First of all, that group of people has one foot in the grave. Their relevancy going forward is waning fast. The times, they are a changin’. If CR wants to remain relevant (and in business) they need to change as well, which means attracting a new demographic of consumers.
Secondly, though many people resist change, when push comes to shove they change...or die.
For the record, age wise I fall in that category but have never used CR as a product information source nor do I know anyone (family, friends) that has or does.
Finally, nobody in their right mind gets ‘incensed’ when their car gets repaired while they are at work (Ranger service), or they get a flat and the tow truck and loaner is on the way before their vehicle comes to a complete stop (future planned Tesla service), or they can book service appointments from the convenience of their lazy-boy on a Sunday afternoon during a football came via their APP etc., etc...
People need to get their heads out of their poopers and realize what’s truly important in life. Quit being so selfish and self-centered, thinking the world revolves around them. Understand that poo happens and it’s not the end of the world.
The whole idea of people going with 5 page check lists and being hyper anal retentive about panel gaps and such when picking up their Teslas is absurdly ridiculous. And yet here we are, holding Tesla to a standard no other OEM has ever been held to in the past or likely the future. Don’t even, I’ve seen plenty of high price cars and lower price cars with worse panel gapping than Teslas. It happens, a lot. If people were half as vigilant about their current cars when they bought them as they are with Teslas, they’d realize it.
Fyi, the price of my 3 is by far (10’s of thousands) the most expensive car I’ve ever purchased and in no way did I go to pick it up with some sort of, ‘I’m paying this much money, it better be perfect’ attitude. I went eyes wide open; new, high tech product, rolling the dice a bit (maybe a lot) here, but this is the right thing to do. I expected and planned for hiccups because the situation called for that possibility. Like, duh!
Anyway, we’re pretty much in agreement on the major points.
So I took my Tesla in for service today -- which was scheduled through the Tesla app
As the service center is 100 miles away we left early and, as there were no difficulties, arrived early. On arrival, the staff
apologized that they weren't ready for us yet. Um, no, that's okay, I said, I'm early. The car was taken back for service
before the scheduled appointment time. They made very sure that we were heard and that they understood the issues.
What thorny issues required me to take my car in for service about two months after I got it? The seals/gaskets on the insides of the passenger side doors had started bulging. You could argue until the cows come home if it is reasonable to have such a problem on a new car, but the bottom line is that was not only an essentially cosmetic issue but far and away the best automotive service I have ever had. I also hit them up with a variety of questions about different issues (non-critical to me, others might see differently -- things like infrequent headlights flickering, black screen, connectivity issues, backup camera) that boiled down to the same thing: known problems that will be addressed in a future firmware update. They were (apologetically) careful to say it was unknown when this would actually happen. On the service invoice it says "...should be addressed with new 19. Firmware."
I did have a suggestion that I hope finds its way to the right folks. Most issues revolve around the car's behavior and there are extensive logs. As anyone who has dealt with logs knows, the only thing worse than no logs is too many logs
The point being, they need to have a specific time for an event in order to make effective use of those logs. To facilitate recording the time, I suggested a feature to generate a flagged timestamp, possibly as an option in the service menu.
I know Musk tweeted in defense of Consumer Reports and that their service of providing an independent review and comparison is important. But I think they are missing that Tesla is not like any other car company and that a Tesla vehicle is not like any other car. The issues that face Tesla owners are often not the issues that face owners of other cars. While something off in the firmware of an M3 can cause all sorts of problems (apparently all of those mentioned above), it also permits fixing all of those things without having to take the car to a service center. I'm not sure I'm onboard with virtualizing everything, but if Tesla keeps the actual hardware simple then they reduce the likelihood of hardware faults -- and those are the most difficult to fix at scale.
Do I have regrets about buying my M3 MR? Sure, I regret I wasn't able to buy an M3P instead
And, despite how much I despise CNBC reporting, I am enjoying the opportunity to buy stock at a rate lower than I had anticipated it would be.
