I placed (date the ACH or wire was received by Tesla I presume) my $40k deposit for a Signature Edition X on Feb 5, 2014.
I confirmed my X and let it sit in the configurator a few times over the next few years, but never pressed order due to life circumstances and other more important business pulling at me. There’s never a perfect time to buy another newly $200k car when you’re still paying off the first, it could be done, and ultimately I did pull the trigger. Had someone from Tesla dropped a letter in the US Mail to let us know if we didn’t order by a certain date hey we’re going to change the terms of the deal and we were going to lose out on the #1 most marketed feature of the past hack decade, free supercharging for life, I’d have ordered that day. There really was nothing that was preventing me from ordering other than a lack of inertia. My initial reason for not ordering immediately was I didn’t think I wanted a buggy X, like how so many of the low serial s cars had their various troubles. I didn’t want to buy a car that was at risk for spending too much of its life in the shop. I I never meant to wait until the third year of [roduction to order our car, I was ready once the P90D became the P100D, and they had a way to upcharge Signature reservation holders for the extra battery. I bet many of the lucky ones did.
So I finally ordered my X in early to mid October (I’d have to look) and remember asking the first Tesla person who wrote me to confirm the order if they could have it to me before Thanksgiving, which he said no problem, then I never herad from him for the next several weeks. When he finally wrote back he apologized of being MIA but offered no details why, but he said he was working on getting the lifetime supercharging and the LTE data sub `resolved.. Never heard from him again. This is my delivery advisor. Everything on the site said my build in progress was coming with 6 months of free supercharging.
So for the approximately 247 weeks they held my $40k deposit and I continued to believe I would get a car delivered that was in spirit the closest they could build for me today (assuming there are obviously subtle build physical differences as improvements were rolled into the X build process), but with regard to the feature specifically Tesla was continuing to offer lifetime supercharging in one form or another for approximately 245 of the 247 weeks between the time they got my money and the day I confirmed build on an X.
While I feel I have a reasonable people would hopefully see it reasonable to deliver the very feature they aggressively marketed for the entire time I have been a Tesla customer (Feb 2014 to date) that they would deliver that feature for my car who’s order began in 2014, missing an arbitrary deadline for NEW ORDERS by less than 1% of the total time.
The problem is who do I even make my case to? I have had 10 conversations with 10 Tesla people during pre and post delivery, and it’s essentially never the same person twice, even those who swear they are going to work on resolving my various pre and post sale issues. It’s also further complicated that I am a Nevada resident who took delivery from the Fremont factory directly, so I have been contacted by people from at least four difffernt Tesla geographical locations, it’s like they don’t know which staff from which state should be helping me, so I’ve spoken with Tesla in Fremont, San Jose, San Rafael, Rocklin (nearest Tesla store / service to us in northern Nevada and of course people from the Las Vegas Nevada store because that’s where Tesla of Nevada is located, I believe co-locafed with the Vegas store/service. And this is supposedly to be flat and more convenient and responsive than a traditional dealer network? This is what happenes when your champion isn’t a 3rd party dealer who can go and advocate your case if you got a lemon or whatever, your champion in Tesla-land is often a young, inexperienced and overworked employee of the same company you find you have the difference with. Tesla needs an OMBUDSMAN at the very least to manage the customer-company breakdowns, and a plan to decrease the chaos going forward. Don’t get me wrong, I remain a Tesla fanboy, but the are making it very hard when the love never comes back, especially we you need it.