Sadly the WORST new car buying experience...and I love Teslas.

[jammer1]

I am an early Model 3 orderer and owner from September last year, shareholder, and all round advocate of everything Tesla.

So on May 13th it was the wife’s turn...a suitable car in inventory popped up (tow bar was essential)...slightly impulsive but a £46k purchase made. Paid the £100...and waited for the mighty Tesla to role into action. Texts start the very next day (much better comms than when I bought mine) and yes, your car will be ready to collect 25th May. Whoa, okay that’s a bit quick got to find the cash now. 2 hours later, moved to 9am 28th May. Phew that gives me a couple of extra days to find the cash. Had been hoping for a part exchange with Tesla, but got the usual expected derisory offer £16k for a lexus NX, (which we sold for £24k in the end to a private buyer). So I was going to have to find the whole lot...which I did. Good work me. Paid them on the 25th, added the car to our insurance from the 28th and then the fun starts.

11.15am 27th May Tesla text swings back into action. “Sorry, your car is not on site, we are arranging for a transporter to bring it and next collection date is 8th June.”

Okay, so immediately on the phone...”hold on a sec, when we ordered it said the location of the car was in London, and in stock for immediate delivery, where is it” Tesla: “we don’t know, can’t see in our system” (aka a lie) A few phone calls later it transpires it might or might not be on a transporter but it is apparently somewhere near Cambridge. Okay fine...why couldn’t we have been told that...”Hey it’s Tesla” I say to my wife...”not quite on top of the customer service but don’t worry they will get it to us, it’s lockdown, it’s not easy etc”. Give them a chance. And indeed Tesla did promise that if it got to Heathrow earlier they would try and sort a quicker handover, but they were fully booked right now until the 8th.

So we patiently spend 10 days without our Lexus and without our £46k. (Which had I put in Tesla shares would now be worth about £60k). I turned into a taxi driver...my wife works for the police doing shifts at ungodly hours. But hey ho I love Tesla I will do this for them.

As we are impatient, and Tesla have our money and we have no Lexus, we call several times in the run up to the 8th. “has it arrived at Heathrow?” Tesla: “yeah,yeah,yeah it’s here, sorry no handover slots” okay... the 8th it is. My wife moves her shift I take the morning off...

You know what happens next. Friday morning we got the final get ready for collection on Monday email, yippee...now we can get excited....and then 4pm Friday, I get a whats app from my wife “can you call Tesla and go mental”.

She had received another text (admittedly they had tried ring as well to forewarn (customer service improvement noted)). “We are sorry but your car will no longer be available for collection at 9am 8th June, please call us to arrange another collection time” (a further customer service improvement instead of the auto kick to the back of the collection queue).

I obviously go WT*, that is less than 1 working hours notice! Come on Tesla this is getting really bad.

So my wife jumps on the phone (I couldn’t)...they were still clueless and fumbling as to exactly where this car is...everyone vaguely important has gone home...yes we are sorry and yes we will sort it. Someone will ring you tomorrow (Saturday)...which they did

The more important person who rings Saturday just can’t give a delivery date...WT* again...“is this car locked in a garage and have they lost the key” it’s a Tesla for god sake, you can’t lose Tesla’s!!!!..they promise they will get it to us as soon as they can...but when is that...my wife has no car and I have no £46k....please please please please we just want the car that we ordered for immediate delivery on the 13th May.

Ah, okay, if you can’t get it to us, you will lend us a loan car...not ideal. We aren’t far from weybridge I can get one from there. “Not sure we can do that, they are different”. Hmmmm....Unless I missed something Tesla is Tesla!

So we wait patiently today for a solution.....and yes, Tesla text arrives at 5.34pm...a loan car is available for us to collect from Heathrow at 3pm tomorrow. Hmmmm let me just check that I had nothing else planned to work around you Tesla....I always wanted to drive to Heathrow to collect a loan car that I didn’t want...

So my question to you all...do I just give in and go...spend 3 hours out of my working day, to collect a loan car, or should I despite being a very loyal Tesla customer stand my ground and say Tesla this simply isn’t good enough.

 

[stonecoldrmw]

So my question to you all...do I just give in and go...spend 3 hours out of my working day, to collect a loan car, or should I despite being a very loyal Tesla customer stand my ground and say Tesla this simply isn’t good enough.

Do both. Go get the loan car but also play hell with Tesla in a very nice, respectful way. @Godsense complained about an issue and received many accessories for his troubles!

 

[Ant M3]

Mate , I love my Tesla but if they had done that to me then I would’ve walked away demanding my money back
That is shocking treatment by any standards , let alone when you’re spending more than Mercedes money but getting customer service worse than Austin Rover !

 

[Ant M3]

Mate , I love my Tesla but if they had done that to me then I would’ve walked away demanding my money back
That is shocking treatment by any standards , let alone when you’re spending more than Mercedes money but getting customer service worse than Austin Rover !

Time to get on Twitter to Elon

 

[JupiterMan]

sounds a sorry story.... hopefully just bad timing with Covid etc, but bad nonetheless.

In your shoes I think I'd get the loaner, and insist on home delivery of the M3... as you would have some leverage once you have the loaner..... and in the meantime you are putting on miles on someone elses car.

 

[davidmc]

Sorry to hear the pain agree it can be more fun going for root canal!

Stick in there and once your wife drives (her car!) she will have forgotten about it within 2 secs

Loan cars sometimes suprise you or don't. I have one at the moment as my SR+ is in for a fix. It a MX P100D this time and is an enjoyable fast tank of a car! Last one I had was a MS 70D and did not enjoy that, but that's my opinion. So I hope they put something decent aside for you

 

[CyberGus]

lo·gis·tics /ləˈjistiks/
noun
plural noun: logistics

the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies.​

This is apparently a skill that Tesla management has not optimized. I mean, FexEx knows where my package is at all times, and Amazon is downright annoying with the updates ("Your package is now 5 stops away! No wait, 4!").

It's not rocket science, Tesla folks. And you guys actually make rockets!!!

 

[LongRanger]

When you look at it from the perspective of Tesla being a battery and software company, that happens to chuck some cars out of a factory, the constant stories of logistics/service/ordering pain do make sense.

Decided that because all the usual traditional car companies have got so bad in recent years, it is unlikely to be worse than that, and if it is I have many years experience of accepting that when you buy a car, the manufacturer / dealer is actually doing you a favour - not the other way round. Yes it’s true ! We all exist purely to be at the behest of car companies. Or indeed battery/software companies. And we pay them handsomely for this privilege.

 

[CyberGus]

My guess is that sales has a system, and production has a system, and delivery has a system, but they're lacking sufficient coordination, such as an upstream authoritative database. ("Wait, your screen says it's in Des Moines? That's weird, my screen says it's in Poughkeepsie. It's probably halfway between, so, I'll tell the customer Columbus?")

 

[jammer1]

Thanks all. Agreed it really isn’t complex. And I don’t mind being told upfront that your car is stuck somewhere, we can’t get hold of it, if you want that particular one you will have to wait, or pick another. We would have happily waited. But it is so so so frustrating to be told literally one working hour before hand it won’t be ready when somewhere someone knew there was no chance of it being ready days before. They had already explained the delivery process to us several times. They need it for a clear 48 hours at Heathrow before handover to check, clean etc. I have checked with the wife again since writing my first post and she had been explicitly told it was at Heathrow and we are pretty sure it is not...otherwise why not give it to us tomorrow. One of my biggest motives for going is to ask to see it!

Anyway I will be calling them in the morning to discuss and then make up my mind whether to go. Agreed the loaners can be good...I have already had 2 from Weybridge...and am still confused why they can’t offer us one from there it’s a 30 min drive not an hour+.

I’ll let you know how we get on....

 

[Mr Miserable]

This is a very sorry tale and one where I smell the odour of a non-performing subcontractor involved.
Whilst the Tesla purchasing experience to my mind was a complete let down they did seem to raise their game when it came to delivering impossiblly large numbers of cars within impossibly tight timelines. There were hiccups and so I fully understand them investigating new methods of delivery. I'm not sure it has been a complete success although I'm not sure the traditional "all hands to the pump" end of quarter mayhem would have worked last quarter either. That said, it would certainly be able to handle deliveries now.

 

[DanAndTheBeard]

This post gets me nervous about ordering my Model 3 in a few months. I’m guessing I’ll need to prepare for the worst.

 

[Durzel]

This post gets me nervous about ordering my Model 3 in a few months. I’m guessing I’ll need to prepare for the worst.

One sympathises with the OP, it's clearly been a massive mess.

That being said, Tesla are delivering thousands of these cars. You will usually only hear about bad experiences on forums, etc, because that's where people go for help. Few people are going to post a thread saying "I got my car today, everything went to plan".

I got my car delivered to me during lockdown, direct from the dock. Tesla called me to say what day it was arriving, and it turned up on the day. The end.

I wouldn't fret too much about it, you'll almost certainly be fine, particularly once there is some sort of normality restored.

 

[GeorgeSymonds]

Lets hope the person writing FSD isn't the same person involved in their own IT (I know it won't be). But it kind of sets the culture for the company

I'd cancel. And until people start cancelling or not ordering in the first place they won't change. I'd also be really wary about only having Teslas, the company is fine when things work well, but to judge a company you have to look at how it acts when things go badly. There are too many problems for might liking where Tesla have effectively played fast and lose to dodge rather than be counted. I drive a Tesla so I appreciate the car, its my second one, and simple stuff like getting a broken reversing camera replaced was easy, but if I got battery gate, charge gate, a broken MCU1 bcause of the memory issue, a heater that stopped working etc I might start experiencing a different side to the company I won't like.

Trouble is, what to buy? 46k probably gets you a nice lightly used ipace. 26k probably gets you a Kona electric.

 

[jammer1]

Right, we have spoken to them. We are going to get the loan car. The car we have purchased is in a locked compound nowhere near Heathrow and possibly until someone comes off furlough the compound will remain locked. Why they couldn’t say that weeks ago I don’t know.

They have not made any promises about delivery now and when it may be extracted from the compound and it is possible that it could be “months” as opposed to “days/weeks”...but at least we now know where we stand and can make a decision on that basis.

And it is so much better this way...I don’t know what Tesla were worried about, if they had told us that up front...we probably would have said fine, we understand, times aren’t easy, let’s wait...it’s not like there are any alternatives to a Model 3 (and for anyone reading this thinking about buying one there aren’t).

Maybe Elon will drop the price while we are waiting as well!

 

[Durzel]

You can spend the money in a lot of cars that will stay the same for their entire life. I had a BMW i3 (via Evezy) before the Model 3 and it was my first electric car. The interior was unconventional but had shades of "this is the future" about it, but was still unmistakenably a car in the traditional sense. Lots of knobs and buttons, a missing gearstick and handbrake but in every other way like a normal car really.

I started off thinking the UI in the i3 was great, iDrive worked nicely, etc. But then it occured to me that the UI would stay the same for the life of the car. It would never be updated in any meaningful way, all of the issues that existed would be there for as long as I owned it. Maybe BMW would iterate on it, but I wouldn't see that in my car - I'd have to buy a new i3 that came with it. The old school of car building is very much that you get what you get when you buy it, and that's it - warts and all.

My Model 3 has had 3 updates to it since I bought it, while it's been sat on the drive. New features have been added, e.g. Track Mode, things have been fixed or improved, etc. I would not get that with any other car right now.

So yeah, you can sink £46k into another car - e.g. an iPace - but that iPace is going to be the same now as in 3-5 years time when you come to sell it. Who knows what the Model 3 will do by then.

 

[Mr Miserable]

They have not made any promises about delivery now and when it may be extracted from the compound and it is possible that it could be “months” as opposed to “days/weeks”...but at least we now know where we stand and can make a decision on that basis.

MONTHS!!
What is happening here?

 

[MrBadger]

Just tell them to give you a different car. I'm sure they must have suitable alternatives that they can get their hands on in quicker time than 'months'.

Our car got 'lost' on day of delivery (as far as we can tell, a transporter load got locked in a pound somewhere in Winchester with no access until the following week) - we were notified on the way to collect it but as we had committed to most of the journey, we decided to continue to collection and talk face to face with them. They miraculously found a car of identical spec that the could swap to us if we hung around for a bit. 6 hours later, we drove off in our 'new' new car *.

* by our after delivery issues, there was probably a reason why that car has not yet been given to a customer - 'you should not have been sold a car in that state' was what the service centre said when they were meant to sort the final issues nearly 6 months after collection - they never managed, so still another visit to sort.

 

[GeorgeSymonds]

So yeah, you can sink £46k into another car - e.g. an iPace - but that iPace is going to be the same now as in 3-5 years time when you come to sell it. Who knows what the Model 3 will do by then.

My Tesla is not even 4 years old and can't do much more than it could when new, and what it can do extra is barely worth worrying about (whooppiee cushion is hardly progress)... so while I get what you're saying, the car may not age as well as you hope.

A bid in the hand... they've still got a big chunk of change they should NOT have asked for ot taken when they weren't in a position to deliver.

The mental test I always apply is "If this was Merc/BMW.Audi/any other car maker, would I find it acceptable?"... and I think most of us would agree we wouldn't. So lets not make excuses for them

 

[Plagued]

I dunno, could be worse.
My mate went to pick up his model 3 performance on Friday, hand over was rushed and unprofessional, they told him if he didn't mention any issues now they wouldn't get fixed. So he called out some of the obvious ones, like -
Drivers door misaligned, belly pan not fixed in correctly and hanging down, rear windows not working, bonnet dented. they told him they'd noted them and to drive off and they'd get fixed later. So he drove home and got a contact tesla service message pop up before the screen went blank.
Called support and a hard reset got the screen back on for it to just do the exact same issue. So they said they'll have to fix it ... earliest slot in over a months time.