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

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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...
 
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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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...
 
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.
 
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)
 
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).
 
I'm very happy with the Tesla people in the UK and my Roadster has been a dream car to own with some minor problems during the last 22K miles and 18 months.

I do worry that some of the flawed design decisions on the Model S are an indicator of much worse to come from Tesla... producing a charging connector that does not have enough pins for 3 Phase, and not supporting the CHAdeMO standard on day one... these issues have stopped European Roadster owners from buying the Model S and are opening up valuable territory for competitors that will cost Tesla dear in the future.

I also think that Tesla should be offering updated batteries for Roadster's.... I do not believe that would require a very large team within Tesla but the payback in publicity would be enormous... 300 mile range would allow us to compete in many of the major ICE motoring events and set some impressive records.
 
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I do worry that some of the flawed design decisions on the Model S are an indicator of much worse to come from Tesla... producing a charging connector that does not have enough pins for 3 Phase, and not supporting the CHAdeMO standard on day one... these issues have stopped European Roadster owners from buying the Model S and are opening up valuable territory for competitors that will cost Tesla dear in the future. ...

+1 , due to that , I'am worried about the resale value ....
 
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.
This doesn't make sense to me. So you will set your alarm for 3:30am and run out to your garage and switch the plug from one car to the other?

In our garage, my wife and I always park in the same spot and once Model S gets here each car will have its own UMC hanging from the ceiling. Who cares if they are different? I guess if you want one HPC in case you need a quick top up the other could be a UMC and you could save some money?

I would rather the Roadster have J1772 so I could use public charge points (without that stupidly expensive and ungangly adapter they sell). But Tomsax is going to solve that problem for us :)
 
I would rather the Roadster have J1772 so I could use public charge points (without that stupidly expensive and ungangly adapter they sell). But Tomsax is going to solve that problem for us :)
I think I'd rather have the J1772 on the Roadster at this point too. It's going to be many, many years before you'll be able to find the Model S Tesla charger at even half the locations you can find a J1772. Even though it's only 240V 30A usually, it's better than nothing and as you said, no expensive adapter.

I also think that Tesla should be offering updated batteries for Roadster's.... I do not believe that would require a very large team within Tesla but the payback in publicity would be enormous... 300 mile range would allow us to compete in many of the major ICE motoring events and set some impressive records.

I agree. With the 3.4 or 4.0 cells out, wouldn't the Roadster have a 300-400 ideal mile range? This would indeed be excellent advertising and would show they are still supporting older cars.

I'm hoping Tesla continues their theme of being more like a Silicon Valley company too in that they offer paid upgrades for items that come out on future models when it's possible to do so (maybe Active Cruise Control.....etc).
 
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I would say Tesla is not perfect, but they have great people who really do try hard to the best for their customers.

I think that's a great summary. Most of the time people think they are great; the problems I've had or heard of are generally because some situations are new to them and they're too busy working on other things, not because they don't care.

While it's true that a customer may not care why they got bad service, the OP was trying to predict future service, and I think good but overworked people stand a better chance of doing well in the future than people that don't care. (Of course that's not a slam dunk; if their customer base grows much faster than their employee base, they could fall behind; but they can't afford to hire early--so this is something they will have to manage carefully. Nobody can guarantee they will be successful at this, but I do have more hope for them trying hard to do so than most other companies I've bought cars from).