There are horror stories as recently as today in r/teslamotors. Some of the service centers are quite good, some are just terrible.
I'm not sure how this is unique to Tesla
Aye, I've dealt with Ford and Mazda dealerships that were utterly abysmal. Others were better. Hit or miss quality of dealerships and service centers is not a surprise and not a flaw of the brand per se.
"But Tesla is a luxury model that competes with Porsche and should make me feel fancy and be super nice etc etc" ...eh kinda, but not really, IMO. The S model does but future models are aimed at a more down-market segment and are going mainstream.
Has the market really spoken, though? If it's literally impossible to buy an EV that doesn't have all these gimmicky screens and AI features in 'em, then there's no way for the market to actually speak .
That might be the case in the EV space, but the ICE space is pretty well documented. All the major car brands are striving to increase the infotainment segment of their cars more and more. Compare a 2020 Camry to a 2008 one. You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market.
> You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market.
That's exactly my point. Your only options are "nice car with touchscreen" or "mediocre car without". There's no opportunity for the market to, you know, actually speak.
Exactly. And unlike this AI module thingamabob, a touchscreen doesn't have the power to fatally slam me into a wall at 70MPH going down the 101. I'd rather wait for the likes of Toyota to do things right with automotive-grade components and automotive-grade programming and automotive-grade testing than trust my life to whatever hackery Tesla wants to brogrammer into its ASICs. The article's probably right about some…
You'd rather wait for Toyota of all people? Toyota is infamous for the bad quality of their software/firmware. Not that I'd expect much better from other established car makers.
> You'd rather wait for Toyota of all people?
Even Toyota has a better track record than Tesla here.
This is grand, apart from the build quality of the mechanics is ~10 years behind. Go to a tesla showroom, Look at the doors of the model three. Note that they don't line up. Look at the paint job, notice that there are bumps and chips, especailly on the edges of the doors. This is on a _demo_ car, stuck in a showroom. these should be perfect. Even a budget Kia has better build quality than this. Its not the isolated…
A lot of the tech in the Tesla vehicles is truly innovative. Look at the seemingly simple cooling bottle they use, which is the best in the entire automotive industry (and patented by them): https://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-3s-superbottle-easter-e... I keep hearing people talk about fit and finish problems with Tesla vehicles, but I simply don't see it. I was so paranoid when I took delivery of mine that I litera…
Does it really matter long-term? A lot of people seem fixated on it. I get it if you are buying a car at the moment. Then there’s an innovation vs. quality issue. For the company though, it seems like it should be far easier to catch up on the quality of the trim as it’s purely executing on something many OEMs have already figured out, and there are proven, known ways to fix those types of issues?
This is grand, apart from the build quality of the mechanics is ~10 years behind. Go to a tesla showroom, Look at the doors of the model three. Note that they don't line up. Look at the paint job, notice that there are bumps and chips, especailly on the edges of the doors. This is on a _demo_ car, stuck in a showroom. these should be perfect. Even a budget Kia has better build quality than this. Its not the isolated…
Less than 0.5% of owners say they are dissatisfied with the exterior appearance of their Tesla (including paint issues)[0]. And quality has continued to improve since then. That is, by far, the most extensive and reliable source we have on this topic but please point to any other study that might say the contrary. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-tesla-model-3-survey...
Pretty strong selection bias here, if people were turned away by the lacking build quality they wouldn't be an owner. Also a pretty huge post-hoc rationalization gap here
A result of the cancer that is continuously floating silicon valley companies in perpetuity despite them not making a profit for years. Tesla is overvalued simply by name. Same with Apple. Autonomous driving is still years out and their custom AI chip apparently doesn't do much in the way of helping that yet.
Apple is an undervalued stock. Their Price / Revenue ration is <5x
And most of their products are overpriced and poorly engineered. They only really make money on phones and branding. I can't think of single reason to buy any of their laptops or desktops.
6 years ahead electronics here means AI ASICs. I thought that was weird, I know Toyota cars have radar and I’m not sure about Teslas. IMO as an armchair observer the sensor array is far more interesting than any of this. Personally, if I were to buy another car (and hopefully I don’t have to any time soon) I’d want the processing electronics to be off the shelf not weird custom stuff that’s going to have all kinds of…
"I’d want the processing electronics to be off the shelf not weird custom stuff that’s going to have all kinds of corporate social crap attached to it." Off the shelf electronics are mutually exclusive of "all kinds of corporate social crap"? I would think the former is the most expedient way to deliver the latter.
That might be the case in the EV space, but the ICE space is pretty well documented. All the major car brands are striving to increase the infotainment segment of their cars more and more. Compare a 2020 Camry to a 2008 one. You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market.
> You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market. That's exactly my point. Your only options are "nice car with touchscreen" or "mediocre car without". There's no opportunity for the market to, you know, actually speak.
Because the market already spoke a long time ago. It used to be the fancy infotainment screen was extra on cars. Turns out the take rate on those is high enough, so it just became standard.
Note that the "we cannot do it" quote is not referring to the technology itself, but rather to the fact that to adopt Tesla's pattern, the legacy auto companies would need to ditch their supply chains. That's not something they can do without pissing off a lot of people.
The answer to this, I would think, would be to have a small part of the company whose soul purpose is to disrupt the larger company. Then Toyota and VW might have built Tesla in house without supply chain worries. When their in-house Tesla-like company proved a success, they could reasonably afford to upend their old supply chain: self-disruption.
It's not like this wasn't a publicly known fact, a strategy they officially wrote about.
Pretty sure the Roadster and the Model S were the luxury cars, and the Model 3 was supposed to be the affordable, non-luxury one.
Roadster 1.0 definitely was not a luxury car. It was just a proof of concept to show that an EV could be made that doesn't suck. It got attention and investors to fund the development of the Model S.