As I have been saying for months, Tesla's biggest ongoing problem is they're klutzes at communication. They lack the empathy, sensitivity, leadership, creativity, discretion, humor, accountability, and plain old good sense when it comes to the corporate bureaucracy communicating to the outside world. They lack the imagination to do wonders with technology -- to integrate it creatively into the car, into the TM website's My Tesla section, and into the mobile apps -- to make the communications between company and customer as wonderful as the car itself. They have not shown any consistent understanding of the importance of managing expectations. This leads to customer confusion, customer disappointment. A disappointed customer is the worst thing a company can have. Especially in the social media, always-on internet age. Of ALL companies Tesla should understand this. They do not. Or they do, but they haven't made it a priority. It reflects poorly on management, and management is sorely responsible for these screwups.
As I have also been saying for months, ALL of this is fixable. It takes management recognizing and admitting there is a problem, understanding the urgency of correcting the problem, finding competent people who know how to fix the problem in terms of process, people, and IT infrastructure, trusting them to be turned loose to make the changes, and making it clear to the whole company this is how things will be done from now on: each employee whose job outwardly faces the customer world needs to be accountable. Systems need to be put in place, and quality assurance tests done and verified, that when the company communicates out to the world, the message is correct, the appropriate recipients receive the message, inappropriate recipients do not by accident receive the message, and things just WORK.
This is not Tesla today. It NEEDS to be Tesla soon or the company will be in a world of hurt come mass deployment of the X and the 3.
After going through 140 posts in this thread and saving a few to respond to, I have to respond to this one now before reading on. Yes, most of us here are fanbois and fangurls and even investors (I'm all three... but only #2 on Halloween ;D ). But there are huge issues here with this letter, and to brush it under the rug just because it does offend you personally is not really the ideal response, imho. Maybe it's partly because I work in the world of public communications, but I'd say most of my concern is that Tesla is now a huge company that should have better checks in place to guard against such things.
Objectively, whether you think it should have or not, this letter pissed off a lot of Tesla owners... Tesla fanbois even! Because it accused them of doing something wrong that 1) doesn't apply to them, and 2) doesn't fit with the loose and strong promotion of the Superchargers provided for a long time.
I agree that it was first of all a big error in the algorithm, which should have had enough checks in place (this is a Silicon Valley company, after all) to have not messed up so badly, and then was also a big error in the communications for not being more cautious in case the person receiving the email shouldn't have received it. Of course, the latter is slightly more forgivable since they obviously thought they were sending these letters to the right people.
This is a mistake on a few levels, and given the repeated concerns from numerous people here about communications errors, I think it's well warranted to write what you wrote and encourage a big shift in this side of the business before it's "too late."
TMC forum members are great at realizing things before the crowd, but when it is something negative, we should realize that the best response is to try to get the problematic pattern dealt with rather than infinitely forgive Tesla because we love the company, love Elon, love the mission, and love the vehicles. The mass market will not be so forgiving, and the result would be counterproductive.
On to reading more responses here. And, yes, writing up a story, which is still forming in my head, for very influential fanboi sites that I know is followed by many more influential sites... which is one reason why I, for one, am exceedingly cautious about how I communicate and frame issues. The ideal, of course, is to help the world (or help society help itself, to be more direct).
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