Tesla is known for sparking an electric vehicle revolution.
It's also brought services to customers like mobile repairs
and over the air tuneups that were once reserved for only the
most elite car companies.
Tesla's really been a pioneer was servicing honestly, they
have a mobile service network that can come to you and service
your car wherever you'd like.
It's a huge convenience factor for consumers, and those that
have been able to take advantage of it really appreciate it.
Unlike the independent dealership model used by
companies like Ford, GM, and almost every other car
manufacturer in the US where dealerships and Service Centers
are owned and operated separately from the brand
itself, Tesla operates all of its own service centers,
Tesla wanted to own it on the whole thing. So no local
franchise, no dealership that would have to hire locally, all
the service technicians all the mechanics would be employees of
Tesla.
But it isn't easy to completely change the model. And Tesla has
struggled to keep up with service as sales have soared.
Customers have complained about long wait times a lack of loaner
cars and having to travel hours to get to the nearest service
center when a mobile Ranger can't fix the problem.
I've made a lot of questionable purchases and in my 39 years and
never in my life have I regretted buying something more
than I regretted buying that car.
I would say people have a great Tesla experience for the most
part. But there are an overwhelming number that don't
have a great experience. And they're all kind of singing the
same song. So that says something in itself.
Other electric vehicle startups like lucid and rivian are
following in Tesla's footsteps with their service models. But
will it be possible for Tesla and others to scale up service
fast enough to keep customers happy?
Almost every car company in the United States has a vast network
of dealerships and Service Centers. But the companies
themselves don't own any of them. They are owned and
operated independently.
The manufacturer is not selling cars to the consumer, they're
selling cars to the dealer at wholesale price. Just as in any
other retail business,
it can be very beneficial for the automakers, you can have
service centers, you can have very close proximity to
everyone. And you can have a retail network that is somewhat
consistent and you can get to the customers and they can
benefit their local communities.
Comparing Tesla's network of service centers to one of the
big threes network of independent service centers,
it's clear who has the upper hand, Tesla has 148 service
centers in the United States. Ford alone has 3143 dealerships
and service centers in the United States.
You go to any town in America, and there's Ford dealer, Chevy
dealer, Toyota dealer, whatever it may be, but looking for the
Tesla showroom that may be a little bit more challenging. But
just because they're
common places to get traditional internal combustion engine or
ice cars fixed doesn't mean consumers like going there.
Jimmy Gordon remembers what it was like before owning a Tesla.
I've dealt with other dealerships. For the 10 years
prior car dealerships in general, absolute, terrible
service and horrible experiences.
We're really seeing kind of the dark side of some of the
franchise dealership model right now, with new popular vehicles
that are in demand, and low on supply. Some deals are working
vehicles of 10s of 1000s of dollars, just speaks ways to
what Elon Musk and others have said about the franchise
dealership model being broken, and that they want to control
their own network.
So that's what Tesla did. Instead of the independent
dealership model, Tesla kept everything in house. And Evie
startups like lucid and rivian are following the same model.
Tesla was thinking about, hey, as we perfect, you know the
electric vehicle and move beyond just the early days of the
Roadster than the Model S. We'll learn more by seeing the cars
come back for service. And there was a lot of motivation to this.
It made so much sense strategically. But it's also
very expensive to operate direct to consumer in that manner.
One of the things that we see with electric vehicle startups
is the idea of mobile service repair. So rather than taking
the vehicle to the dealer, or the manufacturer sending
somebody to you to repair your vehicle, and that certainly adds
an element of convenience. In fact, roughly about one out of
every three Tesla owners takes advantage of that mobile
service.
These over the air fixes and at home service visits are a
welcome advantage for Gordon along with his husband knock.
The other benefit of the car being fully connected and being
on like their network is that they can just remotely connect
into the car and they can check everything in it and what's
going on. So a lot of times they can just solve problems that
way.
But mobile technicians can't do everything remotely.
If you have hit a major pothole or a curb and banter, suspension
arm or some other component that needs repair, a lot of times
that can't be done in your driveway.
In our case, they couldn't identify what the problem was
they verified that, yes, there's these errors. So they send a
mobile tech that's like their first line of defense. So mobile
tech comes out and basically says to us after tinkering with
it like no, you need to go to, you know, one of the service
locations,
recalls are another example. These often have to be dealt
with at a brick and mortar Tesla shop. And if there isn't one
near the Tesla owner, the process can be incredibly
painful.
They haven't invested as much in building new service centers and
scaling up the service side of their operation as they have
into production. So for the number of cars on the road,
including cars in and out of warranty, it seems like they
really don't have enough service centers and service personnel.
It's not unusual for people waiting for body panels to wait
three to six months or more and have their vehicle sitting in a
body shop waiting. And that's that's a real issue.
Tesla also relies on service technicians as an extension of
their factories, they have to get cars ready for customers
before delivery, which means replacing broken parts touching
up paint or installing missing components. That's one reason it
can be so hard to get parts or an appointment from a service
center.
The service took longer than they told us it was gonna take
was initially supposed to be two days and then it turned into a
week and a half or two weeks or whatever.
For Robert who brick. His dual motor model three performance
edition had to be serviced multiple times for a rattling
glass roof for tires wearing unevenly for bad smells coming
from the air conditioning. And sometimes they wouldn't have a
loaner car for Robert and his wife,
and they started cutting back on the number of loners that they
had they would never have one available when we went in. As
then they just gave my wife $450 worth of those Uber promos, but
they all still expired in seven days. So she literally had like
$400 with Uber. I think she used $20 of it, and it expired.
He had such a difficult time with Tesla service that he
ordered two videos from cameo, a service that allows customers to
pay for custom videos from celebrities aimed at Elon Musk.
Hi Elon,
this is Brandy Max. Hello, Elon Musk and Tesla, Elon Musk.
Robert and I and Leslie. were wondering if you could fix it.
Obvious defective tire on Roberts Tesla.
Defective tires weren't Roberts fault. Screw you, Elon or Elon,
you've been lying about your name for years got your
spaceship to Mars.
Ultimately, the stunt didn't work. The Kubrick sold their
Tesla as used vehicle demand and prices soared during the
pandemic.
So we ordered ours December of 2018. Actually, I think we
picked it up on Christmas Eve matter of fact, so it was kind
of our Christmas present to ourselves. We just got rid of
it. I want to say October of this past year. So right around
Halloween. Honestly, if I could have it would have been a year
earlier.
For Tesla owners living in states like Alabama or Kansas
that don't have any service centers. Owning a Tesla becomes
an even bigger challenge.
Anyone who is in a rural part of the country, kind of a flyover
states a lot of the times they are going to have to be warned
that they might not have a service center within their
area. We've kind of learned that also with electric charging
infrastructure.
This is something up and coming Evie companies need to take note
of companies like rivian and lucid have already made plans
for their vehicle service.
Rivia N and lucid who are Tesla's upstart challengers here
in the US are saying that they will essentially offer the same
thing that Tesla does, which is service from our own employees
at service centers that we own and operate so no stealership
experience with remote diagnostics software they can
read your car, kind of guess what's wrong and hopefully make
that whole experience more efficient. And you know, mobile
service technicians that come to you if need be will pick up your
car and ship it to one of our service centers.
Lucid started delivering vehicles last year but only has
15 service centers in North America so far. It offers mobile
service same with rivian, which also started selling its
electric SUVs and trucks last year, it plans to offer over the
air updates and mobile technicians to for larger
repairs. Both lucid and rivian say that they will transport
vehicles that need repairs to service centers for free and
will offer loaner vehicles.
They're all kind of mimicking the Tesla playbook and I'm not
sure how it's going to work out.
One of the main problems with having everything in house is
the massive cost and time of expansion. Not only do Ford
owners have four dealerships across the country, they also
have access to third party repair shops and garages. There
are more than 25,000 Oil chain shops in the US in a for each
city, town and village in the United States, plus some
despair. And
those instances where you do need something repaired and
repaired quickly, and you may not be able to rely on that
third party repair facility like you would with another vehicle
brand. That is a bit of a disadvantage for those owners.
There are Tesla certified body shops in the US as well as third
party repair shops, but not many,
is not many people that really know how to fix them just yet.
So the adoption rate for repair has been kind of low at this
point. Only because we've had so many years of repairing ice
vehicles, people know can and can repair icefields at the back
of their hands,
which Benoit is famous for fixing Tesla's on his YouTube
channel rich rebuilds. He's been buying totaled cars and
rebuilding them for years and has even started his own Evie
garage. But getting parts for the cars has been complicated.
They are starting to have a good selection of parts. Now. For the
Tesla Model S which is the majority of the cars we tend to
take a look at the Tesla Model S the Tesla now has parts for
those there are a lot of third party companies that are all
also making replica parts for Tesla's for example, front
bumpers and other body panels. But a lot of the other parts
like high voltage components, Tesla still won't sell you such
as batteries and drive motors. And because no one has
replicated those from a third party standpoint, a lot of those
we still have to get from cars that are there have been
salvaged. So cars have been racked, you know, we'll pull the
batteries and motors out. And we'll help people that way to
getting parts from Tesla is difficult. Actually getting
parts of Tesla is difficult even for Tesla's service centers.
And there's also a warranty question too, if you take your
vehicle that's under warranty to someone who doesn't know what
they're doing, it could violate the warranty and you could be
left with a very large bill.
And these newcomers that are doing direct to consumer sales,
Tesla, rivian, lucid, and any others that are following that
model, they have a different challenge right to provide the
coverage and to figure out how to work with a body shop that's
not have their own employees.
On the whole though EVs encounter less wear and tear
than ice engines.
In an ice car, you have 1000s of moving parts, you have valves,
cylinders, pistons, you have all these things going up and down,
making these tiny controlled explosions, you have fuel pumps
you have, you have all kinds of stuff to help those cars go on
the road. And with EVs. It's really just a matter of the
electronics between the motor, the controller, and the battery,
which is the power source. One of those things gets messed up,
you kind of know where to look.
We have an initial quality study, which looks at problems
experienced within the first 90 days of ownership and initial
quality is a good predictor of the long term quality of the
vehicle. When you compare the quality numbers in that study
for electric vehicles versus eisert internal combustion
engine powered vehicles. Electric vehicles are certainly
more problematic than ice vehicles, but they are not more
problematic because they are electric vehicles. They're more
problematic because they tend to be more premium in their nature
and premium products generally include more technology.
Despite the small number of Tesla or other Eevee shops
compared to traditional automakers, Tesla owners are
notoriously loyal to the brand, Tesla's model three and model y
are the highest and second highest rated cars respectively
in satisfaction among new Eevee owners. One of the
things that we found with our studies is that once someone
does make the decision to buy an electric vehicle, that
satisfaction and the likelihood that someone will purchase
another electric vehicle in the future is extremely high. Even
for first time Evie owners.
I feel like the service structure is there. So I'm
hoping that they are listening to all of this and that
overtime, they invest in it. My guess is they won't and this
will just be the norm. But you know, at least we don't have
sleazy you know, dealership salesman.
None of this matters anyways, though, and here's why Tesla
knows it has poor service. They also know that poor service does
not equate to more revenue or loss in revenue, because Tesla
can barely keep up with the demand as it is. I'm putting
pressure on them to make them better. Because I remember how I
felt when I saw my first Tesla. I remember how I felt when I
touched my first Tesla drove my first Tesla and owned one. That
was a great feeling. And I want a A lot of others to feel that
way as well, but I don't want them to get in their own way of
doing that. So the pressure that I'm applying is for them to be
better