A friend of mine from the Mercedes Email List leased a Model S, P90D for almost three years. He had a number of problems with it, and his experience with Tesla as a car company and customer satisfaction says a lot about how long Tesla will continue to survive. I'm thinking about the end of this year Tesla will be in deep trouble, not only financially, but also for their reputation for customer service. If it looks like Tesla will have difficulty delivering cars, and fixing the ones already out there, people will be a lot more reluctant to plop down $100K or so when they have doubts whether their car will be "sustainable." And then the death spiral will follow. Anyway, we'll see soon enough. And we shouldn't yet count out Musk's ability to make more investors believe in his company and pump more money into it, or persuading one of the major car companies to take it over and try to make it into a real car company.
(reprinted with permission):
In one of their movies, Chico Marx had a great line that he said to Groucho
to the effect of: "Hey Boss, whatcha going to believe? What I tell you,
or what you see with your own two eyes?"
What I've related to this List is what I've personally lived through in
owning a Tesla for a couple of years, versus what Elon tells you. It
really boils down to the simple fact that they just don't know how to run a
car company. If you forget all the fluff, it's hard to ignore that:
-- their financials are a mess as they burn through incredible amounts of
cash every quarter
-- they lose money on every car they sell, and in a market where they have
no real competition (yet)
-- the falcon wing doors and other zoomy features of the Model X are cool,
but by Elon's own admission, they made the car too complicated
-- the buzz around how highly automated the Model 3 production line was
going to be had everyone in awe, but by Elon's recent admission, they made
it too complicated and it's now causing delays. They had to shut it down
last week for 4 or 5 days to make changes.
-- Elon's statement at the Model 3 highly promoted gala intro event in late
July that they'd be producing 5,000 cars a week by the end of December got
pushed back to end of Q1, and then again to the end of Q2
-- The replacement bumper cover took 8 weeks to arrive, and then it was the wrong part, and had to be reordered.
-- The replacement for the defective drivers seat for my car that was
ordered in the first week of January had yet to appear when I turned the
car in at the end of March, 3 months later. Whenever I inquired as to it's
status I was told it was "back ordered". My lease didn't end until the end
of September but I was approaching my 45,000 mile lease limit after which
I'd have to pay a 25 cent/mile penalty. And, the warranty ends at 50,000
miles and I did not want to own the car outside of warranty, albeit there's
a good chance that the replacement drivers seat may have shown up by then.
-- I tend to take care of all my cars, but there's nothing that I can do as the driver to cause the main battery to fail, wiring harnesses fail, door handles fail, etc., etc., etc. And all cars have failures, but MB would have solved those problems in a few days versus Tesla taking months to deliver the parts.
Facts are tricky things in that they are, well, they are facts. Hard to
spin them. Flame throwers, putting a roadster into space, boring a tunnel
etc., are all zoomy promotional events. Then there are the facts.
