That is not even remotely true. Tesla profit margins on the S and X are higher than any automobile manufacturer, high 28.05% was their peak Q1 2015). The others dream about having such margins. BMW is considered the leader of the rest, and they haven't broken 20% since 2007.
My 2015 car was speced with at 691hp, 85KWh battery, and was supposed to "find me anywhere on private property". Clock ticked down to 4 years, the car is out of warranty, and none of these things were ever delivered. I have a 463hp car, with almost 82KWh battery (77KWh usable) and the car will drive up to few tenth of feet in a straight line while I hole the dead-man-switch. So yes, Tesla can just let the clock tick down to no warranty, especially that they had the forethought to add fine print to FSD which stated that there is no way to tell when it will be delivered, therefore it could be millions of years.
Tesla margins are still higher than BMW today. Maybe Tesla should have gone with a dealership model too and we'd have better service, at least competition.
And your friend has the option to go to a different dealer. All service centers are Tesla owned and they will not compete with each other so Tesla customers have no choice but to pay whatever Tesla says, wait however long Tesla queue is, wait for parts or service for months if that's how long they feel like taking, etc, etc. No competition is for example how they get away with $3,000 to swap out your MCU with a refurbished one (they keep your old one to refurb and sell to the next sucker) when the $10 EMMC fails, and customers have no choice because the is useless without it and Tesla locks it down tight so nobody can sell and install you a new or refurbished one once your emmc dies completely. Talk about stealership.
You can try, however no guarantees (other than you don't pay if they cannot recover). Tesla service is the only place where you can reprogram the MCU from scratch.
You are right, I do have a choice, hence I stopped buying new Teslas. However, just like in the past I used to tell anyone who would listen why they should buy a Tesla, I am now warning people about Teslas - trying to undo the damage I did. I guess that is the double edge of passionate customers, they can be a company's best advocates, but they can also become the opposite.
You'd rather he lied and said Tesla had the best customer service ever?
As long as I continue to receive poor customer service support I will continue expressing my experience with said customer service support. If Tesla cares to do something about my poor experience and that of many others, they will.
But customer service goes hand in hand in this case since Tesla doesn't allow for 3rd party repairs under warranty. The fact that it's literally a car on wheels means 100% reliability on them to fix issues.
You are correct, they won't. Tesla focus right now is primarily on new customer acquisition. Once they run out of new customers to acquire, that is when they will notice, and only then will it become Elon's actual high priority, as it once was (when he needed to convince people to buy early adopter cars). It's the Silicon Valley startup approach, deal with the problem when it becomes urgent and not a minute earlier, as it wastes precious resources. As long as Tesla has drones of new customers lined up, existing customers are not worth spending many resources on, beyond keeping large legal liabilities away, and maybe any large media storms. Customer waves in the US may be slowing down already though, as evidenced recently by Tesla not having enough Model Y 5 seat configuration orders to fill even the initial production run. The question is whether Elon will decide that fixing service is worth investing in to keep USA customers, or will it be more more profitable to invest in new markets like China and let the US market dwindle.
I agree that they probably won't like it, but just like in the US it doesn't matter, as it only affects repeat customers. China is a fresh new market with tons of potential new customers who will hand Tesla money before they learn about service quality, and by then there will be no refunds. Bad service is not a problem to a startup as long as you have new customers willing to hand you money for your product.
