that I'm speaking of.
That's it for about a six to eight state-region of the Mountain/Southwest/Midwest US depending on how you look at it.
The Evans location has four technicians and seemingly the same number of service writers although only three were present the day we were there. The Littleton location has maybe six (best count as of this post) techs and an equal number of service writers, maybe less. So they compound the problem of not enough service centers spread out with the fact that the few they have are incredibly understaffed and under resourced. Things are looking bleak in terms of getting quality assistance should you have a problem, right? But wait... there's more!!
There are two separate phone numbers for each location but they both ring into a single phone managed by a guy named Scott. That's right, one single human being fields phone calls for tens of thousands of Tesla owners across several states of the region. As you can imagine, this person is quite busy. I've never actually got him to answer a call no matter what option I select. If I'm lucky, I can leave a voice mail and he will usually get back to me... eventually. A majority of the time I can't even leave a voice mail because the mail box is full.
Imagine having a serious issue with your car and not even being able to talk to a human being about getting it fixed. I don't have to imagine because I've experience this first-hand now numerous times. Tesla seemingly has two dozen (I'm being generous with that high guesstimate) actual human beings that handle ALL of the service issues in about a half-dozen state area of the US. I can't even blame the employees because each one seems to be doing the work of four or five. This is just Tesla's idea of proper staffing for X number of customers.
If you schedule an appointment via the app you often times get a call back for the most common issues that can be repaired in the field to be asked if you'd prefer that. For people like us who live over an hour one-way (w/good traffic which is nearly non-existent these days) from the nearest service center, this is the best possible news you can receive. Our Ranger Tech for the Northern area of Colorado, named Nick, is incredible. He's punctual, professional and very good at his job. If Tesla employed a few dozen people like him at each location and actually fielded phone calls I would have no issue. Sadly, they don't. The worst case scenario is that you have a problem that must be handled by the service center because this is when the nightmare begins, not ends.
Our most recent saga began when we had a slight clunk in the steering when we turned the wheel. Barely noticeable but I wanted it fixed since we were under warranty before it got worse. We set an appointment via the app as we were coming in from out-of-town. The first available appointment was several weeks away so we selected it and hoped that we'd get a call back saying that they could fix it at our location. Sadly, this wasn't the case so we took the day off to drive the car down for service since it would be an all-day-affair.
Upon arrival the morning of our appointment, we were informed there was no loaner and our car would be put "into queue" now that our car was physically there. Let me say that again because you may not have caught it the first time: our appointment wasn't an appointment at all. Instead it was waiting weeks to get the car into a line to wait again to be looked at by a technician just to be able tell us what was wrong, if they had parts and how long it would take to repair and return to us. It was a Friday and they told us they wouldn't even be able to look at the car until the following week. What was the appointment for?
The service writers spent an obscene amount of time arguing as to how they worked for other car manufacturers and it was the same process. No, it's not. Don't treat me like I'm a moron because it's nothing like other car manufacturers and not in a positive way. I can call a local Honda, Ford or GM (not even getting into luxury brands that go above and beyond) service center near me right now and not only will a human answer the phone by the 2nd ring but I will have an appointment within a few days after a brief call to get my information and properly schedule. During that appointment, I will wait in a waiting room for 5-15 minutes (depending on the extent of the diagnosis) and the service writer will tell me on the spot what the problem is, what it will cost and if they can do the repairs now or if they have to schedule for a later date. If it's the latter it will often be within a few days even if they have to order parts. I'll have a single point of contact the entire time and the person will follow up with me to make sure I'm happy with my experience too because THEY ACTUALLY CARE. This is nothing like Tesla.
They then offered to Uber us somewhere. Really? We set an appointment just to get our car into a line to be looked at at a later date? What's the point of an appointment!? They tried to explain how busy they were and why this method was necessary to their work flow and, frankly speaking, I just don't care. Their solution is to Uber us back 1.5 hours to the city we're from and then Uber us around for a week or two for all of our commuting and errands and finally Uber us back down to Denver to pick up the car? No wonder this company is hemorrhaging money in the service dept. Their solution is to deny claims and tell people their obvious warranty work isn't covered when what they need to do is figure out their communication and logistics on the front end. An ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure applies 100% here.
We even had to get into a heated verbal discussion with the Service staff just to get a loaner they initially claimed they didn't have even though we made it clear numerous times Uber simply wouldn't work for us and our unique situation. They finally gave us a shot-out RWD car for a loner with snow looming the following week. "No worries" they told us, they'd have it back to us in less than a week. I had my doubts but I believed them.
We got an automated text the following Monday saying that they found the problem and attempted to charge us for the repair as well as several other up-sell opportunities. I had to remind them that the car was still under warranty and I wanted only the problem fixed that we brought the car in for. Great, they'd have it done the next day is what we were told.
The next day (Tuesday) I checked the Tesla app and it said the car was expected to be done by 5:30pm. No call. Nothing. Wednesday came and went. Nothing. I attempted to call, text & email repeatedly because Thursday was predicted to have a foot of snow and I didn't want my wife driving a RWD car to work and back. We owned AWD cars in Colorado specifically for days like this and now we didn't have the AWD car we paid for. RWD wasn't a big deal for when it's summertime & sunny and we were appreciative of the loaner but I would have taken our car back that day had I known my wife was going to have to drive the RWD loaner in that kind of snow. Thursday, still nothing. Finally, on Friday, I got someone to call asking about the loaner. Had we not had the loaner who knows when we could have got our car back.
The icing on the cake? There's now a new clunk in the steering/suspension that wasn't there when we took the car in. The soonest we could schedule an appointment via the app is over a month away! We're now going to have to through this entire fiasco again and I feel like every time we take a car into service we take one step forward and two back since they screw up more than they fix when they have one of our cars for repair. I can't even talk to someone to see if they can make an exception to get us in sooner given they clearly screwed something up during the previous repair.
Tesla wants to be taken serious as a car manufacturer and yet they don't take it serious themselves. They want to be a viable complete option for a family rather than the "second car" that someone owns yet still has to keep an ICE car for actual real-world use and yet they can't be trusted enough to do that. We're now a Tesla only family and I'm seeing first-hand what it's like to trust this company with 100% of your transportation needs. I would never bat an eyelash to owning two Hondas or two Toyotas or two of just about any other brand as our only means of transportation. With Tesla I have serious doubts they can keep us on the road and things are getting worse not better since Elon stated nearly a year ago they were working on the dire Service issue. It's been a year. It's safe to say they are either unable to address it through incompetency or they just don't care about customer service as much as they'd like us to believe.
Around the same time as this latest of many Tesla car service fiascoes I canceled our contract with Tesla to install solar on our roof. We were on the fence and based on the awful customer service we recently received on our cars plus the horror stories we were hearing on the Tesla Solar side of things we decided we just weren't ready to commit another $30k to a company that wouldn't serve us with issues once they took our money.
We went from talking about how much we love our cars to warning everyone we talk to about how awful customer service is. As good as these cars are the customer service is equally bad and Tesla won't do anything about it as long as their sales numbers keep going up. Service resource expansion has not come anywhere near pacing sales #'s but hey... stock prices are up and they posted another quarterly profit so who cares..... right?!
This is unreal. This is NOT how customer service works.
That's it for about a six to eight state-region of the Mountain/Southwest/Midwest US depending on how you look at it.
The Evans location has four technicians and seemingly the same number of service writers although only three were present the day we were there. The Littleton location has maybe six (best count as of this post) techs and an equal number of service writers, maybe less. So they compound the problem of not enough service centers spread out with the fact that the few they have are incredibly understaffed and under resourced. Things are looking bleak in terms of getting quality assistance should you have a problem, right? But wait... there's more!!
There are two separate phone numbers for each location but they both ring into a single phone managed by a guy named Scott. That's right, one single human being fields phone calls for tens of thousands of Tesla owners across several states of the region. As you can imagine, this person is quite busy. I've never actually got him to answer a call no matter what option I select. If I'm lucky, I can leave a voice mail and he will usually get back to me... eventually. A majority of the time I can't even leave a voice mail because the mail box is full.
Imagine having a serious issue with your car and not even being able to talk to a human being about getting it fixed. I don't have to imagine because I've experience this first-hand now numerous times. Tesla seemingly has two dozen (I'm being generous with that high guesstimate) actual human beings that handle ALL of the service issues in about a half-dozen state area of the US. I can't even blame the employees because each one seems to be doing the work of four or five. This is just Tesla's idea of proper staffing for X number of customers.
If you schedule an appointment via the app you often times get a call back for the most common issues that can be repaired in the field to be asked if you'd prefer that. For people like us who live over an hour one-way (w/good traffic which is nearly non-existent these days) from the nearest service center, this is the best possible news you can receive. Our Ranger Tech for the Northern area of Colorado, named Nick, is incredible. He's punctual, professional and very good at his job. If Tesla employed a few dozen people like him at each location and actually fielded phone calls I would have no issue. Sadly, they don't. The worst case scenario is that you have a problem that must be handled by the service center because this is when the nightmare begins, not ends.
Our most recent saga began when we had a slight clunk in the steering when we turned the wheel. Barely noticeable but I wanted it fixed since we were under warranty before it got worse. We set an appointment via the app as we were coming in from out-of-town. The first available appointment was several weeks away so we selected it and hoped that we'd get a call back saying that they could fix it at our location. Sadly, this wasn't the case so we took the day off to drive the car down for service since it would be an all-day-affair.
Upon arrival the morning of our appointment, we were informed there was no loaner and our car would be put "into queue" now that our car was physically there. Let me say that again because you may not have caught it the first time: our appointment wasn't an appointment at all. Instead it was waiting weeks to get the car into a line to wait again to be looked at by a technician just to be able tell us what was wrong, if they had parts and how long it would take to repair and return to us. It was a Friday and they told us they wouldn't even be able to look at the car until the following week. What was the appointment for?
The service writers spent an obscene amount of time arguing as to how they worked for other car manufacturers and it was the same process. No, it's not. Don't treat me like I'm a moron because it's nothing like other car manufacturers and not in a positive way. I can call a local Honda, Ford or GM (not even getting into luxury brands that go above and beyond) service center near me right now and not only will a human answer the phone by the 2nd ring but I will have an appointment within a few days after a brief call to get my information and properly schedule. During that appointment, I will wait in a waiting room for 5-15 minutes (depending on the extent of the diagnosis) and the service writer will tell me on the spot what the problem is, what it will cost and if they can do the repairs now or if they have to schedule for a later date. If it's the latter it will often be within a few days even if they have to order parts. I'll have a single point of contact the entire time and the person will follow up with me to make sure I'm happy with my experience too because THEY ACTUALLY CARE. This is nothing like Tesla.
They then offered to Uber us somewhere. Really? We set an appointment just to get our car into a line to be looked at at a later date? What's the point of an appointment!? They tried to explain how busy they were and why this method was necessary to their work flow and, frankly speaking, I just don't care. Their solution is to Uber us back 1.5 hours to the city we're from and then Uber us around for a week or two for all of our commuting and errands and finally Uber us back down to Denver to pick up the car? No wonder this company is hemorrhaging money in the service dept. Their solution is to deny claims and tell people their obvious warranty work isn't covered when what they need to do is figure out their communication and logistics on the front end. An ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure applies 100% here.
We even had to get into a heated verbal discussion with the Service staff just to get a loaner they initially claimed they didn't have even though we made it clear numerous times Uber simply wouldn't work for us and our unique situation. They finally gave us a shot-out RWD car for a loner with snow looming the following week. "No worries" they told us, they'd have it back to us in less than a week. I had my doubts but I believed them.
We got an automated text the following Monday saying that they found the problem and attempted to charge us for the repair as well as several other up-sell opportunities. I had to remind them that the car was still under warranty and I wanted only the problem fixed that we brought the car in for. Great, they'd have it done the next day is what we were told.
The next day (Tuesday) I checked the Tesla app and it said the car was expected to be done by 5:30pm. No call. Nothing. Wednesday came and went. Nothing. I attempted to call, text & email repeatedly because Thursday was predicted to have a foot of snow and I didn't want my wife driving a RWD car to work and back. We owned AWD cars in Colorado specifically for days like this and now we didn't have the AWD car we paid for. RWD wasn't a big deal for when it's summertime & sunny and we were appreciative of the loaner but I would have taken our car back that day had I known my wife was going to have to drive the RWD loaner in that kind of snow. Thursday, still nothing. Finally, on Friday, I got someone to call asking about the loaner. Had we not had the loaner who knows when we could have got our car back.
The icing on the cake? There's now a new clunk in the steering/suspension that wasn't there when we took the car in. The soonest we could schedule an appointment via the app is over a month away! We're now going to have to through this entire fiasco again and I feel like every time we take a car into service we take one step forward and two back since they screw up more than they fix when they have one of our cars for repair. I can't even talk to someone to see if they can make an exception to get us in sooner given they clearly screwed something up during the previous repair.
Tesla wants to be taken serious as a car manufacturer and yet they don't take it serious themselves. They want to be a viable complete option for a family rather than the "second car" that someone owns yet still has to keep an ICE car for actual real-world use and yet they can't be trusted enough to do that. We're now a Tesla only family and I'm seeing first-hand what it's like to trust this company with 100% of your transportation needs. I would never bat an eyelash to owning two Hondas or two Toyotas or two of just about any other brand as our only means of transportation. With Tesla I have serious doubts they can keep us on the road and things are getting worse not better since Elon stated nearly a year ago they were working on the dire Service issue. It's been a year. It's safe to say they are either unable to address it through incompetency or they just don't care about customer service as much as they'd like us to believe.
Around the same time as this latest of many Tesla car service fiascoes I canceled our contract with Tesla to install solar on our roof. We were on the fence and based on the awful customer service we recently received on our cars plus the horror stories we were hearing on the Tesla Solar side of things we decided we just weren't ready to commit another $30k to a company that wouldn't serve us with issues once they took our money.
We went from talking about how much we love our cars to warning everyone we talk to about how awful customer service is. As good as these cars are the customer service is equally bad and Tesla won't do anything about it as long as their sales numbers keep going up. Service resource expansion has not come anywhere near pacing sales #'s but hey... stock prices are up and they posted another quarterly profit so who cares..... right?!
This is unreal. This is NOT how customer service works.
