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Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

dmitryzavyalov.livejournal.com

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Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#141

Post by matt4077 »

noonespecial wrote: post #99

Something lots of car companies don't seem to get. If the service center has your name on it, its an advertisement . PR goes all the way down to the street. Its so easy for a service center manager to blow $500K in goodwill chasing $1k in savings to secure his $2k Christmas bonus. 2 brand spanking new Teslas passed out like party favors would have been cheaper than having this story hit front page on HN alone.

> 2 brand spanking new Teslas passed out like party favors would have been cheaper than having this story hit front page on HN alone.

That's actually quite problematic. I hate corporations as much as anybody, but there are now actually people going around demanding free stuff and threatening to make up some story to "my 20,000 twitter followers". Or consider the story of the developer of "Dash" that hit HN: he threw all sorts of allegations at Apple, and using the HN community as props actually got Apple to offer him a way out. Only thing that exposed this scam was that he got drunk on his power and posted the audio of a secretly recorded phone call (!) which he believed to be supportive for his side of the story (it mostly just made public that "someone" was faking reviews for apps with an account using his credit card, hardware, name, address, and naming scheme)

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#142

Post by khedoros1 »

nurettin wrote: post #104

I found one way to avoid all the costs, the taxes, the service times, the accidents and that annoying kid who always scratches your doors with a key: Don't buy a car.

Then I'm either paying for (and waiting for) taxis a minimum of two times a day, or making my 15 minute commute into an hour or an hour and a half commute on public transportation (depending on the exact time of day).

By not owning a car, I'd avoid certain costs and inconveniences by opting for certain other larger costs and inconveniences. If I lived somewhere where it was actually feasible to ditch the personal vehicle, I would've considered it by now.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#143

Post by martin_a »

taneq wrote: post #138
sp0rk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like the guy was making it up, they had clearly-detailed logs of the problems and the car was provably misbehaving. The fact that problems exist says nothing of what caused them. I don't imagine it would be difficult for a competitor to intentionally damage a Tesla in a way that they could make a blog post like this about it. I'm not generally conspiracy-minded, but I feel like this is something worth cons…

But that's precisely why they should have done a recall-and-replace. Funny error message? Intermittent fault? No worries, give it a thorough looking over. Find nothing. Okay, give it back to the customer. More weird error messages followed by a persistent fault? The prudent thing at this point is to instantly swap out the car, and this time go through it with a fine toothed comb. Now you're not just looking for a dod…

> Funny error message? Intermittent fault? No worries, give it a thorough looking over. Find nothing. Okay, give it back to the customer.

Well said. This might be a problem, in a state of mind way, when you think of your car as a computer but not so much a car. Have you tried turning it off and on again? No? Well, do so and the errors will go away. Not really a good attitude for a car manufacturer.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#144

Post by mulmen »

prostoalex wrote: post #135
mulmen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A franchised BMW dealership tried to charge me $15,000.00 for a new engine. It turns out the problem was two spark plus that they installed improperly. Their diagnosis turned out to be entirely manufactured. The idea that franchised dealerships somehow improve customer service is laughable.

The manufacturer and dealer incentives are somewhat misaligned. The former has an incentive to portray its product as a stress-free and worry-free purchase, as most people are not thrilled about buying a clunker that has consistent issues. Highest mark of success here is the complete lack of future customer interaction - no complaints, no warranty claims, no recalls, no class-action lawsuits. The latter one does not…

That's exactly right. I don't know what metrics are used inside the dealership but I suspect they encourage this type of behavior, perhaps unintentionally.

Say you have two service writers. One is highly competent, motivated and puts the customer's interests first, they try to properly diagnose the problem and fix it the first time. They will also strive to learn from any mistakes so they are not repeated. The other doesn't really care and just does the easy thing. Throw parts at the problem and if you can get the manufacturer or the customer to pick up the tab then all the better.

When it comes time for promotions what gets considered? Is it minimal repairs, customer satisfaction or is it dollars in the register? It could be some combination of all of course but I think at the end of the day it is dollars as long as the customers in general have a perception they are being cared for. If that means telling them a repair will be free from BMW that's probably even better than not having a problem at all. A customer may think "Wow the dealer really helped me out of a jam there!" even though the problem never existed.

Over time this means that the thoughtful and customer-focused service writers get pushed out of dealership service departments for a lack of performance. In fact the service writer at my independent shop used to work at the dealer and left.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#145

Post by madshiva »

mulmen wrote: post #61
sk5t wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason for the existence of dealerships: they are local businesses that local jurisdictions can hold accountable for such things as lemon law refunds. I'm not sure this argument holds water. Civil and criminal law hold all sorts of corporate entities accountable without forcing them to franchise out the business of sales and service. We have a sort of "protected status" for car dealers now in order to pre…

A franchised BMW dealership tried to charge me $15,000.00 for a new engine. It turns out the problem was two spark plus that they installed improperly. Their diagnosis turned out to be entirely manufactured. The idea that franchised dealerships somehow improve customer service is laughable.

my BMW broke too. one of the turbo fail and rejected all in the motor also one flap goes to the motor. I had finish to pay the leasing after 3 years and voilà you get nothing, just lost 15000$. The car had 140'000km, a BMW 123d. A lot of serie 1 get the same problem. I had to wait and town the car to my country (800km), lost 3 days of vacation. I hate car now and all the service that goes around.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#147

Post by hvidgaard »

I know a lot of people that are happy with their Model S. I also know a lot of people that have spend way too much time dealing with issues, having many days without a car, and some even drove 200 miles multiple times to a service center.

I just cannot justify that kind of service and reliability for a car that expensive. I'd rather buy a BMW or Mercedes, because they actually handle this far more maturely.

But what scares me most about this story, is that they do not have their software done right. Even if their system is devided into a critical part, and a non critical part (the infotainment system, ect.), if it throws a code like in this story, it better log every possible thing it knows and what lead to this error. And I would actually expect it submitted it directly to Tesla to look at and analyze.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#148

Post by Steeeve »

pmarreck wrote: post #11

I had the "12V battery problem" as well, which did require service. (I have a P85+.) I also had a more involved problem with the main battery which actually required them to swap the whole thing out for a temporary one, ship the original back to Fremont, and 1-2 months later I got my original battery swapped back in. (I got Tesla loaners both times it was in the shop for the swap.) I wasn't buzzkilled at all; I did k…

> I did kind of sign up for some growing pains with an all-new technology.

I don't really subscribe to this line of thinking with a piece of equipment that is so expensive.

That being said, I'm a car nut. I've gone through more than my share of vehicles over the years and the percentage that have been problem free straight out of the dealership is pretty low. I had a 5-series that my wife got to drive for a day before it sat in our garage for 6 weeks. I was quite perturbed. I had a mercedes that was in and out of the dealership for a few months right out of the gate, but their dealership was the friendliest and most helpful that I've dealt with. I had a mustang that I left service with at one point with no brakes. Imagine being a block from the dealership and figuring that out. I had a Navigator that I spent three months complaining about before the manufacturer admitted they had a problem and put out a kit to fix. Up until then the dealer laid blame 100% on the fact that I had aftermarket wheels put on it.

It's not new technology. It's that the nature of the car business is such that they put them together with best-effort and there isn't a lot that is done from an individual quality-control perspective before they reach customers. Dealer fix-it shops keep themselves busy and full of employees by fixing warranty issues. The danger of doing it differently is that dealers would be short manpower and repair parts would be crazy expensive if cars never had any problems. It's cheap to fix a 12 year old F150 because so many people know how to fix them.

Personally, I'd love to get a Tesla. From all I've heard they have great customer service and work hard to make sure solutions are complete. I don't expect perfection. The only thing that drives me crazy is getting the runaround when problems are unusual.

Re: Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement

#149

Post by gambiting »

coredog64 wrote: post #52
kylec wrote: post #43

In my opinion the most damning sentence in the article is this: This was the day of first bitter truth of Tesla: even you have a new car covered by warranty, you will need to wait in line for a few days to get it checked up. This says one of two things to me, both of them bad. Either there are so many Teslas with issues that the technicians are constantly booked up days in advance, or Tesla doesn't care about providi…

This is about the same level of service I would expect from Toyota should I buy a Corolla or Camry. I would expect better were I to buy a Lexus LS (random example in the same price range)

I own a Mercedes-AMG, and despite being very expensive, and despite me having direct access to an AMG-exclusive service centre, you still have to wait a few days to have the car looked at if there's anything wrong with it.
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