wiztecy, innocent question: Has Gruber 'messed up' in this regard in the past? I don't know him personally, but have referred others to him because I know of no other Tesla Roadster independent service shop and was hoping he was starting something that is so needed in our community. Does ElectricLove work for Gruber or is he Gruber? I see they both live in the Phoenix area. I also see that he has posted in this thread. Just a naive old-timer here who hasn't had his ear to the ground in awhile (as Bonnie can attest).
I can answer this; I am NOT Gruber, I do work for the company.
They hired me to help "build" the new department which was originally intended to service Tesla Roadsters in the 3rd party space. However, my boss has no idea how to appropriately market the company in any way but a low-class walmart shoppers approach. His approach did us no good and in reality hurt the image of the business severely. I have stated a bunch of times on the forums that I didn't approve his approaches and that I advised against the approach, however I ended up getting dragged through the mud with him.
Now, this thread was created by the guy who bought my first roadster from me, I loved the car and it taught me most of what I know about the Roadsters. I bought it as a salvage vehicle and worked hard to rebuild the front end of it and get the communications systems up and running, it performed well and never let me down. I wanted to have tesla service update the firmware for me and my local service center gave me a hard time about it, I came on the forums to protest what I felt was poor policy from Tesla corporate and the responses I got were varied, some people told me that it depends on the service center you go to, others tried their best to thwart any resemblance of "anti-tesla" speak and still others supported my gripes... Nature of the forums...
I listed that same car on eBay and sold it for around $40K, I disclosed everything about the vehicle itself that I was aware of (especially that it was salvage title), I answered any and every question from the buyer honestly and he was happy to be buying the car for about $25-30K under "clean-title" price (it was a 2.0 Roadster included CAN SR, J1772 adapter, HPWC and 50A tesla charger). Thought everything was fine, he messaged me a couple weeks after receiving it about an issue where the PEM was getting hot on one of the phases; I gave him guidance on how to fix that issue and the guidance I gave proved accurate and fixed the problem. Again, I thought everything was fine
Anyways, a few months went by and then he emailed me about deceiving him (after starting this thread and finding on TMC where I had voiced my disappointment with tesla service center policies). His opinion is that I should have told him about Tesla's policies ahead of time b/c now he wants to take it to Tesla for service and he can't because it didn't pass the Tesla certification inspection (which he was aware of prior to purchase but I never took it through the inspection so I didn't know if it would pass/fail, I honestly assumed it would pass but it wasn't worth it to me @ $1,300). At this point he thinks I just "off-loaded" my crap onto him.
This is the entire story as objectively stated as I can, I'm sure others will "add" to it.
But in short, this is all (basically) just drama with no bearing on what the company I work for has to offer, we have started repairing customer PEM's and other various components of the Roadster and have taken care of our customers effectively, we are legitimately becoming a 3rd party option for Tesla vehicles. We are currently investing more R&D time into the Model S as we've got the Roadster pretty well pegged-down at this point. We are also branching into Smart EVs and Prius (for the sake of having an actual market). The Roadster service industry will never be a profitable one, the limited number of vehicles prohibits that, we really got into it due to the mutual love for the vehicle that the owner (Gruber) and I share, but we've learned the Roadster community is rather fickle and there is abundantly more opportunity in the mass-produced vehicles out there. We will, however, continue to service Roadsters for the foreseeable future.
