I've loved Tesla for 7 years. But after years of abuse, I'm out

[JMEhrhart]

I put a deposit on a Model S over a decade ago. I bought a Signature model (one of the first 1,000 MS made) and became an outspoken evangelist for the company. For the fist year, it was a whirlwind romance and I probably sold a dozen+ cars myself and Tesla treated me like a member of the family. A few years in, things started to get rocky as Tesla got more and more busy but I understood. 100,000 owners vying for its attention made for a different dynamic. But then the Model X and eventually the model 3 came into the picture and Tesla started to be more distant and more cold. At first it was just a lack of personal touch but over time, it became neglect.
Now, its an outright abusive relationship. Tesla literally doesn't pick up the phone (this is not a cute relationship analogy- they don't pick up the phone). They discontinued the "owner experience" group (they used to address owner issues) because... who cares? They cut out the loaner program. They lied constantly ("we're increasing the loaner program! We're building a new service facility just for Model 3! We're selling features we can't deliver!") . They started charging $200 "deductible" for issues that are covered by warranty (after 7 years of not doing so and never making it clear it was even a possibility). I wrote a plaintive email into the great void of "[email protected]" as a last hope that somehow Tesla cared enough to at least lie to me about all this. No response at all.
Tesla, which started out with customer service akin to Apple had slowly devolved into a company with customer service worse than Spectrum (or any other monopolistic company). I guess somewhere along the way they realized that treating customers well was not its best strategy to keep its stock price high. Any resources that had been put to serving customers was reallocated to sales. The lie they tell that they are "trying" is as insulting as a spouse telling you they're "trying" not to cheat. Trying is as simple as investing in customer service (or not divesting what was already in place).
If you've been a Tesla owner for more than 5 years, I can't imagine that you too haven't felt the same neglect and abuse.

I absolutely hate Tesla. I love the car but hate the company. And that is awful. Feels like saying I hate an ex-lover because I truly did love this company for years. I learned to love electric cars and I'm hopeful that some company that still prioritizes customers will make a great one. Otherwise, I may just be stuck with an ICE car because as much as I love electric, I refuse to be treated like crap. Tesla should be ashamed of itself for letting its customers down and for shaming its own product in the process.

This is such an important issue and so critical for Tesla to get right. They are so product focused and are really failing at customer focus - despite having so many huge advantages to a traditional car company, most importantly a direct relationship with their customer. Tesla please listen to these voices!

 

[Battpower]

the PRE-Raven Model S seemed a lot less noisy than our Raven MS P

What sort of noises? Road? Wind? Motor? Rattles?

 

[Battpower]

Sometimes, complex issues are best resolved with spoken language rather than twitter text and equivalent grammar.

The trouble is, especially when talking about diagnosis and technical matters between people having different perspectives and experience, there are usually few checks made when using texts and written word that there has been correct understanding both ways. 'Modern communication' is often more about paying lip service and attributing liability' than 'making sure we all understand and are satisfied with the outcome'.

It's just too clumsy and long winded to be very accurate and specific with written language, and then go through the whole discussion multiple times fishing for odd nuance that might suggest misunderstanding.

The attempt to strip out all redundancy, attribute blame / responsibility / cost, do the work and end the job 100% clinically and perfectly might be an ideal, but in my service experience, reality has to be very different to keep customers happy. And that is the hard part. Keeping customers happy without being taken to the cleaners.

To take care of everone's needs takes very careful, professional, personable and effective communication - way beyond text messages and emails.

Personally, I'm fine giving text / email a go to start with if it works best for (Tesla) but you need to know there is a person that cares about the outcome of the communication that you can talk to if things aren't progressing.

 

[MassPlay]

Wait CPA, you are not tethered to your phone? How old are you?

I agree that App communication is not perfect. But I have to say, the no touch service arrangement has it Covid advantages.

<snip>

I hate calling clients. I love emailing them. And I turn 50 tomorrow. Imaging a 30 yo - average tesla employee age?

There is a tipping point where chatbot, txt and email just become a huge waste of time and what could be a 30-40 second phone conversation turns into wasted minutes/hours reading txts/emails, trying to make the language more precise as the person doesn't seem to understand and you're not sure why, things dangling because you're "waiting for a txt/email" and the sender doesn't have any time obligation to respond, etc. Txt/email also make it easier to get completely blown off (either unintentionally or intentionally by a CSR who has a performance metric on contacts closed/shift) and feel that you have no recourse. For truly good service you need that voice piece in addition to the others.

 

[Battpower]

There is a tipping point where chatbot .......
.......just becomes a huge waste of time

And that point is the moment you are forced to try and interact with one.

AI bots are the epitome of the very worst of customer service. Sure, if you haven't read the manual or have hours of time to waste, please use our chatbot. The ethos behind them is so transparent. 'We value you as a customer so much that we don't value talking to you but we will try to profile you and give you the same response as everyone else who matches your profile, regardless of your actual need'.

They take the most ineffective performance of a poorly informed, inept customer service rep and automate it to save employing a real person.

Total waste in most cases. May be ok for automated account services but beyond 'give me an update', 'pay my bills' and 'talk to agent' there's no point to them imo.

 

[Battpower]

It’s a form of therapy.

How do we escape from therapy?!

 

[XLR82XS]

So, do you have a car under warranty that is being denied a repair? Have you used the app to communicate?

I speak for a lot of owners saying sometime the app just cannot suffice when you need to talk to someone about service/support.

 

[SD Diver]

I speak for a lot of owners saying sometime the app just cannot suffice when you need to talk to someone about service/support.

Agree. Case in point - early last week, my wife and I each receive a recall notice on our 2 2013 model Ss (see .sig). We each independently arrange service and get the same time window - makes perfect sense - 2 cars with one visit. Tesla ranger shows up last Friday but only has parts for the wife’s car - not mine. So, I again need to contact Tesla. Can only do it through the app. Instead of 4 days, this time it is 3 weeks. I’d love to ask to be moved up in the queue given it was their screwup, but there is no one to talk to!

On top of this, I’m trying to buy an inventory vehicle and questions are taking forever to get answered. Thinking I should just give up for a few months...

 

[SmartElectric]

AI bots are the epitome of the very worst of customer service...They take the most ineffective performance of a poorly informed, inept customer service rep and automate it to save employing a real person

Disagree. Significant AI work is being done to improve chatbots, specifically to answer the majority of client requests which are "what is the status of my work order" type queries. The company I work for analyzed and found a significant percentage of client requests fit this usage, and the chatbot can connect to live agent once the simple FAQ are out of the way, this is known a "level 1 triage" and was commonly a human with no knowledge but is now transitioning to an automated system that can provide immediate feedback on a ticket vs a human who knows nothing transferring a call to an agent who does know, chatbots are trying to eliminate the "human who knows little" in that process.

 

[SigGuy]

I’d love to ask to be moved up in the queue given it was their screwup, but there is no one to talk to!

Perfect example (among millions like it). What many seemed to misunderstand about my original post is that I'm not against app based communication. I'm just against any system that doesn't allow for a way for customers to reach the company when needed. Sure, the app is great if you have a cookie cutter issue. But anything slightly off the beaten path and Tesla is completely unreachable. It boggles my mind that any Tesla owner would even want to try to defend that. If you haven't experienced a problem, that's great. But don't you want to be sure that whatever issue might come up, you have a path to solve it efficiently?

 

[jelloslug]

I speak for a lot of owners saying sometime the app just cannot suffice when you need to talk to someone about service/support.

That's why you start with the app and explain it in a manner that will get you a call back. It has worked for me (and many others) every time.

 

[jelloslug]

Perfect example (among millions like it). What many seemed to misunderstand about my original post is that I'm not against app based communication. I'm just against any system that doesn't allow for a way for customers to reach the company when needed. Sure, the app is great if you have a cookie cutter issue. But anything slightly off the beaten path and Tesla is completely unreachable. It boggles my mind that any Tesla owner would even want to try to defend that.

I'm still not understanding how you can't explain a problem within the app. You pick a base problem area (or areas), describe the issue, and add pics if necessary. How is talking on the phone going to get more detailed than that?

 

[magarrett3]

I put a deposit on a Model S over a decade ago. I bought a Signature model (one of the first 1,000 MS made) and became an outspoken evangelist for the company. For the fist year, it was a whirlwind romance and I probably sold a dozen+ cars myself and Tesla treated me like a member of the family. A few years in, things started to get rocky as Tesla got more and more busy but I understood. 100,000 owners vying for its attention made for a different dynamic. But then the Model X and eventually the model 3 came into the picture and Tesla started to be more distant and more cold. At first it was just a lack of personal touch but over time, it became neglect.
Now, its an outright abusive relationship. Tesla literally doesn't pick up the phone (this is not a cute relationship analogy- they don't pick up the phone). They discontinued the "owner experience" group (they used to address owner issues) because... who cares? They cut out the loaner program. They lied constantly ("we're increasing the loaner program! We're building a new service facility just for Model 3! We're selling features we can't deliver!") . They started charging $200 "deductible" for issues that are covered by warranty (after 7 years of not doing so and never making it clear it was even a possibility). I wrote a plaintive email into the great void of "[email protected]" as a last hope that somehow Tesla cared enough to at least lie to me about all this. No response at all.
Tesla, which started out with customer service akin to Apple had slowly devolved into a company with customer service worse than Spectrum (or any other monopolistic company). I guess somewhere along the way they realized that treating customers well was not its best strategy to keep its stock price high. Any resources that had been put to serving customers was reallocated to sales. The lie they tell that they are "trying" is as insulting as a spouse telling you they're "trying" not to cheat. Trying is as simple as investing in customer service (or not divesting what was already in place).
If you've been a Tesla owner for more than 5 years, I can't imagine that you too haven't felt the same neglect and abuse.

I absolutely hate Tesla. I love the car but hate the company. And that is awful. Feels like saying I hate an ex-lover because I truly did love this company for years. I learned to love electric cars and I'm hopeful that some company that still prioritizes customers will make a great one. Otherwise, I may just be stuck with an ICE car because as much as I love electric, I refuse to be treated like crap. Tesla should be ashamed of itself for letting its customers down and for shaming its own product in the process.

Sorry to hear about this. I have a 2018 (delivered 2-28-19) Model S P100D - have experienced great service and they do still have loaners - just had my FSD computer UG done last week and the UV treatment on the screen.

 

[NJ Electrons]

I am constantly tempted to have one of my next cars be a Model S but these types of threads speaking of really bad experiences with the company keep me hesitating. I don't need a car company to hold my hand or coddle me. I just want a car that should something go wrong they will fix it promptly, answer my calls, and not charge me to fix what is under warranty. I may be spoiled as a long time BMW owner as well as also have owned Porsche, own an Audi, plus some exotics.

I know there are growing pains but these could all be foreseen. When you have X number of cars on the road and growing your base this fast the only way to decrease demand on the service network is to build such high-quality vehicles that you are not creating an excess burden on your support infrastructure. Bad quality strains service that much more.

Tesla has plenty of money and time to get this figured out and I hope they do. I'm the guy who wants to be a Tesla owner and simply wants to be able to sleep at night knowing the car works and when it doesn't it will get taken care of.

 

[SD Diver]

I had no option to add a textual description. Might have been because os it being a recall item?

 

[Onlyed]

Absolutely a spoiled kid response to not always getting your way. Just because you feel butt hurt isn't a valid reason to go back to an ice car. By the way, was Tesla somehow deprived or shown a hard lesson wirh your action? Nope, and now your self exile back into the dead dino polute-o-mobile is hurting the environment. Ya see, EVs have a deeper mission than keeping everyone who expect kiss your butt customer service happy. Wake up.

 

[Target]

From my experience in the Chicago area, most of the Tesla locations are sort of annoying to deal with, however the one in Schaumburg has been consistently great for the year that I have worked with them. They have only been open slightly longer than that.

When I bought my current S from the Tesla used program, the delivery people didn't really know anything about the car. It was my second S so it wasn't a big deal for me. They even told me they don't know much, and they only recently joined the company.

As far as the used program goes, you put down your money, and then deal with the week plus long headaches of trying to communicate with people who don't respond. Maybe that is better now, but it sure sucked last year.

Yes their service is generally painful, but specific centers are much better than others. Fill out the surveys, let them know your feelings. If possible, try other service centers.

The app, it is easier now to file a service appointment then it was a few months ago. It has gotten better. The best part is I can fill it out on Sunday night, or any other time a normal dealer would be closed, and they will respond a few days before the service to organize parts and so forth. This is better than a normal dealer which will often wait to order parts until the have the car. But you have to provide more information up front.

I still get loaners here in Chicago Land.

My experiences have been similar in pain level to other car dealers. Maybe allocated in different places. If you buy a car that has a manufacturer that REALLY cares about service, then you will probably get good service. I owned a Lexus for a while, and they were nice to work with. I have had certain service advisors at Ford dealerships that were very good even, and others that were terrible.

 

[Mobster]

I feel like the OP. My first Tesla in 2013 came with dream support. Now with my newest Model S a high percentage of discourse concerns what they cannot do. Paid for FSD with wild promises from sales and Elon. Still sitting on HW2.0 with no upgrade in sight. Advisors say wait wait. Don't know how many bad feelings outweigh the cool car. Elon tweets about his newest crazy idea (bless his imagination - a good thing) but gets more and more distant from us car customers. sigh

 

[stevewoz]

There MIGHT be a small difference in having 1000 customers to satisfy or 1.000.000?

As a 'Signature' customer, it's more like being 100 out of 1,000 then and 100 out of 1,000,000 now. Why would one choose to be a Signature customer (I did not, myself) unless expecting some special recognition for it?

 

[SigGuy]

As a 'Signature' customer, it's more like being 100 out of 1,000 then and 100 out of 1,000,000 now. Why would one choose to be a Signature customer (I did not, myself) unless expecting some special recognition for it?

First of all, pleasure to meet you (assuming you are in fact Woz!). I was an early adopter of Apple as well as Tesla. But I really don't expect special treatment from Tesla for my early support. I expect them to do what Apple has done and that is treat ALL of their customers well even as they scale ever larger. A call to Apple is answered quickly and typically by someone who can help. If Apple can do it and be profitable, why can't Tesla?