Folks -
Long time Model S owner here -- cancelled an M3 order a couple months ago after an interminable wait and the necessity of getting some wheels pronto.
My question - and am not trying to start a fight with anyone...
For the life of me I can not figure out why the typical mentality is to accept these highly flawed vehicles with the understanding that Tesla will address these issues (or attempt to do so) at a later point ?
None of us would ever do this with any other purchase we ever make. Certainly not with any other car purchase during our lifetime. I've bought probably 12 to 14 new cars. Never even considered taking home something that looked like these Model 3 Frankensteins.
My point being... if larger percentages of buyers refused these cars, wouldn't that finally send the message to Elon and company that this is an unacceptable way to doing business ? Hurting the bottom line is all that Elon cares about.
Many of us, incl. me would probably better been off with rejecting our cars at delivery, but I believe there is a psychological component and unfamiliarity with the process consequences of rejecting a car for most first time tesla buyers.
Generally speaking, while this is not my first car, it was the first car I ever ordered. All other cars I previously purchased, I only made the decision "to purchase it" after checking out / test driving that particular vehicle and it was always a car that was simply in the inventory of the dealer. If you take a car from a dealers inventory there's not really a "rejection" process involved, since you only file *any* paperwork after you've seen and driven the car.
With Tesla, you order the car, pay 100$ deposit, wait for multiple weeks, tell your friend your getting a Tesla at day X, secure financing, register insurance (the last two steps are usually even VIN-specific) etc.
By the time you get to actually "inspect" your new car, you're already half-way committed to this car plus you had probably weeks of anticipation. At that point it simply feels more "painful" to reject the car/abort the transaction (if you were lucky enough to know that you can even reject the car, which some folks don't know), compared to simply walking off the lot of a traditional car dealership.
Furthermore when you consider to reject the car, tesla will usually not give you any good estimate on how long it'd take to get another one (and you're being told you may lose out on benefits like 1-year free supercharging), so rejecting a car creates additional days of uncertainty.
One of my takeaways is that with Tesla, you really have to prepare yourself mentally and organizationally to the event of rejecting the car.
As someone said well on TMC, or was it reddit?:
"When you pickup your tesla, go there with the expectation that you're going to reject the car and consider yourself lucky if you didn't have to.".
One can't basically rely on Tesla to deliver a car in time and quality.
For some people the wait time and uncertainty is acceptable, since the end-product (if you get a "good" tesla) is without any real competition/comparison at the moment.
However, if you desire a frictionless experience, getting a car right now, and not having to deal with checklists and other tesla-specifics, you should go to a traditional brand or dealership.
Really someone should create a tesla order and delivery crash-course that goes over all these things and makes sure you're not getting ****ed by tesla. I'm aware of all these checklists users have created, but they typically only talk about what to check for, but not what is acceptible / normal "gaps", and how a potential rejection process works.
I'm in fact thinking of creating one myself.
