The former tend to be unappealing and in inconvenient locations, hardly a way to attract customers.
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With brick & mortar locations closing who will be delivering Tesla vehicles?
- Thread starter voip-ninja
- Start date
The former tend to be unappealing and in inconvenient locations, hardly a way to attract customers.
ucmndd
Well-Known Member
As much as I want to disagree, I think this is true.
EVs, and Teslas in particular, are such a unique experience for someone driving an ICE, you almost have to experience it to believe it. I remember my test drive vividly. It was barely 10 minutes, but that first acceleration run and engagement of autopilot was next-level magic. I was completely sold right there in that instant.
I’m not sure you can recreate that and push people off the fence with a web page.
I'm not 100% about no showrooms. I bought mine without a test drive because the people that got there's before me were raving about it, so I figured it was a safe bet. Maybe that will continue. But Tesla is totally relying on word of mouth and buddy test drives now, seems dicey. We'll see. I suppose with the longer return period if you don't like it you can always give it back.
The $35K model is exactly what I thought it would be, so no surprises there. I am pretty excited about another 15 miles of range for my LR plus 5% more power. I think that will translate into a couple 1/10s off the zero to sixty speed. Should bring it down to 5.0 or 4.9 (from 5.1) seconds by my figuring.
The $35K model is exactly what I thought it would be, so no surprises there. I am pretty excited about another 15 miles of range for my LR plus 5% more power. I think that will translate into a couple 1/10s off the zero to sixty speed. Should bring it down to 5.0 or 4.9 (from 5.1) seconds by my figuring.
They're not eliminating all showrooms. My guess is that they're closing the standalone showrooms or mall locations where there's no service center attached. There really isn't a need for those. Just an added expense for no good reason. They'll probably have staff on hand at the service center-connected showrooms who can still educate customers that come in. They just won't need nearly as many people as they did before. Smart move.
Think it indicates that most issues are rather minor and with diagnostics being online and people being able to say "my door handle isnt presenting itself" that the service needed is minor most of the time. So going to the car isnt that inefficient and much better customer service. The more major issues of course will require the car going to the service centers.
Krugerrand
Meow
Well, feel free to call Elon Musk a liar because that’s exactly what he said in the most recent email to his employees along with the stat of 78% of buyers ordering online last year.
FYI, we’re way past early adopters so you can put that argument to bed. It’s 2019, not 2010 Roadster days or even 2012 S days.
I’m one of the 82 & 78% and will do so again for the Y and pickup. Best car and car buying purchase, EVER. No drama. All upside. 26k blissful, awesome miles and soon I’m getting an OTA update that’s giving me 325 miles of range instead of 310 and a 5% peak power increase. The last time an OEM gave me a bigger gas tank and more powerful engine for free was....um....NEVER. The last time an OEM offered a 7 day/1000 mile full refund if you don’t like the car was also, NEVER.
Google is a wonderful thing when looking for information. The hardest part is knowing who’s talking out their butt and disseminating their personal reality and opinion based on zero facts versus giving hard, accurate data. I’ll leave you to decide which category you just fall into.
Feel free to buy not-a-Tesla. Nobody’s stopping you.
If you think that 100% of the things Tesla does are pure epic genius then you might be a broken fanboy. Just like if you think that 100% of the things Tesla does are idiotic stupid and burn piles of cash then you might be a hateful short seller.
Intelligent people try to use their brains and see both possibilities. i.e., when Elon Musk pisses on your head (making unrealistic promises about FSD capabilities, timetables, etc.) it's not raining.... and similarly when Tesla closes most of their retail stores and lays off likely thousand+ employees it doesn't necessarily mean the end is near.
We don't know how Tesla will be handling deliveries moving ahead but they are going to have massive #s of cars to deliver if demand for new lower price trims are high and they are going to have fewer direct Tesla employees available to deliver them based on Musks own comments around store closing and layoff of more employees.
I was perfectly comfortable ordering my Model 3 on the website without talking to anyone, but that's not the case for everyone. Many older people want to shake a person's hand and get answers to all of their questions by a human being before spending a large sum of money.
I wouldn't take Tesla's numbers from very high trim versions of cars being sold to bleeding edge adopters via website and assume it will trickle into all trim levels now that the barriers to entry have been lowered so dramatically... but feel free to do that, since you always argue Tesla is aces in every conversation you have ever been involved in.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
That 78% doesn't tell us what % of them only ordered online after seeing one in person at a showroom and/or test driving one there though.
The sight-unseen buyer % is lower. Probably a lot lower. And probably A WHOLE LOT lower once you're past the pre-order/reservation buyers.
That said- service centers have loaners already, so it'd be fairly trivial to keep one or two guys around to do test drives and look-overs at SCs and solve that issue.
I had the exact same experience as above. I wanted to like tesla, but was "wary" of the brand. A few people (@voip-ninja is one) who I knew were long time BMW drivers and had unfiltered opinions had posted on one of the BMW boards I frequent about their experiences. In specific. @voip-ninja took a lot of *sugar* for answering questions honestly there. For me, knowing someone else who was super familiar with BMWs had thought a tesla model 3 was a good car, made me look into it more.
My local Sales center (50 ish miles from my house) had a model 3 performance car for test drive. The first time I "floored it", I was sold. Without that test drive, I am likely not buying a Tesla. I am not wealthy (but I am not poor). I dont think I would have spent that much money without being able to drive the car. I put a large down payment (for me) down... Money I had been saving to buy some car cash, but was so sold on the performance model I took out a loan to cover the delta between what I put down (north of 45k) and what the car cost.
No WAY I put 45k down on a car I have never driven... regardless of the fact I could return it.
I am not upset about the price drops. That stuff happens, I made my choice to buy, etc. What actually bothers me is, at the sales center I went to, the salespeople and management were super passionate about the cars and tesla. I hate seeing hard working people rewarded with layoffs. These people took a chance with tesla, and are getting burned, AFTER throwing their all into trying to help tesla succeed.
THAT bums me the @#$@Q out. Some may get jobs in other departments, but I am not a fan of just "discarding" those front line people that actually helped tesla survive.
I am also frustrated with the continued layoffs. People are up beat about it and talk about "trimming the fat" but in many cases these are people who just about killed themselves working 12+ hour days to do Q4 deliveries last year and are now being rewarded with a pink slip. Continued layoffs have a very negative effect on morale, based on my personal experience at multiple businesses where it happened.
On the other hand, from Tesla's standpoint it's do this now or risk bankruptcy. They have to convert outstanding reservation holders into purchasers in order to continue expansion it's do or die time now.
Hey, watch it! We don't take kindly to this kind of reasonable commentary around here!
I mentioned it in another thread but I'll mention it here as well. I wonder if they might try to copy the mobile service model and go with "mobile sales". Potential customers could call in and schedule a test drive and a Tesla employee could bring the car to them. They've done this in the past for limited locations. They could easily expand this nationwide and allow potential customers to see the car in person and test drive it. They could easily have employees in any city/town and wouldn't need any actual store for the customer to visit. The potential customers that don't need a personal visit can continue to just order online. Those who need a little more hand holding could call "mobile sales" and get their questions answered in person and then order online.
Deliveries can be made the same way. They are already doing home deliveries in some areas by having the employee drive the car to the new owner.
Deliveries can be made the same way. They are already doing home deliveries in some areas by having the employee drive the car to the new owner.
One cannot hire and fire their way through every few months. Nobody worth anything will want to work for Tesla in such an unstable scenario and us owners won't have much of a good time working with those who remained. I don't know anybody who got to be more productive just based on the threat of imminent job loss or because of general employment uncertainty.
Exactly. Better to lay a few now than 100% later. It's quite likely if Tesla survives than later they may have MORE employees than they did during this time. I think this is an important, but painful step forward for Tesla, not a step back. You have to admit they do have some balls here. No one has ever tried to sell new cars completely online before, at least to my knowledge.
So rather than talk to 30 prospects a day, a sales rep sits in traffic and meets with two or three a day.
I know this is not a good scenario long term, but if they don't have the money they don't have the money. I do think the long term outlook has improved a lot for Tesla since a couple of years ago though.
I doubt they would need to spend 3 hours with each prospect. I could imagine them handling 8 or more...and these would be serious prospects. Casual prospects could be handled online via video conferencing. That's how we got our solar quote and we spent as much on solar as a LR Model 3 costs.
I would think the delivery centers and service centers could employ the showroom people as customer liaison folks because the majority of complaints I read about are lack of communication...and, when four out of five Tesla vehicles sold are no longer part of your luxury brand - it makes no sense to maintain "showrooms" as you are no longer "bespoke" vehicles but selling off the rack...Model 3s
If they're on the right footing, as they say they are, then what they lack is cash flow and for that there are banks and loans. Instead of playing twitter all day, pissing off the SEC and appearing like a bit of a lunatic to the Wall Street crowd, the CEO could show more restraint, build bridges rather than set them on fire, and generally keep as many options open as possible, such that, when a cash crunch comes, followed shortly by the need for more staff, he would not have to take actions with such a severe impact on people's livelihood ... especially after having had those people work their butts off for the "mission".
