MCU is dead, car is bricked, Tesla is being unforgivably terrible

[dloop]

Car "bricked" in my garage. Had to be towed out.

Sorry you had this experience. We all want Tesla to excel, and that includes in the area of customer obsession.

If this were me, and I was unable to find anyone at Tesla willing to take ownership of this issue and make it right (and it sounds like you have gone to great lengths here already), then I would take this to social media and make it as visible as possible. Be specific as to the sales office, specific service center location, etc., but do not include names of specific individuals or personal information. Just facts, no emotion.

And if that fails to get results, make a big sign that says something like: "Ask me about my Tesla Service" and walk the street in front of their sales office.

 

[whitex]

It is charged PER HOUR. My service adviser initially quoted 1 hour for diagnostic, but later requested approval for a second hour since they are charging by the hour. He also just confirmed this morning that the hourly rate that they charge is now $195 per hour (at least in Santa Clara)....so my diagnostic fee for 2 hours was $390 ($195 x 2hrs). The invoice still states that the hourly rate charged is $175. Per his comments, they just recently raised the rate and I must have made my appointment when the rate was still $175 but they have since transitioned over to the new $195 rate.

Also, be aware that once your car is repaired and ready for pick up, you have 24 hours to pick up the car and return the loaner. If you do not, per his words, you could be charged $100 per day as a storage fee. The invoice only says that Tesla COULD charge $35 per day for storage fee IF you do not pick up your car by the fourth day after your car is ready. When asked for clarification for the discrepancy between the invoice and what he said, the service adviser stated that the $100 ALSO includes a fee that Enterprise could charge you added on to the $35 that Tesla could charge you.

Sorry to thread jack but the question was asked.

Wow, so Elon is trying to squeeze money everywhere he can, $195/hr to look at your car? I thought service centers were supposed to not be profit centers, at least according to Elon. My guess he'll say that they have to fix so much *sugar* for free under warranty that they'll never be profitable (conventional accounting by the way would have the shops "bill" Tesla for warranty work, but in Elon accounting I'm sure warranty fixes just count as costs of the service centers, so of course paying customers have to pay tons of money to pay for all the warranty work needed). Cost of Tesla ownership keeps going up, and up...

 

[sorka]

The difference is I have an AP1 car and already had the rain-sensing wipers. All the improvements have been for AP2 cars. THose of us with AP1 have just gotten a worse UI.

Unless you're still on v8

....which I guess I should stop bragging about day after day cause if my replacement MCU that I got a year ago dies, I'll be on v9....assuming I can even get an MCU at all

 

[sorka]

I can confirm the $175 diagnosis fee. I just had my car in for wind noise from the sunroof area. Even though my car is still under warranty, they warned me that it would be a $175 diagnostic fee and if they found something that was under warranty, then they would waive the fee. The initially estimated 2 hours of diagnostic but later text me to confirm that the tech would need an additional hour of diagnostic and if I was OK with that.

I've never had any car company from which I've had a car under the factory bumper to bumper warranty tell me there'd be a diagnosis fee if no problem was found. That includes Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Infiniti, Dodge, and Chevrolet(C5).

 

[gnuarm]

I've never had any car company from which I've had a car under the factory bumper to bumper warranty tell me there'd be a diagnosis fee if no problem was found. That includes Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Infiniti, Dodge, and Chevrolet(C5)

Yes, but Toyota and the others aren't so hurting for cash they may go out of business if they don't get more investment in the next 10 months.

 

[darxsys]

Can confirm, I am being charged $200 for diagnosing a few rattles. And they didn’t even try hard enough to reproduce all of them. I was also told that Tesla warranty does NOT cover rattles or noises anymore, unless you are the first owner and only for the first year or 12000 miles. Beautiful.

In general, one of the most annoying things about Tesla service is how they try to explain away the problem BEFORE they’ve even tried looking into it. So I will complain about something, and they will then start trying to find reasons why that’s “normal”. And then I have to counter argue and in circles we go. And if you aren’t firm enough, they won’t do crap about the problem.

I am never buying a Tesla again, this company is turning into everything I hate. I regret recommending this car to so many people now. VW had 10x better service experience.

 

[gnuarm]

Can confirm, I am being charged $200 for diagnosing a few rattles. And they didn’t even try hard enough to reproduce all of them. I was also told that Tesla warranty does NOT cover rattles or noises anymore, unless you are the first owner and only for the first year or 12000 miles. Beautiful.

I am never buying a Tesla again, this company is turning into everything I hate. I regret recommending this car to so many people now.

What you are seeing is a company that is financially in crisis. It is sad, but true that they are cutting back on all expenditures and charging for things they never expected to charge for.

I'm worried that I may never see my model 3 reservation money. Once I asked for a refund all mention it was ever paid is removed from my account.

 

[Pinegreen]

I've never had any car company from which I've had a car under the factory bumper to bumper warranty tell me there'd be a diagnosis fee if no problem was found. That includes Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Infiniti, Dodge, and Chevrolet(C5).

Can confirm, I am being charged $200 for diagnosing a few rattles. And they didn’t even try hard enough to reproduce all of them. I was also told that Tesla warranty does NOT cover rattles or noises anymore, unless you are the first owner and only for the first year or 12000 miles. Beautiful.

In general, one of the most annoying things about Tesla service is how they try to explain away the problem BEFORE they’ve even tried looking into it. So I will complain about something, and they will then start trying to find reasons why that’s “normal”. And then I have to counter argue and in circles we go. And if you aren’t firm enough, they won’t do crap about the problem.

I am never buying a Tesla again, this company is turning into everything I hate. I regret recommending this car to so many people now. VW had 10x better service experience.

I couldn't agree more. I can understand the need for the fee if you are out of warranty, but to charge it while you are still under warranty ONLY because you need the cash is pretty dirty. It could help you with cash flow short term, but word spreads and the "free" advertising that you get from owner-advocates slowly erodes.

While I love the car, I can NEVER (at this moment) wholeheartedly recommend the car. There is ALWAYS a "But" to my recommendation, eg, "The car is awesome....BUT you're without a car if something happens and you need body work, contacting someone is an ordeal, be VERY thorough with your delivery inspection, expect to run the risk of paying a diagnostic fee for something that should be under warranty, a yellow urine colored border around the main attraction of your interior, etc"

 

[sorka]

Because of this and other things I've seen on this forum building up over the last few months, I've canceled my long term plans to upgrade to a P100D. I really want Tesla to succeed, but this is the behavior of a company getting ready to go down.

 

[⚡️ELECTROMAN⚡️]

Can confirm, I am being charged $200 for diagnosing a few rattles. And they didn’t even try hard enough to reproduce all of them. I was also told that Tesla warranty does NOT cover rattles or noises anymore, unless you are the first owner and only for the first year or 12000 miles. Beautiful.

Totally ridiculous if true. I wouldn't buy a Tesla if I knew that was their policy. I wonder if they are trying to make it retroactive. That wasn't their policy when I bought my car.

 

[darxsys]

What you are seeing is a company that is financially in crisis. It is sad, but true that they are cutting back on all expenditures and charging for things they never expected to charge for.

I'm worried that I may never see my model 3 reservation money. Once I asked for a refund all mention it was ever paid is removed from my account.

That is one the biggest reasons why I would advise anyone against buying a Tesla. With how this company is acting towards existing owners and potential owners, and with Elon’s delusional attitude, they won’t be in the car business for very long. I’ve been literally yelling at people that were saying bad things about Tesla all these years and telling everyone how great and valuable this company is, because Tesla’s mission is so important, but now I am just becoming sick of all this bullshit coming from Tesla itself and I don’t care if they go down, unless they change a LOT.

I couldn't agree more. I can understand the need for the fee if you are out of warranty, but to charge it while you are still under warranty ONLY because you need the cash is pretty dirty. It could help you with cash flow short term, but word spreads and the "free" advertising that you get from owner-advocates slowly erodes.

While I love the car, I can NEVER (at this moment) wholeheartedly recommend the car. There is ALWAYS a "But" to my recommendation, eg, "The car is awesome....BUT you're without a car if something happens and you need body work, contacting someone is an ordeal, be VERY thorough with your delivery inspection, expect to run the risk of paying a diagnostic fee for something that should be under warranty, a yellow urine colored border around the main attraction of your interior, etc"

My favorite question from the SC people the last few times I was there is: “is this car under CPO warranty?” I guess answering yes to that would enable them to charge you even more and bypass almost any responsibility.

To be honest, I don’t even know why this company *deserves* to live at this point. This isn’t 2012 anymore and you had enough time to figure yourself out. It’s not my fault that Model 3 is “excruciatingly hard to produce” and that you didn’t plan well enough to build service infrastructure before getting drowned in Model 3 madness.

Totally ridiculous if true. I wouldn't buy a Tesla if I knew that was their policy. I wonder if they are trying to make that retroactive. That wasn't their policy when I bought my car.

I literally laughed when they told me that. Actually, 2 different people told me the same thing. I will ask some more service people about it when I go pick up the car. I don’t even know if its legal to retroactively change these warranty agreements, but I don’t care enough to pursue it further.

 

[Droschke]

... one of the most annoying things about Tesla service is how they try to explain away the problem BEFORE they’ve even tried looking into it. So I will complain about something, and they will then start trying to find reasons why that’s “normal”. And then I have to counter argue and in circles we go. And if you aren’t firm enough, they won’t do crap about the problem ...

Agreed. The service used to be pretty good. Not anymore. And, it is not only the lower quality of the Service Centers. Their tool free support line quality has gown down immensely. I had an issue last night and made 3 calls and was amazed the agents did not even know what's in the latest software updates and no clue about the Tesla roll out of a better BMS update which was announced this week. The first agent told me she is not technical enough, the next agent gave me bunch of basic info about the car which everyone knows and was unrelated to my question and the last agent told me my car is aging! Unbelievable.

 

[gnuarm]

Totally ridiculous if true. I wouldn't buy a Tesla if I knew that was their policy. I wonder if they are trying to make it retroactive. That wasn't their policy when I bought my car.

They don't need to modify the warranty to charge you if they found no warranty claim. That's the issue. They won't look at the car under warranty. They have to find a problem to make it a warranty claim.

 

[Trebek1762]

Final update: I got the car back yesterday so it was gone 11 days in total. The MCU was replaced and all seems back to normal. (However, I did lose a bunch of settings, including my "Trip A" which was the car's lifetime Wh/m history. Sad trombone.) Once the service center started responding and being proactive everything was as expected for a $90k car, really great service, daily updates, clean car, et cetera. Before that it was a disaster. I am not sure what the lesson is here other than there are parts of the experience that need a lot of attention and parts that seem to work pretty well. This experience will be an asterisk when I recommend Tesla to folks (how could I not, I love the damn thing).

I know what the likely answer is, but what MCU version did you get?

 

[gnuarm]

Because of this and other things I've seen on this forum building up over the last few months, I've canceled my long term plans to upgrade to a P100D. I really want Tesla to succeed, but this is the behavior of a company getting ready to go down.

Just to be clear, there is no indication the company is going belly up. They are hurting in that they have limited cash and large expenditures going forward. Their sales are down presently. They have indicated there is a "chance" they will make a profit in Q3. They are seeking more investment capital. As long as they get the investment capital they should be ok until the China factory comes online at which point they should regain profitability... "should". Nothing is guaranteed.

To build "market share", if that is even the right term for a company that has largely defined the market... they will need to preserve their image of a good company to buy a car from. I expect many potential buyers will have serious reservations about buying not just a very unproven technology, but from a startup company that may or may not survive. So I think they need to continue to treat their customers well and not institute onerous charges like this one.

My air conditioning is acting up... again... and I am worried about taking it in for repair since the problem is, of course, intermittent. I'm already not happy with the service department. If I continue to have problems with them I will end up being unhappy with my car and that will be very bad indeed.

 

[sorka]

Just to be clear, there is no indication the company is going belly up. They are hurting in that they have limited cash and large expenditures going forward. Their sales are down presently. They have indicated there is a "chance" they will make a profit in Q3. They are seeking more investment capital. As long as they get the investment capital they should be ok until the China factory comes online at which point they should regain profitability... "should". Nothing is guaranteed.

My point is that this behavior in service towards existing customers will result in existing customers not buying new teslas and new customers not buying because of word of mouth. No matter how screwed up things get within a company that services external customers, they need to take whatever steps are necessary to buffer customer interactions from the chaos.

 

[Big Toys]

"Just to be clear, there is no indication the company is going belly up."

To the contrary, this is *exactly* how companies go belly-up, especially companies who lost $700 million in a quarter, 12 years into the business. Do you do business with ANY other company that treats customers so poorly--customers who have $80K to spend on a car? Of course you don't, and neither will people who are not Apple or Elon fanbois. I predict Tesla will be sold to a real car manufacturer, and Musk will concentrate on rockets that are already self-driving. Too bad, too, because I kinda like my car.

 

[GreenT]

I got rid of my Model S mostly for this very reason.

 

[darxsys]

https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-hardcore-cost-cutting-elon-musk/

here is a possible explanation. The company is obviously DESPERATE for cash. No wonder they are trying to squeeze every penny out of everyone. Man, I can't wait to sell my Model S and get out of this mess, at this rate, they might be sold to another company in months..

 

[robg]

My point is that this behavior in service towards existing customers will result in existing customers not buying new teslas and new customers not buying because of word of mouth. No matter how screwed up things get within a company that services external customers, they need to take whatever steps are necessary to buffer customer interactions from the chaos.

Yep. There issues with customer service should be treated as a crisis within the company. They'd be better off stopping spending money on everything else and just fixing that cause right now they're just digging themselves a deep grave even if they manage to eke out a small profit in the next quarter.