Thank you for bothering people for a good cause. I look forward to purchasing a 14-30 adapter soon.
In the future what is the best way to let Tesla know that they need to rethink something again?
You know, I was just thinking the exact same question. And it really is a good question, despite the dislike rating you received. Here is a very long response that may or may not turn out with an answer.
Tesla has policies and procedures in place for running their company. Their core mission is to build cars, sell cars, and service those cars if need be. The 3 big picture items are well documented and for the most part, run along fine. It's the little corner cases, like this adapter, where the policy and procedure hasn't been finalized yet. It used to be, when Tesla was small, you'd call up whomever you had dealt with in the past, and they would know someone that could help. But now they have 15k employees and growing. While management is flat, I was finding that a lot of people were only really familiar with other people at their level, in their department. The trick was finding the longer term employees that knew people who had moved on to
other departments and possibly moved up as well.
I think Tesla has realized that not all of their customers have great ideas. They certainly appreciate all of us for buying cars, but let's face it, some of us have some pretty dumb suggestions on how things should be done. Either because we aren't as smart, or more likely, we don't have all the information.
Whenever you make a suggestion to Tesla through serviceNA, they write it down and send it along it's way. I'm entirely unclear what happens after that. Based on feedback from owners and the sometimes slow-moving results, I tend to think your suggestion gets filed away like Dwights complaints in The Office. But seriously, I'm sure someone looks at them and determines that with the resources Tesla has, A, B, and C can be done, but D, E, and F need to wait. Now, here is where I can only suppose. If 250 people call in and ask for the NEMA 14-30, does that person see a total of requests in a report every 6 months? Or do they only see the daily rate at which those requests come in? Because you could get different results based on which way you look at it, right? "We get this request once a day." would garner more attention than, "We see this request once every two weeks." But, "Over the last 6 months, 250 people have requested this to happen." might be an attention getter as well.
In this specific instance, I took the online voting results and sent them personally, to several departments as well as making follow-up phone calls, and bringing up the subject in person. I don't know exactly where the decision came from if it was any one department. Or if they were in a weekly meeting and three department heads said, "Hey, I had this TMC poll come in.", "Hey, I saw that one too.", "Hey, me too."
I pretty much know for certain that without the voting results, nothing would have been done. Everything is a numbers game with Tesla right now. They need to devote resources to where they will get the most bang for their buck. And one person's request, just isn't going to cut it in getting something done.There could be exceptions on here for people like /u/bonnie who may have a more personal relationship with some of the C-level exces. But even she needs to be discerning in what requests she passes along, for fear of losing influence (I could be wrong here). Tesla employees are very busy people and in my opinion, should only be bothered by really important things. But the flip-side is that rooted in the company mentality is that
if it's important to an owner, it's important to Tesla. But what may be important to you, isn't important to me. So back to prioritizing based on the numbers. I firmly believe that if they had the resources, every request would get a personal response and an action.
This ties in with the 7.1 Software Improvement Voting we did almost a year ago. That poll garnered almost 5k votes from over 500 owners with 200 suggestions (and only 150 good ones
). We have seen at least 5 items from that list make it into v7 software, and my gut feeling is that we will see some more with v8. Now, it could be that voting did nothing to influence Tesla. And that's a valid conclusion since we really didn't receive any direct feedback from them. But then again, it could have since those features really were requested and they really did make it in.
All that to say this. I think Tesla should have an "Ambassador Board" that is made up of only the crazy of the crazy of us. Those who are out there every day talking about the car, getting comments from owners, possibly getting referrals for sales, active on the forums, etc. This group would provide a rough focusing for Tesla that would act as either a starting point or a litmus test for the direction of certain things Tesla would like to implement. There would be no compensation offered, only a legitimate line of communication to help an ever-growing company stay in touch with an ever growing owner-base.
