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Is the $1,000 deposit Refundable?

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My sister signed up for a car but has a long wait since she doesn't own one, but I'm not going to use my reservation and wanted to give it to her, but someone at Tesla said the deposit is non-refundable?
Is this true??
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The initial deposit is, but the additional one when you actually configure and place your order is not. A friend of ours who was going to get the standard version couldn't wait once they pushed out the delivery date on it to next year and got her $1000 deposit back.
 
I had two of them and cancelled one because I bought my X, had it back in a couple of weeks. No problem at all. Never mind the actual terms, they have so much backlog, they would love to give a few back out of the almost 500K!

And on the actual order, these are not custom orders at this point. You are being assigned one car that is in a lot in California. Not like a custom S or X.
 
Not exactly but she could cancel, get her money back and give that to her brother; and he could let her configure his reservation he said he wasn't going to use and have her titled on that car especially her being a relative.
Yes you are right. One can transfer to Immediate family, missed that she’s his sister
 
Absolutely incorrect. Deposit is completely refundable.

Yes, it is completely refundable in the sense that you cancel your reservation and then start chasing them to get your money back.

Upon canceling, they promptly removed the reservation form my tesla.com account, without any email, phone or mailed acknowledgement. It’s been 3 weeks and I have not seen a refund posted to my CC account.

I presume it’s expected of me to call around and figure out why they can’t have a working process for what has to be a very simple and frequent type of transaction. I’m deliberately ignoring the bloody obvious reason, i.e. they’re nearly broke and would love to hold on to a free loan for as long as possible.
 
Yes, it is completely refundable in the sense that you cancel your reservation and then start chasing them to get your money back.

Upon canceling, they promptly removed the reservation form my tesla.com account, without any email, phone or mailed acknowledgement. It’s been 3 weeks and I have not seen a refund posted to my CC account.

I presume it’s expected of me to call around and figure out why they can’t have a working process for what has to be a very simple and frequent type of transaction. I’m deliberately ignoring the bloody obvious reason, i.e. they’re nearly broke and would love to hold on to a free loan for as long as possible.
I’ve bought and cancelled multiple products. I can only speak from my experience and there’s no issues.
Credit card refunds often take 5 or more business days. One time my credit card was no longer valid and then they just issues me a check. I believe that took 3 weeks, though required no interaction from me.

Rather than speculate and presume worst intent it would seem easy just to call. Good luck
 
Yes, it is completely refundable in the sense that you cancel your reservation and then start chasing them to get your money back.

Upon canceling, they promptly removed the reservation form my tesla.com account, without any email, phone or mailed acknowledgement. It’s been 3 weeks and I have not seen a refund posted to my CC account.

I presume it’s expected of me to call around and figure out why they can’t have a working process for what has to be a very simple and frequent type of transaction. I’m deliberately ignoring the bloody obvious reason, i.e. they’re nearly broke and would love to hold on to a free loan for as long as possible.

Please - Tesla burns $8,000 per minute. Don't flatter yourself with thinking your $1000/7.5 seconds of operational uptime contribution means anything to them.
 
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I’ve bought and cancelled multiple products. I can only speak from my experience and there’s no issues.
Credit card refunds often take 5 or more business days. One time my credit card was no longer valid and then they just issues me a check. I believe that took 3 weeks, though required no interaction from me.

Rather than speculate and presume worst intent it would seem easy just to call. Good luck

She DID CALL. And some IDIOT told her it's non-refundable. I just wanted to check here before telling her she spoke to an idiot. I remember the site saying it was refundable when I signed up for the wait list.
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@aus -

Mike was replying to TeeEmCee.

The deposit is refundable.. just talk to someone else. Depending on how much time has passed, it will either go back on the card or they will issue a check. Check method takes around 3 weeks from what I've heard.
 
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Just a FYI, when I cancelled mine they didn't actually process the refund. After a month I rung them and they said they'd look into it. A week later I chased again and they then told me they had forgotten to process it.

A week later the money appeared in my account.

It's just worth chasing them if the money isn't refunded after a couple of weeks.
 
She DID CALL. And some IDIOT told her it's non-refundable. I just wanted to check here before telling her she spoke to an idiot. I remember the site saying it was refundable when I signed up for the wait list.
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Um, sorry @aus, my first response was to you. This response you’re quoting was to TeeMemCee. Here approach was a lot more barbed, yours was reasonable and understandable. Hopefully makes more sense now ;)
 
Just a FYI, when I cancelled mine they didn't actually process the refund. After a month I rung them and they said they'd look into it. A week later I chased again and they then told me they had forgotten to process it.

A week later the money appeared in my account.

It's just worth chasing them if the money isn't refunded after a couple of weeks.
When I ordered Roadster, they ”lost” the inbound wire transfer for 7 days - long enough that we were starting a wire trace route investigation. Took almost another 3 days after they found it to make it to the account online. This can happen both ways, hence my earlier comments :)
 
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Requested via the web page that my refund go to my debit card. Money was back in my account in 2.5 business days. Very easy. Log into your My Tesla page, open the Model 3 reservation and you will find the link there.

That's kind of the point. They removed the reservation right away and there is no place to select any option, nor was there such an option when canceling. No confirmation of any sort, other than an on-screen message after having submitted the cancellation.

To me this comes across exactly like the behavior of many of the target market on this forum, i.e. "thank you for your money and welcome to the cult", followed by "buzz off, you're not worthy" if I fail to worship correctly.

I hope they'll get their act together and I'll be able to buy one of their cars once they have finally got to the point where they care about quality and service.
 
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