Tesla sends untrained employees to work on cars as service becomes problematic

Considering the founders of a few other car companies have said or done truly horrible things[0][1], I'm curious what Elon has said that is so beyond the pale.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1939%E2%80%931944:_...

I've often used imgbb[1], which is free, requires a direct link to view images, and has the option to expire URL's at your choosing.

[1] https://imgbb.com/

Of course if you're going to post it to HackerNews that's very public so be sure to redact anything you don't want the world to see.

If the car hasn't been a good one, so be it. But if you let your personal politics color your life's view, you're going to have a tumultuous life.

The real nail in the coffin was that they dropped mobile service in our area. I had a to replace the 12v battery, tried to do it myself, could not get parts.

The nearest service center is a 6-8hr roundtrip for me, more than happy to pay for mobile service but they didn't offer it any more.

Either way the shift to EVs has happened, with the F150 lightning and other offerings Tesla has largely achieved one of the main reasons we were an earlier adopter.

Issues from your list like “tesla mobile app incorrectly identifies car as 100D” and “Autopilot down chime is distorted” are rightfully lower priority than things like brakes not working properly. Most people (including me) would not even notice most of these things on your list. I am not surprised you had to wait a while for those things to get fixed, I have a feeling you’re going to also be disappointed with your next vehicle.

This is mainly how the major established car manufacturers make money. Soon same should be true for Tesla as well, as their fleet ages.

Oh, come on. They certainly are not. Pick any rapidly growing car model of the last six or seven decades (the Prius in 2005-08 comes to mind, Outbacks in the 90's, etc...) and you'll discover a flood of service problems reported.

Tesla is having trouble scaling service because it turns out service might be harder to scale than factories.

And one way you address that is by hiring more people to do service, which is exactly what is being reported here. The idea that these are "untrained" (!!!) employees is pure spin. These are, fundamentally, new employees, brought on[1] to service cars. And, duh, they're going to have to be trained before they can be useful. There isn't the remotest hint of an allegation anywhere in that article that Tesla was skipping training for service employees. It's all spin.

Anti-Tesla headlines are an eyeball magnet. There was one going around a few days ago about something like 300 autopilot accidents had been identified by the NTSB (or NHTSA?), failing to note that if that holds up it represents an accident rate something like 6% of the average passenger car.

[1] Albeit as transfers from other departments.

Really? In the experience of myself and my friends, dealer repair is at best hit-and-miss and at worst feels downright dishonest... most of the people I know who felt "in the know" always used third-party repair people that they trusted.

> As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them.

This just means you need to hire people, not that those people need to be hired at arm's-length by third-party related businesses. Tesla has buildings where people work in them all over the world, just like Toyota. Their location near where I live looks just like a normal car dealer because it used to be a Buick dealership. They have a service center full of technicians, they are simply hired by Tesla.

Taking a step back this is like insisting that companies like Panda Express, Starbucks, or Chipotle can't ever compete with franchises because obviously they are going to have to hire a billion people to cook and serve the food... well, you just hire them! To me the only thing that franchises are inherently good at doing is helping to fleece unsuspecting franchise purchasers with bad models.

> Sure, they’re very expensive but they also have most parts available for a their brands and an army of techs available.

And this is the real problem: Tesla as a company doesn't even have the parts available to make NEW cars right now (Musk has even been talking about pausing new orders as they have cars sitting all over the place just a few parts shy of being ready for pick up ;P) much less repair OLD cars, and their demand scaling up both processes at once is of course going to be hard.

And like, to be clear: maybe their current lack of service people is inexcusable and incompetent... but this has nothing to do with being "dealer-free".

[1]: one of recent examples - Gears & Gadgets f150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCnYeiYY9g

[2]: broken motor at bronco: 50 days in service, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-ZV-7JVeY

I've had a dealer claim that my car wasn't covered by a manufacturer engine warranty extension when it plainly was. That was after struggling for a long time to get them to acknowledge the fix that was needed.

Dealers are often not good at all at fixing problems. Ironically, one of the big problems with Tesla service is that they've copied the "that's in spec" mantra of a lot of dealers.

3rd party repair shops are generally going to be the better way to go and from an outside perspective, the two flaws in Tesla’s service model are 1) not producing & distributing enough parts, and 2) not partnering with more repair centers to train and certify technicians to work on Teslas.

I'm going to have to stop you there.

A little about me, I was a college dropout and worked as a mechanic for a few years, then went back and completed my undergrad, got a Master's and I've been white collar for a couple of decades, but I've always done as much work on my car myself as possible.

20 years ago we used to call the dealership service department the "stealership." I'm afraid nothing has changed.

I normally won't let the Toyota dealer lay even a finger on my car but I recently had some recall work done (fuel pump). I also asked them to look at another issue since the car was there and they presumably had the specialized equipment and knowledge to diagnose a tricky automatic transmission problem.

Well they couldn't even replicate the problem, even though I left detailed instructions on how to reproduce (yay bug reporting experience!). I watched the test drive on my dashcam and he didn't do what I said.

Worse, they messed up the recall repair and left equipment in my car. I told them it was probably the sending unit. They diagnosed the car for over 6 hours, checking everything BUT the sending unit, before finally giving in and realizing it was indeed the sending unit (it's the fancy name for a float in the gas tank). It took them another 4 hours to finally fix it.

I was left without my car for two full days for a repair that they told me was a 3-hour job.

Never, EVER take your car to the dealership EVER once your car is out of warranty. I have friends that used to have car dealerships in the family. They don't make much money on the sale of cars, the service department is under intense pressure to generate most of the profits for the dealership. They will lie, cheat, and steal to get your money. I cannot stress this enough. STAY AWAY FROM AUTOMOTIVE DEALERSHIP SERVICE DEPARTMENTS.

The average HN reader, with a little internet searching and some common sense, is better equipped to diagnose cars than a dealership.

Dealerships for the most part take care of this. They aren't selling people broken cars because if they do, it becomes their problem.

In fact, service and part supply are a huge reason mature car companies are profitable at all.

Telsa controlling the both in house rather then sharing profits with dealers is a gigantic advantage.

The only problem is that while you are growing most of the cars are under warrenty most of the time. Therefore service is hugly negative. Tesla is only now getting to the point where service doesnt lose a huge amount of money.

So its literally the exact opposite of what you suggested.

The main reason Tesla has such problem is because of their growth. Any other startup car company even with dealer model would also face many of those challanges. But those companies wouldn't in the end get all the profits.

Didn't he put like, a whole car, into orbit around the Sun?

Teslas are ever more in demand, with wait times extending to a year. They are the highest selling EVs in the world by a large margin and they make the highest margin on EVs they sell, while others are losing money and stopping production (latest of which is Ford Mache E).

He knows what he's doing.

He took direct control of a company when it was going straight to shit and now its by far the largest EV company on the planned and they are still growing like a startup.

The public perception that everything Musk does it to optimize short term stock price seems to me totally and completly wrong.

I think far more accurate assesment would be that he focus on long term planning off the core limitation his companies are facing. And that will be positive for long term.

And so far this has proven out very successful. I can give many exapmles.

And in that he pays sometimes for not doing as well on the sideshows. Aguable that is the only way you can even consider running multible comapanies like that.

Dealerships aren't just awful for the buying experience. They're also awful for the service experience. If anything, Tesla's model of providing at-home service for small or routine work is an exception from the norm that, in my experience, raises it above other premium brands.

Could you expand ?

Edit: My personal interpretation is this: It is very difficult for a man to sit on the sidelines and watch another man do things. And yet that is what every journalist has to go through. While others are doing things and changing things, he is merely sitting there and commenting. While the other is the artist, he is the mere critic. While the other seems to have power of a nature, all the critic seems to have is power over people’s opinions. Now, if such a person focused on the greater whole, he would still be able to find purpose in what he is doing. After all, we need good journalism. But if he is focused on his own ego, the act of comparing himself to the person he is writing about will make him bitter and resentful. He will feel as though he is standing in the shadows of this other person. As if, if he could only make this other person smaller, he himself would become bigger. That the very act of comparing himself to another person and trying to derive his sense of self-worth from such a comparison is itself what makes him feel small doesn’t even occur to him.

Why does any massively complicated machine need service? Because things break.

Because the initial build quality of the cars is still so poor they come broken, or quickly break.

I humbly submit that electronic parts might actually be less reliable than mechanical parts.

"36% of Model 3 buyers in Q1 2022 didn't have any service visits during the first 30 days of ownership while 54% had one and 10% had two visits."

Only a minority of Model 3 buyers get a car that isn't broken in the first month.