No doubt Tesla could have made more money with an auction, and frankly probably could have jacked up the price of the Sigs and gotten a few more bucks in the process. But this is, IMHO, classic "bean counter" short term thinking. It's easy to do this because the benefit is tangible ("We got an extra $7 million!"), whereas what's lost (customer goodwill, reputation etc.) is much harder to quantify, especially for a bean counter, but I think has a much longer lasting negative impact on a company, especially one like Tesla trying to establish itself.
For example, I have a good friend who canceled his Sig when the pricing came out, and eventually bought a Panamera instead. All over $7000. How many people would he have influenced had he gotten a Sig? He was more excited than I was about the car and Tesla before the pricing came out and would talk it up to everyone. How many people would AnOutsider, Jkam, Kroneal, myself (and many others) have proselytized to with so much greater enthusiasm had we not had less than ideal experiences in the past few months? Just read the thread about delivery concerns to get a flavor of love lost for Tesla these past few months. My strong belief is that the difference between charging extra for a Sig, as opposed to a slight discount (for what is a fully loaded car) would have made *all* the difference for us early adopters as our patience wore thin with communications issues, production delays, and cars being produced/delivered out of order.
Right now, with supply the issue and not demand, it doesn't matter much, but sooner or later, Tesla hopes to be selling 20,000 of these every year, plus thousands of Model X, and eventually tens of thousands of Gen III, and will need to dramatically increase demand. Early adopting Sig owners would be the best people, and in the best position, to help drive this demand.
Do I absolutely love the car? You bet. Do I still "sell" Tesla to people? Sure I do. But I also give warning about being a startup with "growing pains" and that you need patience to deal with buying a car from them because things are far from perfect. It's certainly not the sales job I used to do, and that's a direct result of the Sig pricing, because had I not been charged the Sig premium my patience would have been close to infinite with the issues the past few months. Multiply my experience times several dozen people (maybe more), and the ripple effect of all of those people, and my experience tells me that it will eventually cost Tesla many multiples more in sales (eventually) than $7 million.
When you are sitting in an executive board meeting, though, it's hard to argue against the bean counters because they have tangible money to show, whereas what I'm talking about here is much less concrete, impossible to prove, and a much longer term play. Seeing that Tesla was acting like a more typical company in this respect was deeply surprising and disappointing to me when it happened, and subsequent events have confirmed my original opinion.
This is why I never blamed any Tesla employees, ever, and am deeply appreciative of their efforts. They were put in a really difficult situation because they had to make up for executive-level (bad) decisions by trying to provide communications and explanations for situations not of their creation (Sig premium, production delays, lack of customer service hires etc.). Talk about a thankless task! It's like Andy Reid blaming the defensive coordinator or players for the team sucking instead of looking in the mirror (sorry for those who don't get that analogy), but I've seen that a lot where management makes a poor decision, and then expects the folks in the ground to fix it with customers.
