Tesla Roadster Owners... Are you happy with Tesla as a Car Company?

[bint2k]

Hey Guys, I'm curious about your thoughts on Tesla as a car company. Since the company is still relatively new I'm sure most of you have had cars from other manufactures. How do you feel they compare to Toyota/Audi/Porsche/Chrysler/whichever car you've owned before... I'm talking about Service/Reliability/how soon problems got fixed/your experience with staff/ you know the things that make you feel good about a company.

Hopefully this isn't a repost...

[smoothoperator]

probably a repost of concerns in several threads....Tesla does not have loaner cars (as of today) s whenever you take your car in for service (once a year for the Roadster) you are forced to either rent a car or get picked up and dropped off.. To my knowledge there isn't even a shuttle service....

Some of their concepts are neat on paper not sure how well they will translate once Tesla starts to move units. Personally I prefer the conventional luxury car service model (i.e. Loaner, Flatbed Pick up etc)

Also I am not sure how well the mall store concept work....From my experience it seems that the mall stores are 100% sales/education oriented, if you wanted something as simple as the key fob battery replaced I would still have to go to a Tesla Service Center....Not very Apple like IMO....Its cool though to go into a mall and check out the cars though!

[Alan]

I am very happy with Tesla as a company.

Despite being a very small volume car my Roadster at least has been very reliable over 13K miles and I suspect that is in part due to the face EVs have far less to go wrong.

All dealings with the company have been great and they seem to want to go out of their way to help you.

No doubt many things will be changing in order to support the Model S so there are a lot of unknowns but all I can say is that my experience of the product and the company has been great.

[markwj]

The people and service are amazing. They really think the right way, and go above and beyond.

Reliability has not been good for me. Lots of problems, and the lack of loaner cars is a pain. But, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that the issues are humidity related as our environment in Hong Kong is harsh on the cars.

I do have concerns how they can scale this up. Again, only time will tell.

For me, it comes down to the experience of the car. And that is faultless.

[NeoDoc]

Same here - sales and service reps have been great; my rear tires went out last month - Mark at Newport arranged the tow and kept the store open for me. Always available for questions.

[hcsharp]

I can't say enough good things about the service. The sales people I worked with were also very good. Never any pressure, and always honest. At first I dismissed almost everything they said because, well, they were car salesmen! But virtually everything they told me turned out to be true in the end, if not understated.

I've got some issues with the engineers - mud on the door sills and lack of filters on the PEM fan. Otherwise I'm very impressed with the technology development and implementation. I hope my experience continues to be this good after releasing the Model S and there are 10 times as many customers after a year...

[dsm363]

Same here with what everyone else said above. Sales and service have been amazing. They're growing so fast that I've been through multiple customer advocates now but that's because they keep getting promoted. The Chicago people have been great as well and the Tesla Rangers always do a awesome job.

A lot of the problems I have with the Roadster can be traced back to its Lotus roots but there are certain things I wish they would have changed in the various iterations from when it came out to the 2.5 Roadster. Overall, I think they did a good job. I'm hoping they are able to scale up to the Model S as well and deliver a similar customer experience. I'd imagine it'll be tough for them to be as responsive but it the past, I could e-mail a question and get an answer in a few minutes to a few hours.

[Eberhard]

I am a little unhappy. I fear tesla is about to forget the important role of the Roadster. I am already missing: Access to the car via GSM (already build in but for internal use only). Upgrade of the battery to the new chemistry of Model S (40% more capacity). Upgrade of the charge port to be the same as Model S. DC charging for the Roadster (not 90kW but 40-60kW would be nice)

[dsm363]

I am a little unhappy. I fear tesla is about to forget the important role of the Roadster. I am already missing: Access to the car via GSM (already build in but for internal use only). Upgrade of the battery to the new chemistry of Model S (40% more capacity). Upgrade of the charge port to be the same as Model S. DC charging for the Roadster (not 90kW but 40-60kW would be nice)

That's possible but I hope not. I'm hoping that once the Model S is launched, they'll have a little more time to address some of these issues but of course it's onto the Model X and beyond for them so we'll see. I'd imagine that upgrading the battery chemistry when you're due for a battery upgrade should be something simple for them to do and I hope it's something they offer.

They definitely should upgrade the port to the Model S design but I doubt it'd support the higher even 40kW charging. I'd almost rather have them upgrade it to J1772 standard on the Roadster if it wasn't able to charge at Tesla's charging network (even with the Model S plug).

[Eberhard]

For those, who will have a Roadster and a Model S like me, it would not make sense to have two HPC with different plugs installed. Better to have a solution for both cars.