This is why Tesla will fail -- not this year, not next year, but in a few years. It's just one story, but unfortunately it's representative.
Mid-december, the latch fails shut on my rear right door. I call up the service center I've been using to tell them that the latch is stuck shut (can't be opened from the inside or outside). They tell me that top management at Tesla (aka idiots) have told them they can't service my area any more and that I have to be directed to the "New York Mobile Service Team".
Now, there's no upstate NY service center. This is because Tesla top management (aka idiots) have *chosen* not to build one. It is legal for them to build one -- there is a limit on the number of stores, but no limit on the number of service centers. They are lying about this to their technicians, incidentally.
So, the service center I've been using refuses to make an appointment and says the NY mobile service team will call me. They refuse to give me the phone number for the NY mobile service team. They say they'll report my problem and order the part to be delivered to the NY mobile service team. I emphasize that it's the *latch*.
The NY mobile service team doesn't call me back after several weeks. I call the service center again and yell at them. This time I manage to get a phone number for the NY mobile service team. I call them. They say "our computer system says we tried to call you". They never tried to call me -- their computer system is lying. They say the parts came in a week ago (but they never bothered to call me....) I tell them *again* (since it's different people) that the problem is that the *latch* is stuck and ask them to make sure they have ordered the parts for the latch. "Omar" assures me that they have the parts for the latch. At this point, about four weeks after I first called, I am finally able to make an appointment. There is then a further delay because my schedule doesn't allow for an appointment in the next week (but would have in the earlier weeks which Tesla wasted).
Come today, the service tech shows up. He doesn't have the parts for the latch, because nobody ever wrote down that they were supposed to get the parts for the latch. Complete waste of time. I yell at the NY mobile service team guy (Omar), who lied to me, who now claims that the order regarding the stuck latch was never entered in his computer. I ask and he won't give me his manager's number. Or the number of the idiot in top management who ordered that we get all our mobile service through this idiot division. He says he'll talk to his manager -- we'll see.
This is par for the course with Tesla service. I have been dealing with this crap for five years, and it gets worse and worse every time. Meanwhile, the software team breaks basic functionality in updates (such as USB music playback).
This is going to kill the company. Not now, but as soon as there are other decent electric cars on the market -- ones where you can go to *independent service shops*.
They've had five years to fix this sort of crap and they've only made it worse. My advice to investors at this point is to hold on now, but dump the stock before 2020 if they don't fix the chronic and ever-worsening service problems.
It's not the bottom-line technicians. They're all fine. It's top management failure. There's no internal communications: information does not get passed from one person to another, and any one person who screws up the information ruins everything. The only way to get good service is to talk directly to the service tech who is going to do the work on your car. The only way to get a software bug fixed is to find the programmer who is responsible for fixing it. And Tesla does their best to *prevent* you from talking to the people you need to talk to.
