Worse car buying experience ever!

[SMAlset]

Do you think other car dealerships and their employees are delivering the volume of cars out of their individual dealerships on the same daily number level as what the more limited number of Tesla delivery centers and their employees have been doing over these months in Q3 and 4? I really don't think so.

I also don't think Tesla employees feel like their customers owe them. I never saw that during our Fremont delivery center delivery experience and they were very busy. We didn't go in expecting to be pampered despite our Teslas costing more than any other car we ever owned. In our case we were shown the car first (given ample time to look over and note any due bill issues) and then proceeded to paperwork at the end of which we gave them our check, so no pressure to pay upfront.

I don't doubt that some Tesla employees probably were feeling burnt out helping the company to reach profitability last quarter and sure that continues into Q4 deliveries. If the Fed tax break cools off US sales a bit in Q1, groups will be still be working hard to get shipments out to overseas customers and let's not forget the base range version will be out at some point, all this happening as production numbers increase.

Hopefully cars will be more readily available in 2019 making the customers wait time shorter. Elon said that was a goal they had.

 

[HopeToGolf]

Yes I'm looking forward to the Taycan in 3 years. Originally I thought the biggest draw to Tesla was the superchargers. But now that there's almost always a line there it's no longer an advantage you need to do charging at home. So I'm open to pretty much any electric car as long as the range is above 300 miles.

I am looking forward to the Taycan as well. However, I have concerns regarding the availability of fast charging on the road. Being on the east coast and taking monthly road trips, I find the superchargers invaluable.

 

[traxila]

My experience with the local Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and Audi dealerships here, both service and sales, is above and beyond what anyone is getting from Tesla these days. Tesla management needs to walk through a Lexus dealership and take some notes. It's not just delivery issues...had my annual at the Palo Alto Service center yesterday....wow. Overworked, understaffed, grossly inadequate faculties for the volume of cars locally. And a 6 hour round trip for me because no service center in Fresno even though it's been listed as coming by the end of the year for the last 3 years.

if my car wasn't so darned great I would have ditched it a while back.

I have no doubt what you say is true. You are right that Tesla is behind the curve building out its infrastructure for service. It had to curb its spending to insulate it self from shorts who were on the verge of causing a waterfall on the stock. This is the result, not that there is any guarantee it would be 100% better....

The company grew and is growing very fast and needs to catch up. It will. Enjoy the car.

 

[suwaneedad]

Yes I'm looking forward to the Taycan in 3 years. Originally I thought the biggest draw to Tesla was the superchargers. But now that there's almost always a line there it's no longer an advantage you need to do charging at home. So I'm open to pretty much any electric car as long as the range is above 300 miles.

So your use case is local/regional driving only, got it. In that scenario, yes Tesla will have real competitors probably in 2020 if not sooner.
But for the rest of us, where the supercharger network isn't about local charging but about road-tripping, Tesla has no true EV competitors prior to 2021.

 

[dusdev]

Welcome to the 'Genuine Tesla Experience'

 

[AviP]

Unfortunately, there is a herd of customers who will buy the car irrespective of your opinion. Tesla is definitely not customer centric, as it always caters to the investors first. It is one of the reasons I've canceled my order. As long as there are people willing to overpay, Tesla will continue to behave in this manner. It doesn't help that the competition is technologically limited.

 

[SemiS3XYR]

Pampered? No but a better level of professionalism. Quite simple. Checking in, be honest, update, smile, keep the place clean and refreshed. The waiting room felt like a new age prison. PRIORITIZE

Even a deli counter has rolling # orders.

 

[N2B8]

Good news, Tesla Roadster 2.0 probably qualifies!

It will be an amazing car. But at that price I prefer a little sound. Besides going from 0-60mph in less than 2sec too many times can't be good for me haha.

Please. Please competitors produce EVs! Please! Seriously! We need them.

My experience with the local Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and Audi dealerships here, both service and sales, is above and beyond what anyone is getting from Tesla these days. Tesla management needs to walk through a Lexus dealership and take some notes.

Unfortunately, there is a herd of customers who will buy the car irrespective of your opinion. Tesla is definitely not customer centric, as it always caters to the investors first. It is one of the reasons I've canceled my order. As long as there are people willing to overpay, Tesla will continue to behave in this manner. It doesn't help that the competition is technologically limited.

I agree that right now Tesla has almost everyone by their balls. But that won't last. Hopefully they won't stay so complacent as they are right now. I think a lot of new Tesla owners come from non luxury brands so they do not know what they are missing. I suspect that's why they are not as vocal at the moment.

I spoke with my neighbor last night who bought a 100D last year. He said his delivery experience was just as worse. So apparently this is not a new phenomenon. It's not the tax credit, the forest fires, the holidaze, or anything. It's just Tesla doesn't know much about customer service, or maybe they just don't care.

I remember back in the 90s there were these two cars called the Acura NSX and the Lexus LS400. Those two cars single handedly turned the exotic and luxury car world upside down. The Germans luxury and the Italians exotic car makers thought they had everyone by their nuts. We'll see how it turns out for Tesla in five years...

Welcome to the 'Genuine Tesla Experience'

My only goal from this post is to share with others my experience. It's been an eye opener. I think that when a customer spends more than $50k on a car they should expect a certain level of customer service. It's too bad Tesla is not providing that at the moment. Not only that it's sad that people are ok being treated this way. Can you imagine how many more cars they would sell if they can provide better customer service?

Anyways I have good news to report, a senior advisor finally called me. Probably because I raised hell the day before about my other incompetent IDA. Told me he located an identical car for me. He was able to provide me with a purchase order agreement and set up my appointment within 15 min. Last week it took a week for that other noobie IDA to do the same. I turned down the offer to have it delivered to my house so we are scheduled to pick it up at the delivery center tomorrow. We'll see how it goes...

 

[ivengo]

I want to state that my delivery experience at the end of Quarter 3 was flawless. DS always responded within a few hours. My delivery date was moved to be sooner than what was originally promised. At delivery I was given ample amount of time to inspect the car. My delivery center was Austin.
So I guess people have different experience.

 

[MaryAnning3]

While it was a stressful week and I could regale you with stories about my delivery, I think it does not change how many cars are sold or how Tesla will fare as a company. It almost adds to the mystique. You can have the best, most amazing car in the world with an autopilot system in a class of its own, but you gotta go through some difficulty.

I am assuming that many of the delivery assistants know almost nothing and were hired about 5 minutes ago. (That is what mine seemed like.) But now I am driving the best car ever and I wouldn't trade it for anything. (Actually, it is driving me.) Delivery nightmares don't last that long (maybe 1 to 3 weeks) and at the end of the day they are no big deal (NBD). Show me one person who decided not to buy a model 3 due to delivery issues...? (and I will show you another person who was lucky enough to get an car early.)

 

[voip-ninja]

Very disheartening to hear a constant stream of bad experiences buying a Tesla. Things were different 4 years ago. Sad to see Tesla a slave to the almighty shareholders who demand volume production and don't care about the chaos that is creating with customers because that won't affect profits within 24 hrs.

Tesla wouldn't exist without those shareholders.

It's Elon & the Tesla B.o.D that are pushing things. Tesla has to deliver enormous (and increasing) volume in order to prove out Elon's assertion that Tesla will be profitable every quarter from here on out.

A lot of the people that are working in Tesla service & delivery appear to be overworked, underpaid and underqualified. I imagine that a lot of the delivery people are temps as Tesla expects the demand to become manageable when demand lessons next year.

One of the things you realize after interacting with Tesla a few times is that throughout the company there is a bit of arrogance that they are doing things better than traditional automakers. As someone else pointed out, watching the delivery/service experience at a very high volume BMW or Audi dealership should open the eyes of ANY executive at Tesla as to where they need to improve.

I do actually think Tesla doesn't care. They probably figure that in another 6-12 months the majority of their deliveries will be direct to the buyers home. They will hand off a dirty car and tell the new owner to just contact service if they have any problems. We'll see how that works out for them.

 

[tread]

Definitely understand where you're coming from. When I was dealing with my IDA in July of this year, it wasn't nearly as bad but communication was very difficult and it wasn't a satisfactory experience at all.

I know it probably doesn't help much, but I really do think that they're just plain overloaded. They're in delivery hell right now, and if you take some time to break down their scenario and imagine what it must be like to manage things, you may have some increased sympathy.

Let's say they have 10k deliveries that they have to manage at any given time right now. If that were the case, which I think is a realistic number given they're roughly at 4400 production a week, then let's say they have 200 IDA's handling things across the US (just a guess). With 10,000 / 200 means that each IDA may have 50 deliveries that they will have to constantly monitor. With that said, I'm willing to bet the turnover rate on an IDA is probably high right now because it's a stressful job starting this year, so we will say 25% of them probably have less than 6 months of experience.

If you break things down for each IDA in a normal work day, that means 8 hours * 60 minutes = 480 minutes in a day, 480 min / 50 vehicles means 9.6 min to dedicate to each person a day. That's nuts. Even if you were to flex the guessed IDA numbers +100, that's still only 15 minutes a day. Factor in that most people don't work 8 hours in an 8 hour work day, more like 4 - 5 hours of real productivity, then you get where I'm going with this. That's not taking into account that most people aren't top performers in any given job.

With a company as large as Tesla is now, and taking into account the amount of effort it takes to monitor and train a workforce geared for a specific task, I 100% expected things to go this way.

Doesn't keep me from ranting either though, or demanding better service. At the end of the day, they get paid for their job and we all paid for an expensive vehicle, they simply need to up their game.

But... I get it.

 

[JohnSnowNW]

They probably figure that in another 6-12 months the majority of their deliveries will be direct to the buyers home. They will hand off a dirty car and tell the new owner to just contact service if they have any problems. We'll see how that works out for them.

I would have absolutely no problems with this delivery method, provided I could be reasonably assured that there wouldn't be any issues with the vehicle. As it is, currently, I don't think they're quite to that point...which is why I chose to move our delivery to the SC.

That said, I could care less about the comparisons made to other high-end vehicles that people receive at dealerships. I don't want to be fawned over when I go to any retail establishment, regardless of the cost of the goods I'm looking to purchase. I am an introvert, however, so YMMV.

 

[voip-ninja]

I would have absolutely no problems with this delivery method, provided I could be reasonably assured that there wouldn't be any issues with the vehicle. As it is, currently, I don't think they're quite to that point...which is why I chose to move our delivery to the SC.

That said, I could care less about the comparisons made to other high-end vehicles that people receive at dealerships. I don't want to be fawned over when I go to any retail establishment, regardless of the cost of the goods I'm looking to purchase. I am an introvert, however, so YMMV.

Interesting that you perceive a delivery/service experience where prompt, courteous professional people make sure you are treated fairly and your concerns are adequately addressed as "fawning".

 

[WileyTheMan]

It sucks that Tesla is still struggling with delivery logistics. At least this kind of experience is not the norm (seriously, it's not). I hope Tesla's new-found profits can be funneled into improving their delivery process to make these kinds of issues more rare.

 

[JohnSnowNW]

Interesting that you perceive a delivery/service experience where prompt, courteous professional people make sure you are treated fairly and your concerns are adequately addressed as "fawning".

I didn't realize I was.

 

[voip-ninja]

I didn't realize I was.

You have a misconception that part of the "high end buying experience" is being "fawned over". I have gotten similar treatment from competent dealers of Audis and BMWs as I've gotten from Ford and Toyota.

It's about interacting with people who are professional, courteous and keep their word. In the case of "high end" it probably means more perks for owners like more time going over a vehicle's features, more leeway on fixing minor delivery items, complimentary loaners, etc.

Having bought 11 new cars I have never once felt I was being "fawned over" when making a purchase. However I have never felt I was annoying the staff with questions or concerns, and I have felt that a couple of times when conversing with Tesla service or delivery people.

 

[SemiS3XYR]

Like an episode from Netflix's Black mirror
I am going to sit here for two hours while I am dehydrated by k cups and brainwashed by the Tesla video loop.
Sorry humor is my only cure

 

[GreenT]

Tesla wouldn't exist without those shareholders.

A lot of the people that are working in Tesla service & delivery appear to be overworked, underpaid and underqualified. I imagine that a lot of the delivery people are temps as Tesla expects the demand to become manageable when demand lessons next year.

I do actually think Tesla doesn't care. They probably figure that in another 6-12 months the majority of their deliveries will be direct to the buyers home. They will hand off a dirty car and tell the new owner to just contact service if they have any problems. We'll see how that works out for them.

WHAT service???????????

 

[JohnSnowNW]

You have a misconception that part of the "high end buying experience" is being "fawned over". I have gotten similar treatment from competent dealers of Audis and BMWs as I've gotten from Ford and Toyota.

It's about interacting with people who are professional, courteous and keep their word. In the case of "high end" it probably means more perks for owners like more time going over a vehicle's features, more leeway on fixing minor delivery items, complimentary loaners, etc.

Having bought 11 new cars I have never once felt I was being "fawned over" when making a purchase. However I have never felt I was annoying the staff with questions or concerns, and I have felt that a couple of times when conversing with Tesla service or delivery people.

I haven't experienced any less competence with Tesla than anyone else. I assumed when people continue to compare them with premium brands, instead of dealerships in general, they're discussing things other than competence.

It's a shame people have had poor experiences, I haven't. *shrugs*

I did have a poor experience at a local Fiat/Chrysler dealer, but that doesn't mean I believe the brand's entire dealership model needs to be revamped...