End of a love affair :(

[WannabeOwner]

I assume you don't have something akin to the Lemon Law

Yes we do (UK), well not sure its exactly the same, but ... "Trade Descriptions Act" entitles customer to get what they were told they would be getting etc etc

the airbag light came on and stayed on

(I've had my car nearly 3 years).

Tesla told me I must not drive it when that happened. I noticed it about a mile down the road after collecting the car from Service, presumably it was there when I left and I hadn't noticed ... Tesla neither ...

Car had been in for a headlight fault (I've never read of anyone else having a matching problem on this forum so lets assume it was a "One Off"). That introduced me to the daily courtesy phone call of "Parts arriving tomorrow" ... for a week. Give me a break ... in this day and age of just-in-time delivery I'm sure computer inventory systems know arrival time to the minute ... followed by a week of "parts arrived, your car is scheduled to go into workshop tomorrow" ... although before that when I dropped it off reception went through a whole rigmarole of asking me what was wrong, despite having a point-by-point email. "Oh I see in your email that you have provided a link to a YouTube showing the exact problem, thank you" ... once the engineer inspected it I got a call "Sorry, there doesn't seem to be any problem, can you explain it in detail"
"have you seen the YouTube I made specifically to show you?"
"What YouTube ..."

So, yeah, that was a month or so in the shop ... on the way to (my abortive attempt to) pick it up I phone ahead to ask for the car to be charged to 100% because I had a long journey ahead. "Certainly Sir". Not only was that not done, but the car wasn't even out-front, and a delivery vehicle prevented them getting it out for 15 minutes ...

Here's a tip. When you go to Tesla in the loaner to pick up your, fixed , car then on arrival put the loaner on charge and do not release the key until you are sure your car is in good shape. I had to get back in the same Loaner, luckily not yet reassigned ... but with much diminished range

Most recent annual service was nearly 3 weeks because it needed a new boot catch (it was only self-locking 60% of the time). That part took a couple of weeks to arrive ... why? ... mean time I'm driving around in their Loaner, which must be a nightmare for logistics ("Yeah. we'd love to give you a loaner, but some bloke in Suffolk is driving around in it ...")

Tesla have never solved "Static on radio" nor "Cold feet an hour into the journey" ("A quick test indicates that foot well temperature is as per specification", despite me saying "Give the car to someone doing a long personal trip at the weekend and see if they have a problem after an hours drive"), and after 18 months or so I gave up on getting them fixed. These are clearly not critical problems, but equally they aren't things that I expect in a £100K car. As my wife says "How come every loaner we have had has not had those problems". Tesla said at one point that the static would be fixed in a future software update ... and it was ... but the next update regressed the error, and it has never been fixed since. I'm a software engineer, if we had QA like Tesla we would be out of business; we are only a small company, yet we built automated regression testing for QA because clearly doing it manually was unreliable, and doing it manually every time was expensive, and we thought the investment to automate it was worthwhile. I never thought about the bad PR of NOT getting the QA right; dodged a bullet right there ...

Remember this one (of many)? The original 3-Slide Graphic Equaliser was changed to 5-slides. Whoopee! What's this, it forgets its settings every time I get out of the car? THAT got through QA?

Love driving it though, and would buy another (unless the rest of the EV makers do something impressive, which I thought they would, but they seem to be singularly failing).

Taycan next for me

I just hope Range Rover hurry up and put a whole battery in the Vogue,

When Jag talked of making a BEV I asked in this forum "Why don't they give Tesla a call" and the answer I got was "Pi$$ easy to build a BEV compared to an ICE, no need to buy the bits from Tesla"

yeah, well, "not as easy as you thought, eh?" Both iPace and eTron range disappointing - even with 7 years of tech improvements since MS launched ... iPace software a complete dogs breakfast ... significant variability on battery car-to-car, presumably because 3rd party supplier (supplierS?) inconsistency, either way it is now apparent that it is a risk for new BEVs ... but it seems to illustrate that that is the best those Makers could do

Maybe Porsche will make a great Version One, but I'm not in the market to roll dice on that one.

And my memory is long, life-long in fact, on being shafted by VAG. never going to buy anything from their stable ever again. Also not impressed that eTron launch delayed because the Boss was being slung into jail ...

 

[WannabeOwner]

The whole P pricing is a mind bender

I'm not sure about that ...

Yup, I get that all existing owners are "hosed"

but it may be a masterstroke in scaring the competition, and the huge increase in audience size that a significant price drop creates.

 

[james80]

Cold feet an hour into the journey

I thought this was just me. Cold toes 30 mins in most days.

In fact, my heater vents are all fully autonomous, maybe I ticked the full heating self drive option.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the car is that no matter where you specify you want the ventilation on. I.e. just foot well. Or just forward facing vents.

The screen vent still blows like crazy straight in the face..

Over the winter I couldn’t work out why I seemed to have a persistent cold... through a Sherlock Holmes level deductive reasoning exercise, I discovered that humidity levels in the car dropped as low as 15% with the heater on. A healthy humidity is about 3 times that. (See image attached taken in February)

When humidity is this low, the air takes back moisture from where ever it can to restore balance... eyes, nose, throat & chest being the closest candidates. This dehydrates and hardens mucas (sorry) and makes it impossible for the body to clear colds/sinus.

So yeah. Sorry. But that’s another thing that bothers me about Tesla.

When it comes to in car ventilation. Down means down. Straight means straight and screen means screen. Why not let the customer decide without trying to think for them.


Ps. You can buy a hygrometer on amazon for £5 and find out for yourself.

 

[Shock-On-T]

I reserved my Model X in 2016 and it arrived in April 2017.

I had some relatively forgivable issues when they delivered it (curbed alloy, issues with the leather on the passenger seat, dent in the frame near FWD, misaligned main front camera, crunching door mechanism and maybe a few other little ones)

I didn't really moan, despite it requiring a number of trips to the SC in the first few months of ownership and other than the inconvenience and the frustration of having to rock around in a smokey diesel jag X type loaner for a while and that the car came back twice without a fix for the door mechanism issues, which persisted until it finally crunched itself to death completely and required a full replacement. I just got on with it and forgot about the troubles, I was so in love with how great the Model X was.

Then about a year and a bit later the airbag light came on and stayed on. After numerous attempts with the call centres it was looking like it would have to go back in to the dreaded service centre as soon as I had the time to get it there, then after a software update in early Dec the main heater unit burned itself out (as did hundreds of others around the world apparently). So, I shivered my way in to the service centre.

So, a quick update… it’s almost April and it’s still in the service centre

In my 23 months of Tesla ownership, my model X has spent about 4 months in the service centre.

A week or two ago, missing my car and in a fit of madness, I enquired about buying a newer performance model and asked them for a price for trading in my existing one in. To my surprise Tesla came back to me and said that my less than 2 year old car that cost nearly £95k has a trade in value of £44k. (That’s an official figure from the sales centre.)

So.. my car is depreciating at about £500 per week. (I say again.. 4 months in the service centre)

A pretty brutal figure once you calculate the tax (income not road obviously), insurance, other costs etc

So, the hit of having my car in service for about 4 months is starting to look pretty unreasonable.

I just want to say that I love my model X and I've only ever given a glowing recommendation of the car itself.

As a car, it's excellent. fast, fun, clean, awesome.

But as a company, a luxury car company, Tesla has so much catching up to do.

We shouldn’t have to drive around wondering when something small is going to snap, crunch or go pop and it cost thousands and take months. That’s just not cool.

The reason for this rant, is that I would like to hear (privately) from any other owners that have had a similarly ridiculous experience and what resolution you came to with Tesla.

The (very nice guy) that leads the service centre team suggested that he had a £100 max authorisation last week when it came to restoring goodwill to customers. I'm not sure if he realised that my car lost 5 times more than that in a days it took him to get back to my email asking if Tesla thought it was reasonable) I should have suggested he puts on some new wipers as it eats them pretty quickly.

I'm also annoyed that they most likely will have let my battery run down to zero over the freezing months in Jan/Feb (it’s been totally dead on the app since Dec other than one single alert saying that charging was interrupted in Jan).

I'm sure I will attract enough fire just asking a question like this (I used to convince myself when reading so many similar stories that it probably wouldn’t happen to me) and I'm not asking for anyone to publish their experience and resolutions publicly, please email me privately on [email protected].

Before you criticise my exasperated rant on here.. ask yourself how you would feel in the same position.

It’s really not reasonable at all. I personally feel fortunate to be able to buy and own a car like the model X, but that doesn’t mean we should suffer with such utterly appalling customer service / experience and the lamentable handling of such matters by Tesla.

I'm so sorry for your circumstances.
The car itself is fantastic, but this is far too long in service and I can understand your annoyance.
A bit of a shame really considering if this hadn't happened you'd be merrily enjoying the vehicle.

 

[CommuniK]

I rented an X from 3fev for a long weekend as a test drive a couple of months ago whilst considering a purchase. My main gripe was my right leg being freezing during the trips we made. I had to have the seat heater on just to try and keep warm. I figured it was the fact it was a 2016 75D and maybe it was different in the newer builds. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to heat up the footwell!

 

[GreenT]

Reading all the threads like this, (and I am one of the people whose car is in SC so often) ... I simply do not understand why people are still clamoring to buy any car from this company?
Yes it's the "best" car out there ... except the word BEST must include the company that stands behind it. And they simply do NOT.
When I see a Tesla on the road my mind just says "poor thing" to the driver.

On another note, james80, you might want a mod to remove your email address and just ask people to PM you.
Spam harvesters love scraping web sites for that. And the Edit timer on this web site is FAR TOO short so you cannot edit it now probably.

 

[thegruf]

Reading all the threads like this, (and I am one of the people whose car is in SC so often) ... I simply do not understand why people are still clamoring to buy any car from this company?
Yes it's the "best" car out there ... except the word BEST must include the company that stands behind it. And they simply do NOT.
When I see a Tesla on the road my mind just says "poor thing" to the driver.

On another note, james80, you might want a mod to remove your email address and just ask people to PM you.
Spam harvesters love scraping web sites for that. And the Edit timer on this web site is FAR TOO short so you cannot edit it now probably.

But this I think is the point, Elon calculates that for Tesla to get to where he thinks it can be, there will be carnage en route. Basically he coldly calculates that he has the money from early adopters (who are a troublesome bunch anyway) now he needs to move onto Model 3 buyers, then he will move on to Model Y buyers. Equating it to a bunch of locusts stipping an area bare and moving on is a bit harsh but it does convey the concept.
My point (having been badly caught by one of the "move ons" is that actually it costs very little to keep customers good will. For example offering a special eg £10K discount or perhaps a fully configured car for the base price to existing P owners for 6 months to offset their losses would go a long way towards maintaining goodwill and undoubtedly generate further sales.
This is precisely what a board should be doing and are abjectly failing at - refining Elon's robust strategy moves which rightly are designed to wrong foot the competition, into something that has broad acceptability and preserves what many would call one of Tesla's greatest strength in its loyal customer base.

 

[WannabeOwner]

For example offering a special eg £10K discount

What a good idea. Instead of £30K price drop Tesla could have offered discount to existing users ... or maybe everyone is on fixed period finance and couldn't have swapped at short notice? but if not could have encouraged all existing users to upgrade "cheap", feel good, forget about any past Woe ... and flood 2nd hand market with cars

I simply do not understand why people are still clamoring to buy any car from this company?

Still love driving it. I have other cars, so when it disappears into their workshop for an unpredictable amount of time it doesn't particularly matter, and to date they have always given me a loaner, so I've been putting miles on their Stock rather than mine ...

If the cars broke down by the roadside that would change my mind, but in general that's not an issue, and when I explained my headlight fault (toggling between Dip/Beam like a strobe) they did escalate it to undriveable and changed my service booking from "some weeks in the future" to "tomorrow" ... they still took a month to fix it, but I had the use of their loaner for that period ....

I don't want anything else ... weird isn't it?

 

[GreenT]

Weird, yes.
You're lucky, almost all of my breakdowns have occurred on the road ... today, with about 80,000 on it, I would not trust it beyond the grocery store.
I too LOVE driving it ... but only that far
Seen error messages on dash so often anxiety kicks in. Not range anxiety.
WISH it weren't so. Wish it were 2013 when I picked it up.

 

[sam48]

I placed a deposit on PX with the price drop but have always had some reservations. These sort of service/reliability issues in a 100K car are completely unacceptable. Think I’ll cancel and wait. Who knows when/if Tesla will get on top of these issues. The assumption I’ve had has always been it’s 2019, surely the various issues will have been resolved. I have a 3 year old CRV which runs like a dream and has zero reliability issues. I really want a Tesla but I really don’t want any of these sort of issues. Life’s too short!

 

[WannabeOwner]

Life’s too short!

It will be if people aren't prepared to make some lifestyle changes in order to reduce pollution and fossil fuel consumption ... that may not include buying a car due to reliability concerns, but of course what you read here is the ones that went wrong, not the ones that never went wrong.

Speaking for myself, the failures have been annoying, but that's it. I haven't broken down by the roadside, I've sent the car in for repair, been given a loaner, and then the repair took "forever". My only inconvenience was driving a brand new loaner instead of my own car

 

[Archer09]

This is shocking.

Last year the passenger seat in my 2015 Cayenne was slightly marked after seat heater cooked its way through the leather in a few spots. They replaced the whole seat in just over a week without question and had the drivers seat connolised to match. The car wasn’t even in warranty at that point.

I have been seriously considering a performance MX as my next car, but this sounds like a reliability lottery I don’t need. Maybe my next next one.

 

[Dangerous Fish]

This is shocking.

Last year the passenger seat in my 2015 Cayenne was slightly marked after seat heater cooked its way through the leather in a few spots. They replaced the whole seat in just over a week without question and had the drivers seat connolised to match. The car wasn’t even in warranty at that point.

I have been seriously considering a performance MX as my next car, but this sounds like a reliability lottery I don’t need. Maybe my next next one.

Well, a few years ago, a Porsche dealer destroyed the engine in my 911 during a service and refused to take responsibility.
I had to take legal action which went on for years and even though an expert witness proved they were responsible early on in the proceedings, they just would not admit they were in the wrong and dragged it out as long as they could before settling out of Court a few days before the case was going to start. Porsche GB washed their hands of the matter.

I will never consider buying any product from Porsche again as long as I live. It's not as though the service I got from various Porsche dealers was anything to write home about before then anyway. Frankly, I felt they didn't give a damn about their customers.

There are good and bad stories about every single car maker on the planet if you look hard enough.

I do sympathise with everyone who's had a bad Tesla experience and I hope I'm not going to be writing about one myself when I finally become a Tesla owner, but I've had plenty of bad experiences with many different cars over the years so I know bad build quality, reliability and poor customer service isn't confined to one or two manufacturers and it's certainly not exclusive to Tesla.

 

[GreenT]

Well, a few years ago, a Porsche dealer destroyed the engine in my 911 during a service and refused to take responsibility.

I do sympathise with everyone who's had a bad Tesla experience and I hope I'm not going to be writing about one myself when I finally become a Tesla owner, but I've had plenty of bad experiences with many different cars over the years so I know bad build quality, reliability and poor customer service isn't confined to one or two manufacturers and it's certainly not exclusive to Tesla.

It's not just the service problems ... it's their (lack of) locations ... England has 3 Tesla SC's that I can see. Etc. Compare that to Porsche? And I suspect that for Porsche like most other brands, service is usually at a sales center?
When I sell my car (privately), I am going to have a tough time keeping a straight face when the buyer asks ... "where do I get service"?
140 miles THATWAY ... or 145 miles THATAWAY.
Any questions?

 

[james80]

Wannabeowner, trust me. I’m on the same page. I pray for the day when all cars are electric and Tesla’s are easily the best of them. I hate the fact our kids have to breathe the pollution on our streets. It should have happened way before this in 2020.

I still love the cars. I just think it’s such a shame that they treat us like a one off, nearly six figure transactions with no care about looking after their customers.

I reserved my X before there was even one in the country to test drive, surely they should at least communicate better with customers that supported them early.

I also agree with what you say about a loaner for a week or so. Big deal right. It happens.

But nearly 4 months in a car without enough seats for my wife and kids. With no app control, no pre-heating on frosty days over the whole winter. (And let’s not forget what the heater is like especially while we endured a triple polar vortex or what ever it was called in jan!)

Just a boilerplate sms once a week with the same hollow news. (We are waiting for parts... blah blah..)

I’m just fed up as are clearly so many others.

But hey. If we want to be guinea pigs, maybe we shouldn’t moan about being tested on.

 

[Dangerous Fish]

It's not just the service problems ... it's their (lack of) locations ... England has 3 Tesla SC's that I can see. Etc. Compare that to Porsche? And I suspect that for Porsche like most other brands, service is usually at a sales center?
When I sell my car (privately), I am going to have a tough time keeping a straight face when the buyer asks ... "where do I get service"?
140 miles THATWAY ... or 145 miles THATAWAY.
Any questions?

Yes.
What map are you looking at to get 3 SCs?

About the only place in England you could live to be 140 miles away from a SC is the depths of Cornwall and I do feel for those Cornish Tesla owners, but they are in a minority.

 

[dhrivnak]

I reserved my Model X in 2016 and it arrived in April 2017.

I had some relatively forgivable issues when they delivered it (curbed alloy, issues with the leather on the passenger seat, dent in the frame near FWD, misaligned main front camera, crunching door mechanism and maybe a few other little ones)

I didn't really moan, despite it requiring a number of trips to the SC in the first few months of ownership and other than the inconvenience and the frustration of having to rock around in a smokey diesel jag X type loaner for a while and that the car came back twice without a fix for the door mechanism issues, which persisted until it finally crunched itself to death completely and required a full replacement. I just got on with it and forgot about the troubles, I was so in love with how great the Model X was.

Then about a year and a bit later the airbag light came on and stayed on. After numerous attempts with the call centres it was looking like it would have to go back in to the dreaded service centre as soon as I had the time to get it there, then after a software update in early Dec the main heater unit burned itself out (as did hundreds of others around the world apparently). So, I shivered my way in to the service centre.

So, a quick update… it’s almost April and it’s still in the service centre

In my 23 months of Tesla ownership, my model X has spent about 4 months in the service centre.

A week or two ago, missing my car and in a fit of madness, I enquired about buying a newer performance model and asked them for a price for trading in my existing one in. To my surprise Tesla came back to me and said that my less than 2 year old car that cost nearly £95k has a trade in value of £44k. (That’s an official figure from the sales centre.)

So.. my car is depreciating at about £500 per week. (I say again.. 4 months in the service centre)

A pretty brutal figure once you calculate the tax (income not road obviously), insurance, other costs etc

So, the hit of having my car in service for about 4 months is starting to look pretty unreasonable.

I just want to say that I love my model X and I've only ever given a glowing recommendation of the car itself.

As a car, it's excellent. fast, fun, clean, awesome.

But as a company, a luxury car company, Tesla has so much catching up to do.

We shouldn’t have to drive around wondering when something small is going to snap, crunch or go pop and it cost thousands and take months. That’s just not cool.

The reason for this rant, is that I would like to hear (privately) from any other owners that have had a similarly ridiculous experience and what resolution you came to with Tesla.

The (very nice guy) that leads the service centre team suggested that he had a £100 max authorisation last week when it came to restoring goodwill to customers. I'm not sure if he realised that my car lost 5 times more than that in a days it took him to get back to my email asking if Tesla thought it was reasonable) I should have suggested he puts on some new wipers as it eats them pretty quickly.

I'm also annoyed that they most likely will have let my battery run down to zero over the freezing months in Jan/Feb (it’s been totally dead on the app since Dec other than one single alert saying that charging was interrupted in Jan).

I'm sure I will attract enough fire just asking a question like this (I used to convince myself when reading so many similar stories that it probably wouldn’t happen to me) and I'm not asking for anyone to publish their experience and resolutions publicly, please email me privately on [email protected].

Before you criticise my exasperated rant on here.. ask yourself how you would feel in the same position.

It’s really not reasonable at all. I personally feel fortunate to be able to buy and own a car like the model X, but that doesn’t mean we should suffer with such utterly appalling customer service / experience and the lamentable handling of such matters by Tesla.

Man sorry to hear of your troubles my experience has been MUCH better. Two Tesla’s, 10 years of ownership and only a week at the service center between them.

 

[Dangerous Fish]

Maybe we should give it a while and see what all the new i-Pace and e-Tron owners are saying about their cars just to get some comparison?

 

[WannabeOwner]

They replaced the whole seat in just over a week without question and had the drivers seat connolised to match. The car wasn’t even in warranty at that point.

To be fair Tesla have similar after-sales-American-style no-quibble service like that - although I expect that what existed in early days, of lower volume sales, is being eroded, and Tesla is shifting from luxury brand, which was to pump-prime the company with Cash, to volume-builder, and service will therefore diminish). The parts-supply is the bottleneck and age-old "Shall we make parts for new cars, or for stock" issue, which I'm sure for Tesla is prioritised to selling cars because they need the Cash. There are also certainly some "Harder to fix" issues that take forever to sort out and the depth of knowledge just doesn't exist, or is not shared well enough, and yes that is definitely a worry if you wind up with one of those cars. Same thing with referral program, the "swag" for referrals is typically over a year before Tesla "pay up" ... and that's payment of a debt to Tesla's best sales-ambassadors ...

For sure that will be a turn-off for many people. If you have a spare car in the garage, and so long as road-side breakdown is as rare as other makes, and you want the car for other reasons (performance, minimalist cabin?, cool software/updates? supercar-performance in a daily-driver with huge cargo/passenger ability??) then why not? This is just my 100%-biased view of course

"where do I get service"?
140 miles THATWAY ... or 145 miles THATAWAY.
Any questions?

Well ... phrase that differently and definitely no questions: "Service is over 140 miles away, but Elon says the car will drive itself there, and back, Real-Soon-Now"

Anyone buying for cash, rather than finance, doesn't need to adhere to Tesla service interval (which is so short as to suggest that it is solely for Cash, or beta-test - i.e. so that Tesla get to see cars regularly to then be able to determine if any design changes are needed ... or, as has happened, that hardware is performing better than expected and thus increase 0-60 of whole fleet by 20% via software update) Unlike ICE there is nothing needed at service intervals equivalent to ICE. Brakes are virtually unused, no oil etc., brake fluid change every couple of years ...

I service my car at 30,000 mile interval (roughly annually for me) and Tesla send someone out to collect it, and drop off a Loaner, so distance is not an issue. Elon is saying "No more sales centres, no more test drives" ... OK that has been watered-down, but either other car makers are also going to stop doing that, or customers who want that are not going to buy Tesla.

I just think it’s such a shame that they treat us like a one off, nearly six figure transactions with no care about looking after their customers.

I wouldn't phrase it quite like that, but I'd be interested in other views. Service Personnel are dedicated and competent and I think that Tesla care, the issues are caused by phenomenal growth (nothing like enough service centres in the UK, but presumably not an easy thing to roll out ... or could be that the budget for that is low priority). Not excusing it, and I would love that Elon comes to sleep on a couch in the service department in the UK so he gets that figured out, and fixed. Surprises me that the managers in each Country have not fixed the problem, and I therefore conclude that there it is lack of Budget from above ...

see what all the new i-Pace ... owners are saying about their cars

I occasionally have a read of:

Main forum on i-paceforum.com
the Chat forum on UK ipaceforums.co.uk or if you specifically want to gauge level of grumbles the Faults forum (FWIW 25 topics on the first page, with posts spanning 9 days)

I haven't looked for any eTron forums as yet.

 

[RedBall]

JLR can't get non engine electronics right at all. It is by far and away the most common fault.

I've owned JLR vehicles for some years and with each subsequent generation incorporating more and more modern tech, the user experience has been in direct and opposite correlation.

The latest being a new discovery, which has been plagued with electronic issues for its entire life. Which is why I'm getting rid of in favour of the model x.

Whilst the disco is a great place to sit, and very well specced in terms of capability and finish, the in car systems and entertainment etc is absolutely abysmal. Utterly shameful. I've even been told by one dealer he wouldn't want to sell me a vogue at the time I was looking because of the vast number of returns for faulty systems of one sort or another.

As soon as they start relying on electronics for the propulsion as well, forget it. I wouldn't touch them with somebody else's 10ft barge pole.