We have some points we agree on - and some we don’t. Like some other owners on the forum, I’m conflicted. I love driving the car, but as an owner, not so much in love with the company. As an admirer of innovation and engineering prowess, I’m an admirer of the company and Musk. Heck I will give him credit for marketing and promotion genius. Where we continue to diverge is with ownership experience. Your view has held so far. Jury is out as to whether it holds over the next 3 years. I don’t think it will. I think the model of car as a phone, or car as a service (clearly a market Tesla is aiming at) is not more than a thimble of marketshare in the next 3 years unless some other market disruptor like the pandemic reshapes things. I think most owners of cars won’t share your view as real competition arrives and reaches a point where there is enough feature parity for many users. The majority of people who spend $35k and up, want more stability and predictability along with the features and coolness of the product. Unlike a phone, most car buyers aren’t going to flip them every 2-3 years. It will be interesting to watch.I've been a Tesla bull since 2013. I've bought three Teslas with a tiny percentage of my stock profits. I'll no doubt buy a few more over time.
Tesla communications suck, and they have done so forever. I think this is because Elon Musk doesn't care about communicating with customers, so there's never a Tesla executive in charge of making that work, at least not for very long. The last one who cared (Jon McNeill) left in early 2018. I absolutely agree that in the current case, Tesla should have let people know what they were doing, but I think it's a real stretch to call a passenger lumbar adjustment control a "promised feature". It's a minor detail.
But I do believe that Tesla is dedicated to making great cars. If your idea of a great car is different from Tesla's, then you will be unhappy with some of their decisions as to what constitutes great, or even what makes things better. And Tesla is playing a long game so better sometimes means two steps forward and one step back. That's how engineering works.
At any one moment you can take some item and say it was better last week. Sure. But the car overall is better, at least so far as Tesla is concerned. If you can't handle this, you'll be unhappy with the cars. If you think Tesla is trying to bleed their customers dry and take advantage of them, then you'll be unhappy with their cars. So don't buy them if that's the case. Somebody else will.
Me, I love the experience of getting a new car every couple of months by way of a significant firmware update. Sometimes it isn't really much better as it turns out (e.g. I couldn't care less about fart sounds and games), at least for me, but if not, then it will be better next time. Meanwhile, the cars are so good that a little wobble just doesn't concern me.
As for me, I’ll see how it goes. For now I still love the car more than my angina with the company.
PS Lumbar support is important for me. Demographics say population is trending older. Hard to say how many people will want this feature. The real marketing question isn’t how frequently a feature is used, it is how frequently it is desired and part of the decision making process. Countless examples of features people want/pay for but don’t use.
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