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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be a process within customer support teams in which they can escalate problems if the rules feel wrong to them.

If a purchase was unintentional and very large ($4,333) a refund should be offered. This feels like common sense to me.

That's a large amount of money to lose. Providing annoyingly bad customer service to people and then signing off with "Warm Regards" is likely to make enemies of customers.

Edit: Somebody mentioned that Taleb might be bullshiting about there being no confirmation, however, to be honest, I still think at this price level, customer support should be able to refund purchases. Keep your customers happy (and they will eventually purchase upgrades from you)!

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This is just an American problem because there's no real customer protection.

In Europe (EU) you have at least 14 days to revert any purchase made over "distance" unless the product is either custom made or of such a type that a resale isn't possible (eg. Underwear). You are also allowed to reasonably test the product. The only charges you can incur is the shipping back and if you materially lower the value, an example would be rough handling.

This is the reason for the return policy of 14 days or a couple of hours played steam for example has.

Steam has refused every single refund I’ve requested over the years, from €1,99 to €20+, unplayed or not.

Purely digital items bought are not covered by this law. Only physical items bought online, because you cannot try them like you can in the store.

This means no refunds for Steam games unless your government has put additional rules in place to also cover the purchase of digital goods.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, because what you said is more or less correct:

"But section 19 of that EU directive explicitly allows sellers of digital goods to ask users to waive that right before they make the purchase, provided the digital goods are delivered immediately." -- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/03/sorry-europe-you-stil...

Interesting, Steam has granted every refund I've requested (I'm in the US).

Same, I've never had any issue refunding a game with less than 2 hours played prior to 2 weeks after purchase.

When was the last time you tried? Steam introduced a refund system with clear rules a while ago: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

As others pointed out the european 14 day return policy only applies to physical goods.

Also, Tesla upgrades are universally either software unlocks ("boost mode") or promises of future hardware/software upgrades ("full self driving"), as far as I know, and so should all be entirely reversible in an automated way.

I think of Apple, Microsoft, and Steam for comparison, each of which have software stores that allow refunds for purchases, some of which could potentially be pretty significant. For example, Train Simulator has about $10,000 in DLC [1], and a single bundle purchase of all of it would still qualify for Steam's two-weeks-from-purchase/less-than-two-hours-of-play refund policy.

[1]: https://ganker.com/train-simulator-game-all-dlc-total-cost-a...

Nitpick: while I agree that “full self driving” is kind of a promise and that all those charges should be reversible, you still get immediate feature unlocks today immediately after paying for it, like navigate on autopilot/smart summon.

> you still get immediate feature unlocks today

So... turn those off again, then.

So I can just borrow boost mode to impress my dates and turn it off afterwards? For free?

If I can borrow $10k of Train Simulator DLC from Steam to impress my date, sure. As long as the "you can get an automatic refund as long as you haven't used it for too long" timer is cumulative, it doesn't seem too abusable.

Why not? But after the third time, Tesla should require in-person confirmation of the purchase.

I reckon they could charge a monthly subscription and make more money that way from people trialing features...

Only if people repeatedly desire those features, vs being more of a one-time novelty.

Say unlocking Boost Mode costs $2k. What would the subscription cost, $200/mo?

If I can show off Boost Mode to all my friends in one month, I might never care to pay for it again after that.

If my only way to get the feature is a permanent unlock (and I can afford it), Tesla scores an extra $1800.

Subscriptions work for sticky things. Are Tesla's add-ons all that sticky?

What if 20x more of their customers trial it for a month, than purchase it outright? It could still work. It just depends on user engagement.

There have been entire TV shows build around the premise of not paying a cent with "borrowed" cars, clothes, etc. . Hell there are millions lost by people ordering clothes on Amazon and sending them back when they don't like them. Tesla stands out badly if it cannot even offer doing so one time.

I think the clothes-on-amazon thing is fair and a cost of doing business, though. If my only choices, as a customer, were "all sales are final"-buy-online or go in-store, I would 100% go in-store. I would never, ever buy what could be a brick in a box online if I wasn't allowed to return it if it turned out to be a brick in a box.

And clothes have another dimension (heh, literally) of size/fit/feel. I think it's totally reasonable to buy a shirt online, put it on, think "wow this material is awful" and return it. That's what you can do in-store, and it's not your fault that that loop is a lot more expensive for online retailers.

> Hell there are millions lost by people ordering clothes on Amazon and sending them back when they don't like them.

Free returns are usually a requirement for clothing sales though. Say, Zalando has free returns within 100 days -- people expect this as clothes obviously need to fit.

My comment wasn't supposed to be an argument against that. I agree, it should be fully reversible.

Does anyone believe the currently available Tesla vehicles out on the road will be level-5 "fully autonomous" without major hardware upgrades?

> Does anyone believe the currently available Tesla vehicles out on the road will be level-5 "fully autonomous" without major hardware upgrades?

I don't know.

But that doesn't seem very relevant. Tesla has already shown they will upgrade customers who have purchased full self driving to their latest hardware package (v2 -> v3).

Elon seems to think so. He knows more about this than many of us. He may have reasons to hype the story a bit but I do think he’s sincere.

He also says there is another generation of hardware in the works. Not sure where that fits in. But if they can roll out a 2.5 -> 3.0 hardware upgrade, as they are doing, I don’t see what prevents them from doing that for 3.0 -> 4.0 hardware when the time comes.

Although I don’t know where that fits in, I do know where it does not fit in, which is into a made up narrative which falsely claims that Elon promised the hardware would never change and never be upgraded.

I realize that’s not quite in the spirit of your question but I’m also pointing out that the question may be moot.

Also the qualifier “major” is up for discussion. A replacement of the main computer motherboard certainly seems major on its face, but if it can be done by a mobile service tech in half an hour at a location of your choosing without you even needing to be there, then it’s not so major, in an important sense.

I don’t know if it’s still this way, but I liked how Android used to allow returning an app after purchase (time limited I assume), and was always surprised Apple doesn’t have a mechanism like this. Well, not surprised, I guess, there’s an obvious business reason for not making that process easy.

If you uninstall a paid app quickly enough after installing, it's automatically refunded without you requesting it.

I realized by accident once when I bought an app for a one-time thing, it worked very well and quickly, and then I uninstalled it.

Actually re-purchased afterwards and left it installed for a few days so dev would get their couple dollars.

Tbf, from a seller's point of view, the larger the purchase, the harder a refund should be. In any case, the bigger party (in this case, Tesla as the seller) holds more power.

I agree about the power balance but I don't think it's in Tesla's interest to have customers that were burned by massive accidental purchases and never buy a car from them again.

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