I went on what felt like a bit of a limb back in 2015 and bought a Model S P85D in the US. I was willing to buy a Tesla because its reputation up to that point was of a company that stood by its product. The overall experience with the P85D was fantastic – amazing car unlike anything I'd ever owned before and a great overall ownership experience. I really got the feeling that Tesla wanted to go the extra mile to make the overall experience a pleasant one. Offering the Ludicrous upgrade for a reasonable price to keep the P85D owners happy was a great gesture, and further added to my evangelism for the brand.
I moved to the UK in 2017 and bought a 2017 S P100DL. It's coming up on 3 years old. It's been a great car as well, pretty much trouble free. My initial plan was to keep it for 5-6 years, maybe more. But IMO, Tesla is no longer the same company it was in 2015. In a desperate push to become profitable, it has decided that its bottom line is more important than being upfront and honest with its customers when it comes to its batteries and other matters. Hence I sold my P100D last week rather than shepherd it into old age and have no plans to buy another Tesla unless Tesla takes drastic steps to right the course of the company as to how it deals with its customers post-sale.
Even though I wasn't affected by batterygate/chargegate, how Tesla is handling these issues influenced my decision to sell my car. We now know that Tesla has decided to artificially cap voltage in battery cells and slow supercharging speeds of certain cars for what we can only assume is to avoid exposing issues with these batteries that would necessitate replacement under the 8 year battery warranty. This is huge. Up until recently, I thought the battery warranty was going to actually cover battery failures. Now it looks like Tesla has decided that rather than do the right thing and replace the defective batteries, it will push out updates to cripple the range and charging speeds of the affected cars to conceal the problems, if possible. I have no confidence that these same problems won't arise in other battery sizes and Tesla will try to do the exact same thing.
There are several other issues that Tesla is being difficult and/or being downright dishonest about: yellowing screens that they absurdly claim are "normal" and not covered under warranty, forcing owners to go to arbitration, is one. Another is MCU failures that are clearly due to poorly designed, improperly used components that cause out-of-warranty owners to get stuck paying thousands to replace when the defective memory chip itself is probably a $10 part. And after experiencing the reduced performance and additional lag of the MCU after updating to firmware V.10, I worry about further degradation of performance as newer, more bloated firmware is pushed out in the future. And will I experience the dreaded control arm failure that many have experienced?
Then there are the myriad of other things that make the owner experience frustrating: one is dropping prices of P100Ds overnight by £43,000 (roughly 32%) in the UK this year, resulting in existing customers losing tens of thousands of pounds. Also, making us schedule service with the app is annoying, and having to wait months for a service appointment is worse. I was told recently that there were no service appointments available for the foreseeable future at the service center nearest me (over an hour away) and that if I wanted to book one (still two months out), I'd have to book it at a service center that would take me about twice as long to drive to (two hours). And knowing that if I ever had a collision that my car could be off the road for an inordinate amount of time due to the Tesla parts supply chain, and the repair would be of a magnitude more than a comparable ICE car isn't comforting either.
I used to wholeheartedly recommend Tesla, now I tell people the exact opposite: stay away. I truly breathed a sigh of relief when I closed the sale of mine. These cars are complicated, the technology relatively new in mass deployment. I was not willing to hold onto this car knowing that if I have a serious issue in the future, Tesla's first thought will not be how it can fix it and keep a good customer happy, but to obfuscate and conceal to help its bottom line.