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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

I would never buy something without a test drive. No level of return policy will be good enough.

I agree with you, at least for a big ticket item like a car. But Turo exists, so you can test drive pretty much any non-exotic car in any major metro area, for a somewhat reasonable price. That's what we did before we bought a Model 3, as official test drives weren't available yet.

Yeah, I hear you.

Yet all you (we) need to do is find a friend/colleague with a Model 3 and go to lunch/test-drive together. In fact, I would value my friend's frank opinion over a slimy car salesman's one.

Would you prefer to buy a Tesla at a traditional dealership, which offers short test drives and the usual "service" of a dealer and pay a premium of 2-3k for this service? If yes, then there is a business model for independant dealers buying cars at Tesla and selling them at their own conditions.

Does saving $2,100 help?

Not really if I have no idea what I’m buying?

Rent it for a couple days on Turo. I did that recently with a Model 3 just to try it out.

A friend did this one year. He sold his old car, commuted to work on public transit M-F, and rented a different car every weekend, whether he felt like driving somewhere or not.

Rentals are cheaper on the weekend, and he got to try all sorts of cars. He started with the ones he was most interested in buying, but since he was for ing himself to rent different things, he tried convertibles, sub-sub-compacts, minivans, even a pickup.

When he finally was ready to buy, he had enjoyed a quirky period of trying different things, and was now very sure of exactly what he wanted.

I tried it myself for a summer, even rented an oversize SUV for a climbing trip. And I loathe driving SUVs, but hey, if it’s just for the weekend...

What did he end up buying?

You're being downvoted, but honestly this is great advice. I recommend this to anyone that can do this when buying any car - it's so much better to live with the car you're thinking of buying for a day or two to see what it's actually like. Are the seats comfortable on a long drive? How good is the visibility really? How well does it fit in your parking spot/garage? What's it like to drive on your favorite road? You can't really answer any of these questions with a 10 minute test drive with the salesman right next to you.

Turo refused to rent to me because I don’t have any recent US driving/insurance history for their insurance scoring. Never had a problem at any other normal car rental place.

Excellent suggestion. I did this with a Model S a few months ago and it was a blast.

So now we have to pay for test drives?

I don't think this model makes sense for the long term. Eventually there will be enough competition that Tesla will need to go through an actual Sales/Marketing process like every other product.

But as long as they have a huge wait list for cars, and huge numbers of people who are willing to pay for cars without testing them this makes sense.

My response to your question is "Why should I (a preorder customer) pay a premium for Tesla's business model that allows YOU to do a test drive?"

Until the demand of the wait list customers has been fulfilled, catering to the HARD SELL customer is actually making my experience worse and more expensive.

1. $37,100 Tesla with a free one hour dealership test drive.

2. $35,000 Tesla plus a $100 rental payment for a 24 hour test drive.

You honestly prefer the first option?

If you want to try a bunch of cars since you are undecided you might pay extra compared to now, since other brands won’t give you a discount and you still paid for the Tesla test drive.

If there's a 5% chance you'll buy a Tesla, the math still adds up to where you're better off spending $100 to test drive it over a free test drive and paying $2100 more for the car.

It's more than a 20 minute test drive. You get to keep the car for a while, park it, load/unload it, try out car seats in it, etc. It is very informative compared to a dealership test drive.

Hmm. Not this time, but in 2015 when I bought an Audi, they let me have the vehicle (once I showed I was serious about buying/considering the vehicle, but without money or signature anywhere) from Friday evening til Sunday afternoon. Only thing they said was "Don't drive it to California and back, please" (from Seattle).

Ask a friend or neighbor who owns one -- Tesla owners always seem excited to share. Viral marketing... viral test drives?

Rent one? Depending on where you live there are rental car places you can rent a Tesla.

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