Yay! I picked up my new 2022 Model 3 VIN #F174xxx directly from the factory yesterday evening (Feb 12, 2022) around 7pm!
It was a much longer process than I anticipated. My delivery appointment was originally scheduled for 1pm but fortunately I checked the app right before I left the house and saw that they pushed the delivery appointment at the last minute to 3pm. No, they did not call me or send me a text or email to let me know that the time had changed. I got there early at 2:30pm to check out the car ahead of time. I found the car and was checking out the exterior as my 3pm appointment approached and as a tech was checking out something in the inside of the car. The tech abruptly drove the car away without saying a word to me and I got a text saying the delivery had been rescheduled for 4pm.
"But wait," you might be thinking, "I thought you said in a previous post your VIN was F177xxx? And why did it take until 7pm to pick up your car when they only pushed the delivery to 4pm?"
Well I'm sorry to say my original car, VIN F177474, did not even make it out of the Tesla factory parking lot. The car started throwing a bunch of "Powertrain requires service" error messages and went into reduced power mode.
They tried resetting it a few times but the errors kept coming back. At this point I'm thinking to myself "Crap! I've already paid for and accepted delivery of this car! It'll probably be in service for months and when I get it back it will never work right! You fool! You should have realized something was wrong with the car because of the way they kept pushing back the delivery time!"
So they took the car into service to have it looked at and I got to wait around even longer. When they came back they said it was good news: it's not a hardware issue but only a software issue. They can have the car fixed by Monday and they might be able to give me a loaner until then (they'd have to check). They also said that if I really, really wanted they could give me a different car that was built for someone else. Well I apologize, Anonymous Tesla Buyer in the Bay Area, I took your car. I owe you a beer.
I gathered from reading between the lines of our conversations that if a car can't make it out of the parking lot they are pretty much obligated to undo the sale even if you've already fully paid and accepted as I had. That's what they did for me before selling me a different car. But if I had made it 100 feet further and turned onto the little side road in front of the parking lot I suspect I would have been SOL and been stuck with that particular car. I probably could have walked away and demanded my check back but I didn't. These things happen. Teslas are like any other electronics; if they make it past the first day they're generally fine. But it's not all that uncommon for electronics not to make it through that first day.
So I was not angry, didn't lose my cool and remained polite and cordial. This was not the fault of any of the people there. It was just one of those things. The people at Tesla remained professional and I think they appreciated that I didn't go ballistic. In retrospect, though, I believe all the delays in my delivery time and the way the tech drove the car away as I was looking at it without saying anything to me suggests they knew this car was throwing errors before they sold it to me but just didn't tell me. That's really pretty shady.
By the time the paperwork got sorted and everything settled it was after 6:30pm, I was tired, I was hungry, I was cold (I was wearing a t-shirt with no jacket) and it was dark. I didn't bring a flashlight with me and the lighting in the parking lot is completely inadequate so I haven't even really inspected the new car at all yet aside from what I could see in about 30 seconds in the dim light. I'll check the new car out thoroughly when I finish writing this but I anticipate it will be fine.
Obviously Tesla needs to do better QA. That goes without saying, right? The first car that died on me had only 8 miles on the odometer so they couldn't have done much of a QA test drive. The new car which I have now had
only 3 miles on the odometer when I took it home which pretty much proves to me that it had no real QA test drive. The 3 miles was them driving it out of the huge factory and to the customer pickup parking lot.
Both the old car with VIN F177xxx and the new car with VIN F174xxx were built / born on Feb 11 (the day before my pickup). Since both cars are the exact same color / build and both cars were built the same day that clearly demonstrates that we can't assume that a 177xxx VIN is newer than a 174xxx VIN.
I had a lot of waiting around to do yesterday at the factory's tiny showroom / office as all of this got sorted. It is not a good place to have to wait for any length of time. There are no comfortable places to sit, there are no drinks or snacks, there are no vending machines and there is no TV or anything else to keep you occupied during a wait. It is also so small you feel like you're in the way when you're sitting around waiting.
Consequently I spent hours out in the lot inspecting pretty much all of the new cars that were out there for delivery and there were A LOT. I'll get this out of the way first: no, Tesla's exterior build quality is in no way the equivalent of Mercedes, BMW, Lexus or any other high-end brand. Frankly I'm not sure it is even quite up to Civic or Corolla standards when it comes to the alignment of body panels. But despite this it HAS gotten a lot better. I did a similar inspection of a delivery parking lot full of Model 3s in December 2017 and some of those cars back then were absolutely atrocious (and I still have the pictures to prove it). None of the cars I saw yesterday were anywhere near as bad as the worst I saw in 2017 but a few not quite parallel seam edges and slightly uneven panel depths were easily apparent to the eye and were the norm and not the exception. The kindest way to put it is to say this sort of thing is not Tesla's focus. You don't buy a Tesla to do that marble test from that old Lexus commercial from 1992. But it is a shame to say that a Tesla from 2022 isn't put together nearly as well as a Lexus from 30 years ago. I hear the cars built in China are much better (probably because they have better / more expensive assembly equipment) and I also suspect cars from Texas will also be better as Tesla will have more money for its capital equipment. Are the issues easily noticeable if you look? You betcha. Is it something you or anyone else would notice in day-to-day use if you're not looking? I don't think so. And I'm not just guessing when I say that; I owned my first Model 3 for 4 years and neither I nor my passengers noticed these small imperfections in daily use.
I also noticed there was remarkable consistency with some of these imperfect panel alignments probably due to the processes used in the factory. For example, there is a small seam that runs from the headlight assembly to the seam of the frunk. One one side of the seam is the side fender panel and on the other side is I guess the front bumper. It was pretty much the norm for there to be a slight mismatch in the height / depth of these two panels along the seam on the passenger side of the car but on the driver's side it tended to be much better. Another example is the back bumper. The seam where it attaches to the rest of the car was pleasingly parallel on almost none of the cars there and instead tended to come together to a point at one end.
I am not a paint expert but to my eye paint quality appears to be VASTLY improved from 2017. Few cars had visible paint imperfections that I noticed (but maybe I don't know what to look for) and almost none had spots where you tell that someone tried to buff out a paint imperfection over zealously. The paint jobs looked good. I wish Tesla offered more paint colors but for sure the blue, white and midnight silver colors all looked good. From a distance those 3 colors can look a little plain but when you get up closer you see the subtle nuances in the paint that makes them look fantastic. But the true standout is the red. Up close or from afar red looks absolutely fantastic on this car. It's just the right shade and has a lot of depth and character under all lighting conditions. My last Model 3 was red so I wanted a different color this time but wow it looks good. The loser is black. It looks cheaper than the other colors and generally looks terrible on this car in my opinion. Add in the utterly ridiculous $2,000 Uber Black tax that Tesla charges for this color and I have no idea why anyone would buy a Model 3 in black unless they really want to use it for a car service.
That's all for now! Happy driving!
