Tesla removing transferable supercharging from existing owners?

[Bet TSLA]

2) It was considered finished, but it's very buggy.
3) Someone just messed up while deploying some features which is killing every other feature, too (oh, javascript..)

I really hope it wasn't 2 or 3 because that just further confirms my suspicions that Tesla's in house software quality and processes around testing and shipping are a complete dumpster.

I imagine it's sloppy deployment. It's hard to generalize about these things across all software. Don't you think it's pretty unlikely that Tesla has its best people on web fixes and their deployment? I'm sure it's "process lite" and they just fix the problems that show up rather than making sure they never appear. Much less effort, and thus a more efficient use of resources. I've never seen Tesla blow safety-related software, have you?

My page for my Model S says "Free Unlimited Supercharging", but it's missing the "Motor Vehicle Purchase Agreement" under the "Delivery Documents". I'm not about to panic. As I remember, when I got my Model 3 back in December, 2017 it took months for the purchase agreement and other paperwork to appear on the web page. Seriously, so what? It would be nice if Tesla delivered a high quality experience across the board, but I'm glad they seem to be making their technical mistakes on things that matter less.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

I just logged into my Tesla account and notice that any mention of supercharging transferring to the next owner is gone. I still have free supercharging.

Am I correct in that Tesla is removing transferable supercharging altogether? If so, how is it not theft or fraud?

No. It is not so, so no point answering.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Maybe those who leap for choice number 2 have read this thread where people are reporting Tesla removing supercharging from vehicles they don't own which came with transferable supercharging but have changed owners.
No more free unlimited supercharging for Tesla used vehicles

You have some particular post you are referring to? That's a long thread and seems to be mostly about Tesla removing free supercharging from vehicles that didn't come with transferability. Is there some evidence of Tesla doing something other than that?

Or maybe those same people drive cars which developed yellow screens within a year and which Tesla recently excluded from warranty coverage? Or do you claim that this was also just a software bug that infected service personnel and Tesla lawyers too?

What? To my knowledge Tesla is fixing yellowed screens with some sort of application of UV for belatedly properly curing some glue. Is there evidence that they aren't doing this or refusing to do this for some people? I expect I'll need that to be done at some point, but I haven't been stressing over it.

Blame everything on a software bug - "it will be fixed over the air", where have I heard this before.

Web site bugs aren't fixed "over the air". Are you just pretending to be stupid? Or do you really think that Tesla is evil and out to screw its customers? If so, you really shouldn't own a Tesla vehicle. You know they can make them crash, right?

 

[AMPd]

You have some particular post you are referring to? That's a long thread and seems to be mostly about Tesla removing free supercharging from vehicles that didn't come with transferability. Is there some evidence of Tesla doing something other than that?


What? To my knowledge Tesla is fixing yellowed screens with some sort of application of UV for belatedly properly curing some glue. Is there evidence that they aren't doing this or refusing to do this for some people? I expect I'll need that to be done at some point, but I haven't been stressing over it.


Web site bugs aren't fixed "over the air". Are you just pretending to be stupid? Or do you really think that Tesla is evil and out to screw its customers? If so, you really shouldn't own a Tesla vehicle. You know they can make them crash, right?

Tesla might not be evil but they are definitely screwing some customers.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Tesla might not be evil but they are definitely screwing some customers.

So, presuming that the car business isn't all that different across different manufacturers, is there some evidence that Tesla is doing worse than others? Is there any evidence they aren't doing much, much better? Of course they are not doing a perfect job. Of course some people are going to be unhappy.* But is it out of line?

*It's also quite apparent that some people aren't satisfied unless they're unhappy and actively complaining.

 

[AMPd]

So, presuming that the car business isn't all that different across different manufacturers, is there some evidence that Tesla is doing worse than others? Is there any evidence they aren't doing much, much better? Of course they are not doing a perfect job. Of course some people are going to be unhappy.* But is it out of line?

*It's also quite apparent that some people aren't satisfied unless they're unhappy and actively complaining.

This forum is about tesla and not other car manufacturers.
Regardless of what other manufacturers do, my statement is true.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Regardless of what other manufacturers do, my statement is true.

True statements are cheap. Statements that are true and meaningful are what we need around here.

 

[Tam]

...Is there evidence that they aren't doing this or refusing to do this for some people?...

In the beginning, Tesla was gladly to replace yellow border screens with no questions asked under the warranty.

Then Tesla reversed itself and stopped replacing it claiming it's wear and tear but it would gladly replace it if you want to pay outside of warranty.

Now, it starts to treat the screen with UV light as one time courtesy outside of warranty.

If that treatment fails as the screen becomes yellow again, your one time free courtesy was spent and you will have to pay even when your warranty has not run out.

 

[Bet TSLA]

In the beginning, Tesla was gladly to replace yellow border screens with no questions asked under the warranty.

Then Tesla reversed itself and stopped replacing it claiming it's wear and tear but it would gladly replace it if you want to pay outside of warranty.

Now, it starts to treat the screen with UV light as one time courtesy outside of warranty.

If that treatment fails as the screen becomes yellow again, your one time free courtesy was spent and you will have to pay even when your warranty has not run out.

I'll believe that when I see it. My understanding is that this is supposed to be a permanent fix. If it's not, I'm sure they'll do something else to deal with it. On the other hand, my screen (in my S) has started yellowing around the edges. It's hard to notice and doesn't interfere with anything in any way, so strictly cosmetic in my opinion. I suppose other people must have it a lot worse if they're getting upset about it. But I haven't paid much attention to this controversy as it seemed to me Tesla was dealing with it.

 

[Tam]

...so strictly cosmetic in my opinion...

It is a display. The function of a display is to display what the software tells it to. If the software tells it to light up in some regions and it cannot because of missing pixels, then it is not doing its job. If the software tells it to display white and it always displays yellow then it is not doing its job.

The same thing with white paint. If I order white paint, its job is to display white. If it displays yellow instead of white then it is not doing its job.

Many people do not mind those technicalities.

However, the arbitrator ruled against Tesla and made it replace the screen display.

 

[bmah]

Moderator note: Moved two posts to snippiness.

Please remember that personal attacks are against TMC forum rules.

Thank you,

Bruce.

 

[S4WRXTTCS]

The simple fact is that Tesla is removing transferrable free supercharging for life from vehicles that people own.

I have absolutely no idea how it's legal as it was transferrable when the people bought the vehicle. There were plenty of things on various literature indicating it was.

When I owned a 70D Model S one of the things I liked about it is that it had free supercharging for life that was transferrable so I always knew a private buyer would likely pay extra for it. Where as the car got older, and older that uniqueness would become more and more valuable.

I don't have the car anymore so it doesn't impact me, but I still find it irksome that Tesla is doing this.

For the sake of argument lets say Tesla left wiggle room to change it, and maybe I just missed it since I'm not a lawyer.

Even if that's the case I still find it unacceptable.

It's just another thing in a long list of practices that are turning away owners from Tesla.

It's extremely doubtful that I'll buy another Tesla due the accumulation of all these things.

Where the vast majority of them saved the company less money than the customer it lost.

Quite frank it's not a consumer friendly company anymore. It's downright hostile to owners whether intentional or not.

 

[Geek190]

The issue as I see it...
Tesla at some point decided that it was very expensive to replace potentially most of the screens, and that they thought they would be able to fix them via the UV treatment.

The problems begin to arise as there is no clear message to tell customers.

Confusion turns to frustration as it has become increasingly difficult to communicate with Tesla. The option we have is to use the app to schedule service, which quickly gets cancelled with an email saying we're working on it and will let you know something, sometime, maybe.

Where the frustration turns to anger is Tesla's refusal to say whether the UV treatment is permanent - of course they can't say because they don't know - and then the subsequent refusal to call the treatment warranty service.

My MCU isn't yellow either, and if/when it becomes yellow I'll be just fine with the UV treatment, so long as they can give me a reasonable timeframe to apply it (inside of 6 months? Before the expiration of my warranty? Before I try to sell my car?) and mark it as warranty so that if it didn't fix it permanently, I can still have it replaced under warranty. The refusal to mark it as warranty and to instead insist on the invoice being marked goodwill is very intentional and quite suspect.

 

[darxsys]

I imagine it's sloppy deployment. It's hard to generalize about these things across all software. Don't you think it's pretty unlikely that Tesla has its best people on web fixes and their deployment? I'm sure it's "process lite" and they just fix the problems that show up rather than making sure they never appear. Much less effort, and thus a more efficient use of resources. I've never seen Tesla blow safety-related software, have you?

My page for my Model S says "Free Unlimited Supercharging", but it's missing the "Motor Vehicle Purchase Agreement" under the "Delivery Documents". I'm not about to panic. As I remember, when I got my Model 3 back in December, 2017 it took months for the purchase agreement and other paperwork to appear on the web page. Seriously, so what? It would be nice if Tesla delivered a high quality experience across the board, but I'm glad they seem to be making their technical mistakes on things that matter less.

Absolutely could be true and it could be that only their web team doesn't do proper development, which in itself is not too terrible because a broken webpage won't kill anyone.

However, let's dig deeper: what about MCU1 performance issues? Don't tell me that a quad core CPU from 2011 can't run a little bit of Linux smoothly, because that would be nonsense. What about memory corruption issues after certain updates? What about the maps bug that slowed everyone's MCUs down? How did that get through testing? Any kind of reasonable testing?

Combined with this website development issue, as well as the mobile app issue (service option is gone from my mobile app for some reason), it certainly seems to signal that more than one thing is being sloppily developed. Does that mean that FSD also isn't good? No idea, but I have reasons to fear. ESPECIALLY since Elon seems to be pushing so hard for it to the point that people are leaving. That tells me the chance of cutting corners is pretty high.

 

[darxsys]

True statements are cheap. Statements that are true and meaningful are what we need around here.

It sounds like you really want people to bash you so someone gets banned. This is advanced level of trolling. What kind of a statement is that and what does that even mean? And how was AMPd's statement not meaningful?

This forum is toxic because people are either extremely into Tesla, or extremely against it. It's almost impossible to reasonably debate about good and bad sides of Tesla.

Apologies for the rant, won't happen anymore.

 

[jerseygirl18]

I apologize for asking for a reasonable service from a car company that sells premium cars costing close to 6 figures.

Carry on.

Beyond 6 figures in some/most cases

 

[David_Cary]

It sounds like you really want people to bash you so someone gets banned. This is advanced level of trolling. What kind of a statement is that and what does that even mean? And how was AMPd's statement not meaningful?

This forum is toxic because people are either extremely into Tesla, or extremely against it. It's almost impossible to reasonably debate about good and bad sides of Tesla.

Apologies for the rant, won't happen anymore.

Wouldn't this mean that every internet forum is toxic? Oh - yeah they are....

It does seem like this forum was a lot more reasonable in the good old days. But I digress.

As a more casual observer of their webpage, I checked my car (2015 70D). It says FUSC. No mention of transfer. But no mention of no transfer either. Since I hadn't seen the page in years, I thought it was fine. So if you take away the history that it said "fully transferable for the life of the car", then there is an issue. But today - looks fine to me.

So maybe they just changed wording. Maybe they are hoping that the less knowledgeable consumer will forget whether their car was "for the life" and they can disable it when sold. Perhaps 80% of consumers are "less knowledgeable". Also perhaps, the new buyers will give up on trying to fix it when they can't get anyone on the phone. Many new buyers maybe never supercharge and never notice. And then resell the car in 2 years and then it is really gone.

Probably a reasonable strategy. Sketchy for sure. But reasonable from a profit standpoint.

I have 75k miles and probably haven't broke $200 in savings by not paying for SC. We have a 3LR that we take on long trips despite the pocket change that supercharging costs us (mostly because of range and supercharging speed).

 

[whitex]

You have some particular post you are referring to? That's a long thread and seems to be mostly about Tesla removing free supercharging from vehicles that didn't come with transferability. Is there some evidence of Tesla doing something other than that?

Well, you can read through the thread to find examples youself, but here is one I found on page 2, comment #25, then Tesla replying to the same person in comment #34 that they have a new policy of not transferring free supercharging for cars which were supposed to have free transferable supercharging for the life of the car. Another person, comment #62, and another in comment #120 with the most telling Tesla response:

Got an email response from Tesla stating they are indeed removing free supercharging from 3rd party vehicles they do not own. "Thank you for contacting Tesla! My records indicate that you purchased this vehicle from a third-party seller. Unfortunately as of April 23rd, 2019, all Tesla vehicles purchased at third-party dealers/vendors will lose their unlimited Supercharging statuses. There may have been a slight delay in some credits disappearing as our systems had to implement the change fleet-wide. I apologize for the inconvenience."
I of course responded insisting this be escalated for an official justification on how they can remove items of value from a vehicle they do not own, in my case 2 months after I purchased it and did have the feature.

While someone dug out a cached Tesla website from the wayback machine which clearly shows that Tesla sold cars per 2017 as free supercharging for the life of the car:

I thought Supercharging was free. Why do I have to pay now?
If your Tesla was ordered by January 15, 2017, it comes with free Supercharger access for the life of the car. You will not pay for Supercharger use but idle fees may be assessed if your vehicle remains connected to a Supercharger after the charge session is complete.

What? To my knowledge Tesla is fixing yellowed screens with some sort of application of UV for belatedly properly curing some glue. Is there evidence that they aren't doing this or refusing to do this for some people? I expect I'll need that to be done at some point, but I haven't been stressing over it.

Again, not my job to read threads for you. If you don't have a car with yellow screen, there are plenty of accounts from people who tried to get Tesla to fix it. They strung people along for months, and now there are 3 machines doing the fixes, each taking hours, while there are thousands of affected cars - you do the math. They also very clearly are disowning the issue and even the fix is classified as "good-will" which means you are not at all entitled to it (meaning if you have to wait 10 years before you can get it, no recourse), and the fix itself is not warrantied at all (good-will fixes are favors they are doing to you, they don't warranty any of those not even for 1 day after the fix).

Web site bugs aren't fixed "over the air". Are you just pretending to be stupid? Or do you really think that Tesla is evil and out to screw its customers? If so, you really shouldn't own a Tesla vehicle. You know they can make them crash, right?

I was being sarcastic - things you attribute to webside bugs are clearly not, Of course, I'm sure some people will continue to make exuses, "this new supercharging policy is just a web bug, I have faith it will be fixed, like the yellow screens, some day before the end of time".

 

[Bet TSLA]

Well, you can read through the thread to find examples youself...

Yes, I could. But you're the one claiming there's a needle in that there haystack, so it seems to me you should point it out specifically. I looked at the posts you mentioned and some context shows that there are varying experiences and no resolution yet. Like most of these things it looks like Tesla's communications are poor and their low-level employees uninformed.

Meanwhile, on that thread, I see unhelpful things from you like:

Elon is ruthless when it comes to money, so if he can pull a fast one on people to make a buck, he will.

Given that attitude, I think I'm done responding to you.

 

[Bet TSLA]

It sounds like you really want people to bash you so someone gets banned. This is advanced level of trolling. What kind of a statement is that and what does that even mean? And how was AMPd's statement not meaningful?

What nonsense is this? True statement: Tesla cars catch fire. So what. Not meaningful unless context is provided. Defending a statement as "true" isn't much of a defense. A meaningful true statement would include information like some Tesla cars catch fire sometimes, and often the battery isn't involved so it's no different from an ICE car fire where gasoline isn't involved. And no Model 3 battery has ever caused a fire. And Tesla cars catch fire at a far lower rate than ICE cars. You know, context. But sure, Tesla cars catch fire is a true statement.