This has been without a doubt the most dissatisfying car buying experience I have ever been a part of! The current arrangement for buying a Tesla certainly isn't providing a better car buying experience that is Tesla's stated goal; that much is for sure.
I just hope I can forget all of these issues when my car finally arrives......
I have to agree. The whereabouts of our Model S (VIN 1380) has been difficult to pin down for the better part of a month. Our original window was quoted to us as 12/7-12/21. It's still MIA with previous bait-and-switch delivery notions made and superseded. It seems Tesla is completely unprepared for what it takes to deliver cars in more-than-Roadster volumes. Our Roadster experience is what gave us the confidence to order the Model S back in 2009. Had we had the current experience first, we might be a zero Tesla family instead of a paid-for-2 with one-in-the-garage Tesla family.
It's also completely amateurish (or squeamishly over-lawyered) to refuse to attach the winter wheel/tire set before delivery. This curious custom has a work around ... maybe. My Product Specialist (a nice guy) with whom I have been conversing, in lieu of a Delivery Specialist (who knows why?), has kept in touch with the nearest Service Center (Chicago - 5 hours away) to graciously provide a Ranger to do the summer-wheel/winter-wheel swap when the car is delivered. The only fly in that ointment is that the delivery date keeps shifting out and the scheduled whereabouts of the Ranger becomes more and more murky. So, I get questions like, "How many days following delivery would it be OK to not have the winter tires mounted yet?"
I wish they wouldn't promise to do things they can't control and I wish they would better accommodate changes in their schedule when we haven't done anything to cause their problem. Apart from the Model S delivery schedule cluster foxtrot, our Roadster has had a weird problem in the turn signal controls that causes annoying, repetitive warning messages to appear and beeps to sound since this Summer. A number of unsuccessful Ranger visits have ensued, at 2-month intervals, usually many weeks after initially promised/expected. The Chicago Service Center has promised to pick up the Roadster to work on it, but only after they finish with another car from Ohio -- some unspecified time in the future.
Some of the problems with the Roadster service delays was caused by some Tesla-corporate MBA-type that switched our Ranger coverage from Chicago-based to Bronx-based last year. This caused the Ranger-to-customer travel times to go from 5 hours one way to 12-13 hours one way. Ridiculous!
What I now quietly fear is that the Chicago visit will keep getting pushed back until the Columbus, OH Service Center (2 hours away) is stood up in March and they will take over our account. That sounds good in practice, but curing the weird electrical module glitch will be put on the shoulders of a completely new (and Roadster-naive) service crew. I shudder to contemplate.
