Happiness Guarantee Applies to Buyers Not Just Lessors.

About a month ago Tesla announced that the US Bank Lease would include a Happiness Guarantee. Elon posted a new blog post mostly about the incentives that Tesla is getting from Nevada for the Gigafactory. But in it he said the following:

At Tesla, we believe in doing deals where both parties benefit, and, when there is an asymmetry or underperformance on our part, interpreting that in the other party’s favor. This is true for big deals like the Gigafactory and for everyday transactions. For example, if you buy or lease our car and don’t like it (within a reasonable amount of time), you can automatically give it back, accounting only for usage and damage. Tesla will absorb loss of the new car premium when reselling it as a used vehicle.

Our goal in doing so is to build long-term trust. If people know that we will not take advantage of them and aspire to fairness, even at our own expense, then they are much more likely to want to work with us in the future.

Click to expand...

This implies that the Happiness Guarantee essentially applies to buyers. Given the way Tesla has treated me with my own trade of my September 2014 S85 that I'm replacing with a S85D, I'm not surprised by this. They've done a lot to build long term trust with me.

eco5280 said:

"Reasonable amount of time" might be 72 hours or 14 days. Not the 36 months of the Happiness Guarantee.

Click to expand...

Happiness Guarantee on the Lease per the blog is only 3 months.

Leasing now also comes with the Tesla happiness guarantee. If you don't like our car for any reason in the first three months, you can just return it and your remaining lease obligation is waived.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you're thinking of the resale value that kicks in at 36 months.

But yes you're right that he was vague on the time frame.

- - - Updated - - -

gpetti said:

I think you might be in the minority where the trade ins are concerned. There has been a lot of annoyance expressed by others in this forum regarding their trade in values and Teslas handling of this. The only reason I took the trade in was because the tax savings of only paying tax on the difference made their offer closer to a level I could palate. As I get closer to my new car the bad taste is reducing but this definitely dented my trust.

Click to expand...

I'm aware of this annoyance, but that's almost all been over people annoyed about cars they've had for a while. I recall at least one other person with a recent car getting a pretty high trade offer.

I got 94% of what I originally paid (after removing the tax credit). I have a hard time believing the car held 94% of its value after a month and almost 2,500 miles. Speaking to dealers I was told it'd take a fully optioned P vehicle for them to consider giving me more than what Tesla was offering. As opposed to my reasonably optioned S85.

Maybe my situation is an anomaly but I didn't ask Tesla when discussing the trade to do anything special for me. I had sent a long email to ownership@ telling them I was disappointed with how they handled the Autopilot rollout. Which was never responded to. So I suppose that was enough to trigger the difference in trade-in.

What did you end up getting as a percentage? You're not in the US so maybe the tax credit doesn't prop things up for you as much.