Tesla's Infinite Mile Warranty
teslamotors.com
teslamotors.com
http://www.mercurynews.com/60-second-business-break/ci_26323...
http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/alternative/1404...
http://insideevs.com/real-imagined-tesla-model-s-drivetrain-...
Recently Edmunds sold their long-term Tesla Model S; but before they did so the car had four (yes, four) drivetrains replaced by Tesla Motors. Motor Trend’s long term car is working on its 2nd.
This does not make us ask the question “is drivetrain failure a common occurence in the Model S?”
Because it is.
If you check out the latest numbers on a Tesla Motors Club poll, you will find that 75 (supposed) Model S owners have had a least 1 drive unit replaced - 12 of which have had it replaced more than once.
(Fair disclaimer: There is always a couple jokers messing with the results of an uncontrolled poll like this. As a point of reference, TMC likely has somewhere around 5% of Model S owners as members)
To their credit, Tesla service has been doing a yeoman’s job taking care of its clients. Despite the many failure occurrences we have yet to hear of Tesla giving a Model S owner a difficult time in solving the problem (ie-replacing the drive unit entirely).
The problem for customers will arise however when Tesla’s 4 year/50,000 mile warranty on the unit expires; that is when repairs reportedly greater than $10,000 a pop really start to hurt.
Tesla has got to both get ahead of this issue for the upcoming models and instill consumer confidence in the vehicles while they're fixing it.
http://transportevolved.com/2014/08/11/tesla-model-s-drivetr...
Moreover:
Speaking a few weeks ago at the Q2 earnings call, Tesla Motors [NASDAQ:TSLA] CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla’s approach — replacing the drivetrain of affected cars under warranty at an estimated cost of $15,000 per case — was more about customer satisfaction than anything else. “Our optimization was customer happiness. And so we knew exactly what to do. We just wanted to give people their car back right away,” he said.
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft.
My experience with Apple failures/replacements has been worse than any other customer service / quality assurance experience I've had. Products owned: Nano first gen (replaced with nano eighth gen), Video first gen, MBP 2007. Also a 5s but that can be an exception because my Mom brought it in the pool while I was lending it to her and we were trying to figure out random shutdowns on her 5, which were due to the battery.
Of course Comcast is just a puppet of media companies that are trying to monopolize consumer communication and monitor/identify users. I do indeed believe I have experienced poor quality service due to the controls they have been implementing, but overall the product has been quite a satisfying experience most of the time.
The problem with Apple's service is that it really doesn't even exist. There is no way to talk to anybody at Apple about the technical issues with their products. They just tell you to take it to completely clueless people at their retail stores or mail it in for replacement. This is all fine and dandy, as long as you bought the product a year ago or pay for Apple Care.
It's difficult to compare to Comcast.
There's good reasons why Apple tops customer satisfaction surveys pretty consistently - obviously there'll be failures sometimes, but overall they do aim for customer satisfaction more than most companies.
I'm over them though. Honestly, I loved each one of those products deeply (the video was actually under warranty, but it was stolen from my car before I sent it in). They are obviously very pleasant to use, and their high price tag provides quality material and sleek designs. I just have no more patience for the failures that render them unusable. With a higher price tag it should be even more crucial that the product does not fail, as we see with cars.
For my future computing device purchases I will opt for the lower cost products that have less failures. I hope that there will be more high material cost devices that can compete with Apple and maintain quality assurance. It is also a plus to get out of the walled garden.
http://transportevolved.com/2014/08/11/tesla-model-s-drivetr...
They just announced a warranty of 8 years and no range restriction retroactively. You also mention that their service is great and the pool is void.
Even if the drive unit has to be replaced before 8 ( or 4 ) years then that is no problem to the customer. It can't be a problem to Tesla or they wouldn't announce this warranty.
Your parent sees extending the warranty as a form of damage-control against this (quite reasonable) fear.
Even if we err on the cautious side and say a better comparison is replacing just the transmission of an ICE vehicle, the Tesla drivetrain is only electrical connections (albeit some large ones), drive shaft, and mounting hardware.
I wrote out the list of ICE transmission removal steps but deleted it -- I think the point is clear: this is no big deal.
Tesla can absolutely reuse the drivetrains it removes, unless the defect is catastrophic. I wonder what exactly the cause is? (I'm sure Tesla is hard at work determining just that.)
Just speculating: if Tesla has gone ahead and extended the warranty, they might be doing it because they are certain that the issues are not catastrophic. Cost/benefit analysis was probably completed to Musk's satisfaction before this announcement.
At least they are standing behind it, many corporations would just say "too bad, so sad".
I'd say that clicking through to a tiny and clear press statement should prevent any misunderstanding here.. People that just read the headline ... are misinformed most of the time anyway.
If we're going to have Tesla ads on the front page, they can at least be realistic. "Infinite mile" implies forever. 8 years, not so much.
Infinite mile, which is discussing distance, does not imply something time related.
No, it doesn't imply that in this context. Car warranties are sold as, "X years, Y miles". So "infinite miles" simply says Y = Infinite. It doesn't say anything about X.
EDIT: also, most underdog companies are "the best" in terms of customer service until they get huge. there's no doubt that he's one-of-a-kind, though.
I am not a fan in general of idolizing people.
It would have to be someone who was laudable as a whole person and not just professionally. Someone who can keep a marriage together and doesn't produce large broods of offspring just to outsource their care and feeding to nannies. These are my own personal biases and judgment: family and the people around you should come first.
This is a great idea - just as cars are about to go out of warranty, Tesla are getting ahead of potential reputation issues by offering it "forever."
Because Tesla offer an aggressive buy-back program on their leases, they're also incentivized to improve their cars' depreciation curve, so this makes a lot of sense.
As a result, some potential customers were getting concerned about the reliability of Tesla's drive train especially since it's only covered under the 4 year (50k) warranty. So, Elon decided to extend the drive train coverage to 8 years, and this significantly makes the car more appealing to potential customers since they know Tesla will take care of the biggest problems (ie., the most expensive part of the car is the battery and drive train, which are now both covered for 8 years). This is a great move by Tesla and should show people how committed they are to product quality and to the ownership experience.
Below is from TSLA's Q2 quarterly conference call: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2368515-tesla-motors-tsla-ce...
"We definitely had some quality issues in the beginning for the [indiscernible] number of cars, because we're just basically figuring out how to make the Model S. And I think we've addressed almost all of those CARB [ph] production cars, I mean not all, but the vast majority have been addressed in cars that are being produced today.
And we're also getting better at diagnosing what's wrong, because in some cases we, particularly with respect to the drive unit, we think that something is wrong with the drive unit but it's actually something wrong with another part of the car. And then we'd replace the drive unit and that wouldn't solve the problem because the drive unit was not the problem.
And we had one particular case where there was vibration, and it was due to -- it was due to the -- a cable detaching itself and touching the drive unit assembly and causing vibration to be transmitted to the body of the car. And it was somewhat pernicious because if the cable moved a little bit and so that it didn't provide a conductive path, then you wouldn't -- the vibration would go away. If you replace the drive unit, you temporarily tuck the cable back and think the problem was solved and it was -- but then the cable would vibrate itself down and transmit the energy. So I mean that, you know, the cable thing takes us like -- it's nothing to fix it. It's like, virtually, it's like a $3 cable tied to solve it.
So there's a bunch of things like that which are just [indiscernible] diagnosis of the problems that we've obviously addressed.
There are a few items that will need a fair number of drive pans [ph] will need to be serviced. It's actually related -- one particularly is related to the differential, and we need to assume [ph] the differential. It doesn't require drive unit replacement, it just requires a technician to insert a Shim [ph]. We're going to have to do that on a fair number of cars. But that's like a $0.50 Shim [ph].
So it's really -- I wouldn't assume that there's going to be some vast number of drive pans [ph] that will need to replaced, but there's several service buttons [ph] that we'll be instituting, many of which we've already have to address the issue.
And every week I have a product excellence meeting, which is to -- which is a cross-functional group, so we've got engineering, service and production, and we go about all the issues that the customer is reporting with the car, and, you know, the action items that we addressed to get car ultimately to -- photonic ideal of a perfect car, that's what we're aiming for. Because although we -- I think we've got great service, but that service is no service. That's really what we want, is a car that never needs to be serviced. And I think we're getting there quite rapidly."
"And another key metric we measure is the average time to service something. So our average is less than a day. So the car is -- so, in most cases we can actually pick up your car, fix anything that's wrong with it, and give it back to you, without you even knowing it was gone. So you just tell us like my car is at my office and this is where it is, and we'll pick up the car, fix it, and get it back to you before you finish work.
Our goal with service is sort of invisible up, which is, is there even -- it's like elves [ph] service delivery [ph]. Like you don't even see it. It's like -- it happens so fast. And once done, you'll love it.
And so I think there's like -- there's an interesting opportunity to revolutionize service as well. It's not just like, oh, let's do the same thing as before. I think it was a lot of lessons learned from a Formula One car approach. So, because we're not trying to serve customers for the most amount of money possible in a service, which is typical of the conventional auto industry, we want to get the job done super-fast, and then also make sure that you don't -- like we want to anticipate issues so you don't have to come back again.
And so we actually bring the car and we kind of hit with a pit crew, like a Formula One pit crew. So instead of having one person per bay, the car gets slowly worked on over several days, it actually comes in and a team attacks it, and we're constantly improving the tools and the metrics to say, how can we get the car perfect as fast as possible. We actually bring in people from Formula One to help with the training on this. And I think there's a real opportunity to revolutionize the way service works."
For someone to do that every day for 8 years and still do sales work would be some kind of endurance feat.
Days in a year: ~365 x 8 = 2,920; 1,000,000 / 2,920 = 342.5 miles per day
W/o weekends: ~260 x 8 = 2,080; 1,000,000 / 2,080 = 480.8 miles per day
That's more than 5 hours of driving, every. single. day. Unlikely.
I think you should have just calculated 100000/260 to get miles per day, not 10^6/2080.
Your 480.8 miles per day should be 48.1 miles per hour.
Still doesn't change the huge amount of driving needed to do 100k miles in a year!
This is putting money where your mouth is.
It probably wasn't necessary (and might have been largely a marketing stunt) but going above and beyond at such a critical stage in the companies history will undoubtedly pay off in the future.
Their actions of doing everything possible to ensure they have the best and safest car possible is refreshing in the business world that has typically had the motto of "buyer beware" and "maximize profit".