Obviously the owner isn't happy and exaggerated his displeasure by stating "Tesla is a Scam". Who hasn't embellished when trying to emphasize their point? Regardless of the OP's misguided description, his/her complaint is still a valid one. For the Tesla fanboy's, once you get over the butt hurt of the OP's comments that are critical of your beloved Tesla, he/she is absolutely correct in that Tesla's customer service has suffered significantly over the past couple of years. Take a few minutes to read the various forums and there are way too many examples of complaints from existing owners. I love the cars, have had many of them. But I myself am also disappointed with how difficult some simple tasks have become with Tesla. Clearly not enough to keep me from buying the cars, but I can see where many owners would be put off. Tesla does things their way and have a very "my way or the highway" attitude or "don't like it?, tough!". Not real becoming. Supercharging is one issue that's come up for many. They advertised free-supercharging for life on their early cars, now decided to remove it from any cars they take ownership of. I too, on one of my other cars, had free unlimited supercharging changed to Pay per Use without notice and no explanation other than "we changed it, deal with it". Again, not real pleasant.
Tesla has been the only game in town for 7 years. But with some valid competitors coming to market, things like Customer Service are going to be a factor in decision making from new customers. But even still, Tesla is still well ahead of the competitors offerings. Tesla hasn't been the greatest to existing owners. Even with my recent purchase, they called daily, returned calls / emails immediately, were very helpful during the process of the purchase. As soon as I took delivery, nothing but crickets! No replies to e-mails, pulled teeth to get someone on the phone, etc. Supercharging was one of the issues. My car was supposed to have it, and it didn't. Took over a month to get the issue resolved. Several other simple issues over the years that were made unnecessarily complicated.
Having had many Tesla's since just after their beginning, I've learned, get everything in writing and keep it. That's good advice for life in general. But with Tesla, it's especially important. I had it in writing, however the people I originally reached tried to tell me I wasn't getting it. I had to deal with wasting time to prove that I was promised Free Unlimited Supercharging. Why was it my problem? Because they made it my problem. Time is valuable. Didn't appreciate having to deal with it when, if they just did what they said they'd do, I would have been happy. Have had many other similar issues over the years with them. I love the cars too much to give them up and have learned how to work around most of Tesla's shortcomings on the Customer Service side, but really should have to.
I hope they improve. They're so amazing at so many things with potential beyond imagination. Just a matter of sorting out the things that are actually relatively simple to fix, like Customer Service issues.
For context, I'm not one that likes texting every damn thing or talking to automated systems when I call. I can spend 10 seconds voicing what my call is about, versus having to spend a full minute typing it out in a text. One time, not a big deal, but when having to deal with 50 of these things per day, that extra 50 seconds adds up. Same thing with voice automated systems. Takes forever to get through all the verification responses, only to have the person that eventually picks up 10 minutes later, ask all the same damn questions the computer just tortured me through. Tesla has very much tried to automate everything. For some things, automation is great. But, I don't believe I'm the only one that buys a premium car and expects to have a high, or even just acceptable, level of customer service. That means being able to reach someone with simple questions rather than getting the runaround by a computer for 10, 15, 30 minutes and still not get your question answered, one that could have been answered by a human in about 5 seconds. Scheduling a service appointment was annoying as hell last time. Had to schedule twice online, only for it to tell me soonest available was three weeks out. Tried calling, told to "use the app". After all that, they called two days before my appointment to say they can do a home service call, which was what I wanted from the start, but wasn't an option available using the app. For another issue, was told that it would take over a month to get someone out to me. The human that called said "oh no, we'll have someone there tomorrow" and they did. Why couldn't I have just done that the first time I tried?? Things like that are what I'm referring to.
OK, this got WAY longer than expected. Moving on. Key points, "get it in writing", "hope Tesla improves". And one more piece of advice, if you're resilient enough, you can actually get a human on the phone and it does make a BIG difference at actually getting your issue resolved. Can however be time consuming in getting that human on the phone, but is worth it.
