Hey, folks,
I'm a long time member and occasional contributor to the forums, I also write for CleanTechnica about Tesla and other clean power issues. Here's a link to some of my work on CleanTechnica:
Chris Boylan, Author at CleanTechnica
At the moment, I'm working on a couple of articles: One about the current state of Tesla Service, and another about the impact of the recent pricing changes on people's opinions of the company.
So if you've got an experience with Tesla service - negative or positive - please post it here. As far as "Service" is concerned, this would involve any direct personal experience with Tesla service, mobile service, on-site service and/or parts availability and its impact on service turn-around. If you've been a customer for a year or more and have noticed any change, this is worth noting.
I've owned a Tesla since 2013.
Chris, here are my main issues:
(1) The nearest service center is 5 hours drive away. I have unlimited ranger service (which was only purchaseable for a few months) so Tesla is taking care of it for now at their very large expense, but what the hell do I do when the extended warranty runs out and the car needs a lift? It will not be affordable to own the car unless they get a service center in Syracuse or Rochester or Binghamton NY. (All the service techs agree, but they can't seem to get HQ to do anything.)
(2) Service communications, until very recently, have been appalling. It's been hours on the phone having to repeat everything every time I talk to a new person, and then the person who actually comes to repair the car often hasn't heard any of it. The actual repair people are great.
The comms were better at my two most recent service calls (during 2019) -- they actually had the record of what I told the previous person, and I even got handed off to the correct specialist. But on one of them they still emailed when I specifically told them to call (thus meaning I had to call and yell at them to CALL back like I told them to).
(3) If something is broken in software (like the media player), you are screwed. They just break stuff in new software releases. They never ever fix software bugs. They just break stuff. The service centers have no ability to get the software people to fix anything. Neither do the mobile rangers. Neither does "executive escalation". Only suing the company or, if you get lucky, tweeting at Elon can get them to fix a software bug.
The good parts:
(1) The actual bottom-line service staff are awesome, eager beavers who do great work. Once you actually have one of them working on your car and talking to you, you're golden, in my experience. (Unless there's a software problem. Then you're hosed.)
(2) The hardware people do really great work. Every time I've had a hardware problem, it has been fixed permanently with an upgraded, improved hardware component. The exact opposite of the appalling experience with software, where every single version is worse than the previous one (and I really wish I still had the version which came with the car in early 2013).
(3) Parts availability has been good in my experience. But it's improved this year. It used to be that they would be calling around trying to figure out where they could get the part -- there was no central database, I guess, so they were calling other service centers saying "Have you got one of these?" Now they can find even obscure parts very quickly and get them immediately.
Nathanael Nerode, Ithaca, NY, and I'd be happy to answer follow-up questions.