How Elon Musk Stole My Car | Hacker News Reader

How Elon Musk Stole My Car

atlantic.net

397 pointslouis-paul146 comments

>Tesla has a strange way of communicating with customers I think is best described as customer service vaporware. That is, they spend more time trying to create the illusion of customer service, rather than actually providing it. There is no mechanism for them to get feedback, as I tried to provide, so its difficult to see how they can improve if they don’t know where they are going wrong.

Now we find out the unexpected corporate benefit of not having showrooms or physical locations by which to service clients - if they can't walk into your place of business and make a scene, just consider them a happy customer!

>In my experience, its a hobby masquerading as a company, and it can probably run as a hobbyist organization for some time.

This is the gut feeling I get with every over-the-top announcement by Tesla. Frequently I get down-voted here for griping about the linguistic flourishes in Tesla announcements, but I have my reasons. Sure, creating a neat innovation or clever door opening apparatus is impressive and all, and great for show, but the boring part of pulling it off reliably XX,XXX times is a totally different animal.

Also, a corporation where everybody is too on eggshells to point out that the boss lifted a customer's car and they're too scared to engage either the CEO or the customer is, for lack of a better concept, high-school-level drama lameness.

They've built over 100,000 vehicles, built out a massive nationwide charging network (plus a huge network in Europe and a decent-sized one in China), produced the best highway auto-drive system available today, and currently have the best selling car in their price segment in many areas.

Yes, clever doors and gimmicks like their new Summon feature aren't worth the hype they put into them, but that's not the only thing they're doing.

That's not a hobby company by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, they have problems. Specifically, communications during the delivery process has always been troublesome for them, and there's no reason it should be. But that doesn't make it a "hobbyist organization." That's just silly.

I mean, GM's failed processes meant that their products spontaneously shut off and killed people, and they sat on their hands doing nothing while people were still dying, but we don't call that a "hobbyist organization...."

Oh I know they sell a lot of cars, I've seen hundreds if not a thousand locally since the debut.

>That's not a hobby company by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, they have problems. Specifically, communications during the delivery process has always been troublesome for them, and there's no reason it should be. But that doesn't make it a "hobbyist organization." That's just silly.

Based on the descriptions of the behavior of Tesla's internal customer service, it actually sounds worse than a hobbyist organization. This is personal perspective though, based on multiple professional and grunt-level jobs over the years.

>I mean, GM's failed processes meant that their products spontaneously shut off and killed people, and they sat on their hands doing nothing while people were still dying, but we don't call that a "hobbyist organization...."

GM is, if memory serves correctly, facing significant legal ramifications (monetary) for their bad oversight and will, presumably, be held accountable in court. Like Ford and Firestone. Or Takata. Pretty much every legacy auto manufacturer started off as a 'hobbyist organization' and after enough success and longevity, they grew into large enterprises that we know today. Can Tesla weather a GM-ignition swtich type lawsuit? Maybe, time will tell.

GM being held accountable is irrelevant here. My point is simply that large organizations we'd never call "hobbyist" do vastly more stupid things than what Tesla has done here.

I will note that Tesla did just weather what could have been the equivalent of the GM ignition switch problem. They discovered a problem with the front seat belts which could have easily have been fatal in a crash. They pretty much immediately recalled every single vehicle they had on the road to inspect them. As far as I know the problem only ever existed in the one car where they found it, but they immediately took charge of the problem instead of covering their ears and trying to wish it away until they couldn't.

All kinds of companies are dysfunctional in all sorts of ways. That doesn't make it right, but I don't see how the label "hobbyist" applies just because of it.

As you said though, they've only sold ~100k vehicles and only in select markets. Try doing that to the 3 series, Golf or Corolla.

The Takata airbag recall shows that can be done too. That's been a bit slow, but only because the affected cars actually need stuff replaced, not just inspected, and supplies of replacement parts are limited. Even with tens of millions of cars affected, car companies can jump out ahead of a problem and fix it properly.

The point wasn't 'can car companies do it', it was 'can this car company do it'.

Relative size counts for a lot. Honda can recall five million cars because they're big, and they produce almost that many cars every year.

But my point was just that big car companies can still fuck up big time in very stupid ways, but we don't say they're hobbies. My point with Takata is simply to show that GM didn't have to approach their ignition switch problem in a stupid way.

Honestly I think we're in a semantics loop of sorts. I view the Tesla auto company through the same lens as Kanye West's shoe line with Adidas. Yes, Kanye and Tesla sell as many units as they want. But, and this is a big but, neither the automotive or shoe industry are the primary field of expertise for the person at the top (Elon, Kanye) and thus can reasonably be viewed as an outsized 'hobby' until they return to their core competency. Some hobbies can be extremely profitable, no doubt.

That would put SpaceX in the "hobby" group too, which I would find to be very weird.

Heck, lots of pretty big, serious companies have CEOs whose expertise doesn't line up well with the business. That's why you delegate.

It is just about how you define the word, though. It's obviously open to a lot of interpretation, and if your interpretation is one way, I can hardly say it's wrong, even if I might say it should be a different way.

Well John Carmack spent 10 good years on Armadillo Aerospace and eventually went back to his day job, so I'm still comfortable viewing certain enterprises by people with means as being 'hobbies' as a general term, insofar as if they wake up one morning and decide to do something else, they still have money, a home, and other opportunities. The IRS has some pretty interesting perspectives on 'hobbies' as well, as I've discovered over time.

I'd have no problem calling Armadillo a hobby company, they never had any paying customers (I think) and never produced anything of practical value. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'd personally say SpaceX fit that category through the Falcon 1 days, but moved past it once they moved to the Falcon 9. YMMV.

A hobby is something you enjoy that doesn't make you any money. It becomes a business when it starts making you money.

All those billion-dollar unicorns showing up on the front page of HN are just hobbies, then?

s/hobbies/hobby horses/

;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_horse_%28toy%29

The circle is complete:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ii5wNiMRq8o/VGAZVysO5nI/AAAAAAAAN...

I wish I could get billion dollar funding for my hobbies!

The ones that continue to lose money year after year I still consider a 'hobby company'.

They are experiencing reliability issues which is why Consumer reports said they cannot recommend the Tesla Model S. http://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla-reliability-doesnt...

I fail to see the relevance.

I'm not saying they're perfect in every way. Merely that they're big enough and serious enough that it makes no sense to refer to it as a "hobbyist company" anymore. I could see it in the Roadster days, and the early Model S days, but not now.

Over 16 million cars are sold each year.. So really in comparison to the actual market they are small; If they wish to scale without a buy network they need to answer the phone.

I agree, they're relatively tiny. But they're plenty big enough to be more than a hobby. I just don't see how it makes any sense to use that term to describe a company with billions of dollars in annual revenue.

GM didnt exactly do nothing - what they did was fix the part on later models but keep the part number exactly the same so that no body would suspect that the original part had an issue and they wouldnt have to do a recall.

They do have showrooms, even if they're not the same as other car manufacturers. See here and sort by Stores & Galleries: https://www.teslamotors.com/findus#/

I've visited one nearby. It was small, but had several Teslas inside and out.

Yup, I've visited one in Berlin, it's next to the Apple Store. Very small, just the one Tesla, but it was there and had a handful of staff on hand to ask about the car.

Tesla reminds me of Formula Student where teams also would do hilarious stuff like put a phone in the steering wheel (actually was not that bad) or program their car to make donuts on the spot with 4 electric motors and pushing a button. But fun is simply part of the competition and it's not the end of the world if something goes wrong or isn't perfect.

This incident sounds pretty isolated and exceptional. The post and your reply made me feel kind of nauseated. Just sit back and critique the doers. How lame.

There is a difference between Elon Musk having a low tolerance for technical stupidity, and people treading on eggshells to avoid having to report bad news. My guess is that it would have been far better report "We have this issue, and here is our solution" than simply report bad news.

It would be likely that Elon didn't just walk over to a particular car at random, but asked for a dealer inventory model, and this particular car was not recorded as "sold" to a customer for whatever reason.

Publicly saying "How Elon Musk Stole My Car" probably wouldn't have made it easier to resolve this one more smoothly.

>"[The Tesla Owner Advisor] called me to explain he had a call in with the Office of the CEO at Tesla and was working with his team in Tesla to resolve a problem that had come up — their CEO, Elon Musk, had taken my car and was using it as his personal vehicle to test a new version of autopilot. Even worse, he said he could see all the calls I had made into the Orlando delivery center this past week, and no one was taking my calls because no one knew what to do."

The fact that a customer-facing resource is airing information about internal process screwups directly to a customer is indicative that something is very wrong with service management at Tesla; this is a bush-league customer service mistake. Not only is the customer being informed that there is a apparently a massive issue with the pipeline for delivering product to customer, but they're also indicating that there's clearly nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues.

Two seperate issues there, 1) I don't see a problem with a honest CSR 2) yeah there is no way that a car that had been allocated to a customer should be taken even by the CEO.

Honesty is rarely an issue, the lack of accountability is.

There's an important distinction between an "honest" CSR and an oversharing CSR. The response of a CSR to a complaint should be "I'm sorry this happened. Here's how I will make it right". Occasionally it's OK to say "we made mistake X", but don't try to excuse the issue.

Generally, the customer does not care or want to know exactly what went wrong. If I order a burger from a restaurant and it comes out wrong, I expect the establishment to apologize and quickly provide me another burger. I don't need to know that someone called in sick and there is a football team that swamped their lunch hour while they were short-staffed. Those are the restaurants problems, not mine.

>There's an important distinction between an "honest" CSR and an oversharing CSR.

It seems an appropriate response to this (not uncommon in different contexts) situation would have been to say something like: "It turns out that even though the car you purchased was listed as available in our inventory system, it's not." At which point, the CSR should have been empowered to do something along the lines of offering an equivalent or better car for the same price and expediting delivery.

My best-ever CSR experience: buying an engagement ring online from Blue Nile, which was supposed to arrive in time for my pre-planned out-of-state meeting with her family. There were a handful of delays that had me worried. CSR named Sean (how often do you remember CSR's name? Only when the experience is awesome) reaches out to me and says in essence "we had a supply issue and we can't get you what you ordered, so I'm going to look through our current inventory and see what I can get you that's better." A couple hours later he gives me info on a slightly bigger stone with equal-or-better specs, I OK it, and it shows up overnight.

IMO it was the perfect experience. They let me know there was a problem, but didn't overshare or turn their problem into my problem. And then they let me know how they were going to solve the problem of getting me something I'd be happy with given what I thought I had ordered. And then they delivered.

Personally, if a CSR is up front about what went wrong, what they did to try to fix it/what they're doing to get it fixed, I'm a happier customer. I've worked in enough large organizations to understand how difficult things can get when navigating multiple departments and multiple people trying to get some corner case situation cleared up.

God forbid a customer service agent ever give you a straight answer...

The article I read said "(1) tesla fucked up a customer's order, then (2) tesla fucked up fixing it ten times in a row at many different levels of the organisation despite the fact a fix should have been easy, then (3) the customer insisted on an explanation and someone at tesla was honest"

I'm confused as to why you think (3) is the problem here - it seems to me that (1) and (2) are the root cause - (3) is just an embarrassing repercussion.

I mean, the customer knows there's nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues when they contact ten different people and can't get the problem resolved. It's not like inscrutable customer service would have hidden the fact the car hadn't been provided.

I think GP assumed that (1) and (2) being problems is obvious, and so pointed out that (3) is a problem too, even if less obvious.

A support rep's main job is to put the customer at ease. The more details the customer has to contend with the more stressed out they are.

The best action here would be explain that there was an internal process issue at Tesla, apologize and then make an offer to reconcile the error.

edit: wording

It only reduces the customer's stress to hear "don't worry about it sir, I'll take care of it" if that statement is credible. If I'm being told that and I know it's bullshit, my stress level is increased, not decreased.

Once the customer is on their third call to customer service, the credibility is already lost. Unless the customer will have their car in a single digit number of days, refusing to be honest with them isn't going to help.

Customer service's job is also to make the company not look bad. If you're fully honest about something as ridiculous as the CEO not letting you have your car, and then proceeding to not answer your calls because no one knew what to do, that makes the company look terrible.

If you share that kind of knowledge, the customer might end up writing a blog post showing how incompetent the company is, and that blog post might make front page of Hacker News.

They're probably just terrified of Elon. Fear would explain the paralysis; I'm not sure why they thought that not communicating would make things better.

> they're also indicating that there's clearly nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues.

Based on gossips about how it allegedly is like to work for Elon Musk, it might be that people are even more scared of reaching out to him than to violate the process.

Which is a deadly issue: when people are too scared to give honest feedbacks to their CEO, the CEO stops knowing how his company actually runs. Parallels can be made with soviet countries, run through the deforming lenses of five-year plans and fantasy reports.

Honestly, as a customer, I appreciate the honesty and clarity of this CSR. Ideally, the CSR would just do something to quickly resolve the issue without divulging details. But if they can't actually fix it, being honest about the reasons is the best they can do. Then I can at least empathize with someone, feel like someone is empathizing with me, and not feel like everyone there is jerking me around.

The actual screw up at Tesla is that this kind of problem should literally never ever happen, and that CSRs should never be put in this situation.

Had this been "Elon took my car and told his company to give me a heavily discounted one in exchange" then presumably this article would have been filled with praise for their customer service. What a missed opportunity.

Instead of feeling like you are gambling on a potential upgrade my perception is now I'd be gambling on a potential loss / failure-to-deliver if I bought a used car from Tesla. It's only one datapoint, but it's the only data point I have.

Seriously. They should have given him a even nicer car for the same cost as he agreed to initially.

Obvious answer is give him a new one for the same price. You have to eat 20k, but it saves the customer and a bunch of bad press about how your customer service is awful and Elon Musk might decide to take you car for reasons.

How do they not have a dedicated test fleet?

Were it the case, we'd have never heard anything from this customer. Happy customers rarely make the news.

eh, REALLY HAPPY customers frequently make social media like reddit and here.

There are all sorts of stories of "company I love screwed up and really came through!" Hell, apple gets all sorts of these comments when they do some out of apple care thing.

At least it wasn't a loss, besides time and mental anguish.

But yes, it's extremely weird that they didn't just immediately apologize and offer him a nice discount on a different car.

Yeah, they lied to him, stalled, avoided him, in the end told him "he could spend an extra $20K for the car he wanted", after he'd put down a deposit. At least after that, they "agreed" to refund his deposit.

never mind that, had it been "sorry, that car turned out to have some experimental hardware in it and is not certified road safe; here's a refund of your advance" the customer would have been disappointed but not pissed off, and that would have been the end of the matter. despite the hyperbolic title, the real issue is not that elon musk "stole" his car, but that tesla people deliberately ignored his calls because they didn't know what else to do(!)

At first, I was pissed about the hyperbolic attention grabbing headline, Elon Musk isn't a moniker for Tesla...

...then I got to the part where (allegedly), Elon Musk literally took his car, never delivered it, and pretty much just fucked Kevin over super bad.

Elon seems like a pretty smart guy, he must realize he is quite famous, so if there is any way this can be corroborated, it will play negatively all over techcrunch for the next few days.

edit: I accidentally implied fact checking and corroboration are important factors to Techcrunch when publishing.

I once ordered 100 Model S's at one time (Google it) then later took delivery of 12 Model S's at one time. Here's what I can tell you. Tesla's system for selling one new car to one person at one time is very, very good.

Tesla's system for doing anything other than one car to one person at one time is not good.

When we initially placed our 100 unit order we got 100 confirmation emails timed suspiciously as though some poor person was entering the details one at a time. Their owner's website couldn't handle 100 unique vehicles tied to one user. When we took delivery we had to go through a bunch of human processes 12 unique times. The people seemed incapable of batching tasks like signing title paperwork. We went through the routine for each car twelve times.

All of their systems are built to do one thing very well.

So this guy asked Tesla to do something it is not built to do and sell him a loaner car. And the systems broke. All of them. In Tesla systems (operational and technological) everything is built to do one thing.

Yes, it stinks that some people at Tesla acted dumbly in response to this. But overall, don't forget. People are components of a system.

There are no programs in the Tesla system to handle any of the variables this situation threw at it, starting with what the guy wanted Tesla to do.

When you deliberately ask a system to do something it isn't designed to do you shouldn't be surprised when it breaks.

> Tesla is pioneering two things at once, (a) a luxury full-EV segment for passenger vehicles, and (b) bypassing the traditional dealer network and selling directly to consumers. Since I never got my car, I can’t speak to (a). But, because (b) is so horribly broken, I don’t think (a) can succeed.

How on earth does this person's experience point to the non-dealership model being broken? Has this person never dealt with a shitty dealership?

When you have a shitty dealership, you drive somewhere else in town to buy a car.

I went to five different dealerships when I bought my car. Three of them were shitty / scumbags. The last two were good, and one offered me a better price.

The benefit of the dealership model is that customer service is decentralized, and different dealerships even offer different levels of customer service. Some offer free tuneups for life for example (and seem to factor that into the cost of the car). I went for a dealership with a lower price, since I expect to do my own oil changes / basic maintenance.

You only really know how good your dealership is after you've bought a car and there is some problem.

Yeah, that's pretty weird. People experience this problem all the time with dealerships: you call up and make a deal on a car, they "hold it" for you, you get there and it turns out the car you wanted "was just sold" but the dealer is happy to sell you this other one instead, which by the way is several thousand dollars more expensive.

At least with Tesla, you can be pretty sure that Elon Musk actually did take this guy's car. The dealers will just lie to you; in the scenario above, they typically never had the car in the first place.

I'm not defending what Tesla did here in any way, but this problem certainly doesn't make a case for dealers.

> you call up and make a deal on a car, they "hold it" for you, you get there and it turns out the car you wanted "was just sold"

Although this generally doesn't happen after you stumped up thousands of dollars as a deposit.

Only because the opportunity presents itself early. I've seen plenty of stories of people getting screwed like this after putting money down too.

I guess the point was that dealer are notoriously bad. Tesla decide to bypass them in order to put in place a better system.

Simply providing a similar service or very marginally better, is a big failure of model. If we are having a bad meal in a restaurant, and I invite you home to eat home cook food instead, but I serve you the exact same bad meal. Would you not be slightly underwhelmed, and wondering what was the point ?

Of course, that's one guy having a problem so that's not statistically significant. But from his point of view, Tesla model is indeed failing to deliver its promises.

I don't think he was arguing that the (possible) non-dealership model was broken, but that Tesla's current attempt to disrupt it is flawed, and that if they fail because of poor execution, that this could stifle future innovation in this area.

The next sentence:

> My concern is if Tesla fails the experiment of directly selling cars to consumers may be considered a failure, when in reality it was tremendous missteps on Teslas part that caused it to not work.

Tesla is climbing uphill against an entrenched dealer network. In order to succeed, Tesla needs to be much better than dealers. Any time the message becomes "but the incumbents are just as bad," the innovator is falling behind.

97% of Tesla owners would buy another Tesla[1]. Doesn't sound like they're screwing up overall, because that's an amazingly high %.

1: http://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla-reliability-doesnt...

"Despite the problems, our data show that Tesla owner satisfaction is still very high: Ninety-seven percent of owners said they would definitely buy their car again. It appears that Tesla has been responsive to replacing faulty motors, differentials, brakes, and infotainment systems, all with a minimum of fuss to owners."

Want to know how well the dealership model works?

I bought a car last year. Found a dealership with exactly what I wanted, ordered it from them, and traveled a long distance to get there.

The car they had in their inventory didn't match it's description and no one at the dealer (despite cleaning it and installing a few options for me) noticed it had the wrong trim level.

So I had to find the car somewhere else for more money.

If you can't keep track of the inventory sitting on your lot you're screwed up. Not 'oops we sold it to someone else' but 'the car physically isn't what the computer says and no one noticed'.

Way to go Honda dealer. Ruined my experience of buying my first new car and put a SERIOUS dent in my respect for Honda.

Heh heh. I think that's pretty normal. I used to work for a logistics company. One of the big car companies was interested in our product, which was normally used to track inventory in warehouses. They told us every year they lost thousands of cars - no idea what happened to them.

So I listed to them as they were trying to sort out what happened and if someone nearby had the car I wanted, it sounded like what happened was that all the cars in the shipment were brought to another local dealer and then taken from there to the other dealerships. The dealership I went to picked up the wrong car instead of the one they were supposed to have (same color, same engine, etc., only trim package differed).

Has you never dealt with a not-shitty dealership?

I have. Last year I wanted to buy a 2015 STI. I emailed the dealers within 25 miles or so, replied to the one with the best price and said I wanted the car. He said 'just put a sold sign on it, when do you want to pick it up?' A few days later I walked into his office, signed the paperwork, and drove away. He didn't pester me with add-ons, didn't insist on showing me how to operate every little part of the car (he offered, I declined, he simply said 'no problem'). It was a great experience. Good dealers do exist, find them and then give them your business when possible.

The best customer service 1) identifies and resolves the client's problem and then 2) tries to identify what went wrong internally and escalate appropriately.

Aligning yourself with the customer, then failing to provide a solution is a rookie move.

None of us were on the line with this customer; it's very possible he was prying for details and the CSR was trying to be accommodating with information because they weren't empowered to deliver a good solution.

This needs to end with Elon Musk delivering by himself a brand-new top-model car, with him saying: "sorry I took your car, now you'll get mine"

My father-in-law works for a Tier 2 auto supplier that works primarily with GM. Elements of this story sounded very similar to how GM operates: no callbacks, lack of empathy, passing the buck, etc.

I wonder how deep the similarities go, or if this story is just a really odd edge case.

I imagine this is an odd-edge case being that it's not a typical purchase, but a purchase of a showroom model.

Yeah, I think that's true. But it still alludes to a broken corporate culture. If nobody can call back because they can't take the bull by the horns, that tells you something. (if it is indeed a true story).

Yikes. They should give him a better car at the agreed upon price.

If they have any customer service savvy they'll get ahead of this, public statement apologising and a much better car at the original price.

It's easily fixed if they just get ahead of it and then figure out what the hell went wrong and how to prevent it in future.

It's like that thing about Doctors getting sued less if they just apologise for screwups, shit happens and most people are understanding if you are honest about it - mealy mouthed platitudes from the "Big Book of Covering Screwups" however annoy people.

Exactly, I don't think anyone's looking for much beyond a, "Whoa, that was a blunder on our part, let's make this right" from Tesla. Relatively easy fix from a PR perspective, but based on this account of their internal process, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets missed too.

They're obviously very good at engineering, which is kind of a classic mistake to then not bother trying to be good at the other stuff, too.

> They're obviously very good at engineering

Everyone's very good at low volume. I'd say wait for the mass-production model (ie: Model 3) before we judge their engineering skills.

My car insurance tells me to never apologize even if it is my fault because that can be equated with admission of guilt. I imagine Doctors are told the same in regard to malpractice suits.

In Ontario and apology is not an admission of guilt: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/09a03

Seems like a good idea.

As a fellow canadian, given how often we apologize when it's clearly not our fault, this only makes sense.

This is a fault in US law if I heard properly. Its also horribly misaligned with getting appropriate results both financially and socially.

Probably, and yes. In the US, you can tell when a business has well and truly screwed you when you hear, "I'm sorry, all further communications will have to be through our attorney."

This is true. We are told not to apologize. Institutions sometimes have funds to compensate patients with errors, but they don't typically admit fault per se. In our current legal setting, admission of fault means uncapped potential for damages hat can ruin anyone's ability to ever practice again.

Part of the problem seems to be that some people (me included), use "Sorry" to sometimes mean "I'm sorry for what has happening to you", not "I'm sorry I caused this problem", but it can be construed as the latter in court. Using this ambiguous construct when, at some point, someone is going to look to see if there's a way to assign blame, is not wise. If the purpose is to express sympathy, there are less ambiguous ways to do so. ("This/that sucks.", "I feel for you", etc.)

That's because you might think you're at fault, but actually not be. Or you might truly be at fault, but in a way that can't be proven. And there might be a huge amount of money at stake, if someone is injured and requires extensive medical treatment.

None of that applies here. Tesla is clearly at fault, actual damages are basically zero (the guy got his money back, at least), and making it right will be pretty cheap, if Tesla actually decides to do so.

I don't disagree with you; my response was to parent's comment about doctors who apologize.

I see, I didn't quite connect the dots there. Well, if anybody cares about why I think insurance companies might say that, there it is....

I've had a claims agent directly tell me that this absolutist advice is a myth, especially if it's truly obvious that you're at fault. This is because apologizing can reduce the likelihood that the other party sues, which means that if you're probably going to lose, it can actually help.

This is an interesting anecdote about an extremely unlikely scenario, and one that hopefully you could laugh off if you're in a position to spend $100k on a luxury car.

I think most people in a position to spend $100k on a luxury car would not laugh off a breach of contract worth approximately $20k.

I would rather be able to say "Elon Musk stole my Tesla" than "I paid $100k for a luxury car". But then, I am not in a position to say either of those things, so perhaps my perspective would change.

Seems silly to chalk Tesla up to a "hobby masquerading as a company" based on a single interaction buying (or trying to buy) a vehicle that is not even sold as part of their typical sales and delivery channel. What would this person's experience had been if they weren't seeking a special discount deal and just ordered one normally?

The only concerning part in the article is the explanation by Kevin that the reason he couldn't get through to anyone wasn't because no one was available, but rather that they saw him calling and refused to answer because they didn't want to deal with him.

You probably had case for a lawsuit, but not worth the effort. You story probably lost more business for Telsa than they would have paid you damages. (Maybe they'll sue you for libel)

It likely that this article put whoever told him Elon was driving the car around in some hot water. I would not want to be that guy when Elon reads the headlines. I am not saying Elon is vindictive or anything just that it would be a uncomfortable position to be in. It's likely he thought the buyer would think it was neat that Elon was driving around in the same car he was going to get... if so he was wrong.

I hope Elon personally takes responsibility for this. The person who told the author what was going on is the only person in the story who provided good customer service!

I would think that too, but it seemed that because of the testing, the vehicle was no longer available to the customer, and would retire as an R&D vehicle. From the write up, Tesla pre-sold a used vehicle, and then was unable to fulfill the sale. The customer's option seemed to be "find a different car".

And if Elon had actually acknowledged this it would have been much easier for the Owner Advisor to find an alternative and Elon could easily have made the company pay a $20k difference.

I mean, I'd be pretty excited to learn Elon had been driving the car. However, they did mention that because of the changes they've made to test the new software he wouldn't be able to receive the car. If the company had just said "We're sorry, here's another car with all the features you wanted" but they didn't they dropped the ball.

Why would he think it was neat that Elon had driven his car? If I was buying a used car I'd be annoyed that someone else was adding extra mileage to the car I'd purchased.

I don't know. I would think it was kinda neat because I got alot of respect for Elon but I would also kinda wonder about the extra mileage.

EDIT: Message to the down voters I am not saying its rational that I think it would be kinda neat. I am just honest enough with myself to recognize that I am not a purely logical beast.

If I was Elon Musk, I would promote that guy and put everyone else in "hot water" for not escalating this issue.

A lawsuit for something like this would have been ludicrous. Clearly, the OP was trying to purchase his car through a discount channel which this relatively new company had not completely ironed out.

Mistakes happen, people get embarrassed, no one wants to tell Mr Musk "No", and no one wants to be the focal point of a customer complaint which they can't really do anything about.

It seems like a screw-up on Tesla's part. Stuff like this happens all the time at good companies and this one has a funny twist but it doesn't signify anything as far as Tesla's ability to deliver, IMHO.

> relatively new company

They've been around for 13 years and have been selling cars for coming up on 10. Plenty of time to make sure customers aren't jerked around when making $100k purchases.

They've been selling cars since the first roadster in 2008 and only sold ~500 in their first year.

They're still "a baby" when it comes to car companies.

8 years is still plenty of time to figure out your basic purchasing channels, regardless how long it is compared to other car companies.

> Maybe they'll sue you for libel

Why do you think they would do that? I don't see anything that would come close to the bar that you'd need to meet to be able to sue for libel in the article.

No, and no.

What damages could the plaintiff have shown here? He got his money back, and Tesla kept the car. He had never executed a bill of sale for the car. While what Tesla did looks like horrible customer service, there was no damage here, any more than when you order the daily special at a restaurant and the waiter comes out to tell you it's sold out.

As for libel, if he is telling the truth, then in the US, it can not be libelous. The saying goes "truth is an absolute defense against libel"

IANAL ...

While many bemoan the dealership models it is a dealership I once used to get something done when all else seem to fail. There are far more good ones than bad and big companies can effectively and afford to ignore a single consumer, even a vocal one. So while there are some benefits of dealing directly with a manufacturer it can also be insane at time how tone deaf they can be. Dealers suffer this at times too but larger ones know the game and better yet know the people to call. I had a North American rep calling me direct on my issue and it was resolved.

Once Tesla ever moves into a large volume car I don't see how they will keep up the image they portray. Its not that simple. Whats worse here is that they have people who saw what was going on and it wasn't run up the flagpole fast instead they tried to up sell the customer!!! Get real guys.

TIL even millionaires look for discounts on Teslas.

What Tesla did wasn't right but very hard to have a pity-party for Marty Puranik.

> TIL even millionaires look for discounts on Teslas.

Read the "Millionaire next door". The vast majority of millionaires in the US are just slightly above-average income folk who live below their income and save appropriately.

If anything, the typical millionaire will look for discounts everywhere. On the other hand, the "millionaire next door" doesn't buy Teslas, but instead buys used cars.

The vast majority of millionaires like that don't blow 100K on a used car.

Marty is not a "slightly above-average income folk".

Started and ran a large dial-up ISP in the 90s and adapted it into a full blown hosting company when dial-up went away the next decade.

He's on a few "lists" of successful people and extremely well off which is why it is strange to see someone like that shopping for what had to be only a moderate discount on a used Tesla.

Again, none of this excuses what Tesla did, I just find his shopping habits to be a little strange in his bracket.

The unlikely day I have that kind of money, the first thing I do is visit a Tesla location and order a Model X

How do you think Marty got his business chops?

Successful business people are always working to get a discount, more mileage for your money, etc. etc. Whether they are "working" or "leisure", they invest, haggle, look for discounts, and everything.

Living successfully is partially a lifestyle choice. If you live it up and party like you're a millionaire, you end up broke like the tons of Hollywood celebrities or lottery winners who don't know how to manage cash. The vast majority of millionaires are humble people who live below their means for their whole life.

In part, because humble people who live below their means tend to be good business owners. Having a solid grasp on the value of money is invaluable. That part of his brain doesn't "turn off" because he's buying a car. If anything, its working harder.

'millionaires' are all over the map. some are not into cars, some are.

it's really annoying when people think 'real millionaires don't buy expensive things' -- yes, they do.

That is a really weird experience. That being said one weird experience doesn't mean a system is "horribly broken." You got into a weird hole, but how many of these problems can really come up.

These problems suggest more to me about the immaturity of Tesla's Inventory Car channel than about its customer support in general. There may be one person spending 20% of his time on the loaner car sales channel at Tesla.

Pretty amazing how organizational incompetence took what could have been a minor inconvenience or even a positive (your car gets driven by Elon for 50-100km is probably a plus, if it is already used) to a pissed off customer.

Otoh, I'd far prefer a company screw over a rich guy who is the very definition of an equal party to contract/informed consumer. The "buy here pay here" used car dealers catering to poor, relatively uninformed, and powerless consumers do things far worse than this as routine business practice.

You don't need the dual charger.

Source: Owner of a non-dual-charger who has literally never missed it. I charge at 30mi/hr off a 220v dryer connection in my garage, what's not to like?

I wonder if Elon will respond with reasons given what happened to the New York times guy: https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

Of course I have doubts the reporter was accurate but I do believe this guys complaint sounds legit.

I was thinking about buying a (edit: new) Tesla recently, and my main concern was that one might have a difficult experience receiving the car after paying a deposit well in advance.

Tesla - if you're reading this, this guy's experience has convinced me; I won't be considering buying a Tesla again until you can buy one and drive off with it that day.

>I won't be considering buying a Tesla again until you can buy one and drive off with it that day.

Do you really want this? If this were true, you would be buying a car that x number of people have test driven. It will come with 100+km on the odometer already. If I'm spending $100k on a car, I'd rather a brand new vehicle that was driven onto the truck, and off of the truck and by no one else.

Why wouldn't they have a test-drive fleet (like they currently have) and keep the plastic on the new cars?

Then they would have to keep stock at the 'dealerships'. They will soon have 3 models, with various configurations. Allowing enough selection for someone to "drive off that day" with a car would require expansion of the dealerships.

I'm still waiting to hear if: 1. This story is verified legitimate and then if so 2. Where's Tesla's response?

Reading this made it feel like everyone at Tesla is afraid of Elon Musk, which hopefully is not the case. Not being able to talk honestly to a CEO (or anyone) is how things fester.

Pretty sure most people at Tesla/SpaceX ARE afraid of Elon. Especially if you have MBA :), which most senior people in a sales organization probably have.

Has the OP tried to reach out to Tesla / Elon Musk on Twitter at all? I don't know other channels, but Elon Mush is Twitter A LOT!

This sounds like a completely innocent foulup (Musk taking the car, probably without checking if it was sold) that was then handled in just the worst way possible and snowballed into a ridiculous saga.

You cannot just NOT ANSWER a customer when you don't know what to do. You take it to your superior, who takes it to theirs, who takes it to theirs. Simply not answering the phone and hoping this guy would just be ok with losing 4 thousand dollars is certifiably insane, and whoever decided that should be the course of action should be fired. That is NOT how you handle a customer.

At the very least he should've been offered either the car as is with a discount, or a similar model for the same price. I'm sure he would've been happy with either option, but the Tesla customer service staff utterly failed him.

The existence of a sales channel is utterly irrelevant. He contracted with the sales rep to buy THAT car at THAT price, that's what was agreed and Tesla did not deliver. THEY need to make it work, not him.

Lol, guy angling for a free car.

Sorry your discount scheme didn't work out. Pay retail like the majority of the retail public.

I'm sorry your comment is being buried, because I think you do bring up a good point. This was not the usual Tesla process for purchases. The author wanted an "inventory" car at a discount. Now because Tesla offers this option, they are responsible for fulfilling the process, and the author's concerns do seem valid. However, this is not the usual process for purchasing a Tesla, so it's likely that this is not the usual experience for the "full retail" customers.

The CEO taking your car from the "inventory Tesla purchase program" is an edge case of an edge case, so it makes sense that nobody knew what to do. The process still needs to be fixed though.

This isn't a special process. "Buy New Today", "Buy Pre-Owned Today" (which is where the showroom models are) and "Custom Order" are in the same top-level menu on Tesla's website, which is where you buy their cars, whether you're at home or in a showroom at their computer. Whichever you click, you choose a car, make a deposit right there, and are given an order confirmation and an account. It's the same process, and you have the same "full retail experience", no matter which of the three pages you started your order at. He even included screenshots of his account in the "My Tesla" portal, just like any other customer that ordered a car from them.

While the "Buy Pre-Owned Today" option is given equal weight on the website, I specifically am referring to what happens on the back end. When you buy new, a new car is configured to your liking. I have to imagine Tesla's fulfillment operations are arranged primarily around this case (take new "shell" car, install customer-selected options, deliver to customer).

It's the same process only in what the customer sees. And I'll agree that the customer should get a similar experience from a similar process. Tesla seems to have failed in this case. However, it's clearly not the same process on Tesla's end. Selling an inventory car is a subset of the pre-owned car sales process, and selling a specific inventory car that was somehow (erroneously?) available for R&D is a very specific case. Has the car been made road ready? Have they removed any beta features that are not for the public?

This is a special process. However, since Tesla offers the option, it is their responsibility to ensure they can deliver.

The parent is blaming the victim. Buying used is not special, and they clearly have mechanisms in place. No one at Tesla took responsibility (or felt empowered to) for the error and raise it to higher levels of management.

Someone should have immediately said "Crap, a customer's car just got requisitioned. Let's take this up to the top so they can work on it."

#firstworldproblems

The only way that I can see this made right is that the guy gets a free Tesla and lifetime-of-the-car free support and repairs on it. Inexcusable.

This is not the The Atlantic that you've heard of.

And i smell a rat. Has anyone else who has purchased a Tesla had even half as many issues? I think this guy just worked things until he got some sales schmuck to make him an offer too good to be true, and then it was. (Note the several weeks to find a car. If Tesla sales are always months of back and forth they have serious problems.)

   Has anyone else who has purchased a Tesla had even half as many issues?

Well, I would hope Elon doesn't use already sold cars as prototype test vehicles on a weekly basis.

> This is not the The Atlantic that you've heard of.

I've heard of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic.Net

Marty is the founder.

I read this as: "I tried to save money and it backfired."

They have actual sales channels with real support, by sidestepping that and your stuck in weird internal processes.

IMO, paying full price and just buying fewer things massively simplifies most processes.

PS: That's not to say Tesla did a good job. Just that edge cases are often fragile and it's a good idea to weigh your time vs. the actual savings.

The showroom inventory is an actual sales channel. It's not some back channel insider process.

It's behind the "Buy Pre-Owned Today" link on Tesla's public website.

https://www.teslamotors.com/models/preowned

The site has one top-level menu where you can choose new, pre-owned or custom to start your order. Everyone's in the same system.

There is generally a big internal difference between cars that are used by a customer and cars used by the company.

Dealerships often deal with this for their internal loaner cars used when someone is getting repairs vs. there normal inventory. He was buying a car that was likely at a transmission point where the company was still using it but it had entered there sales channel early.

This is an actual sales channel. It's an offering for the company, there should be (better) infrastructure around it.

All that being said, Elon Musk shouldn't have been given the car by this staff when he asked for a car to test with. That's a systems mistake that can be fixed.

It's especially entertaining how he tries to apply his very unique sidestepping effort to the rest of their operations as if he's warning potential buyers and investors alike.

I wonder how many people have had to listen to this drawn out story.

I can understand being frustrated about being given the run-around when you have deposited $4k for a really expensive car but I think this guy(Marty) is an asshole:

1. He posted this on his company blog. Not a personal blog, not medium but on a company blog. I think he's hoping to get some business from the exposure. I'd be planning to leave a company quickly if my boss posts personal rants that are not business related on the company blog.

2. He outed the one rep that told him the truth. He gave the date and the name of the rep that told him Elon was driving the car. Why would you do that?? Perhaps the reason why the other reps kept mum was because they knew Marty was a difficult customer.

3. He goes on about having a new baby, about how his electrician was calling to install some power-ups in his garage. These things are not relevant to the story. Simply tell your electrician the car has not arrived yet.

He also mentions that "In 21 years as a founder/CEO of my own company, dealing with Tesla has been the most bizarre and strange experience I’ve had interacting with another organization"

That simply cannot be true.

Bottom line: Marty thinks the world revolves around him and is really upset Elon doesn't care about him.

Power-ups in the garage... for charging his Tesla? Sounds relevant.

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