I guess I'm trying to put myself in your shoes but I'm not seeing what their is to be really upset about. Disappointed? Perhaps, but upset? Ehhh... Whatever the delay was with the seats what would the alternative have been? Waiting 5 months longer before getting your car? How were your truly inconvenienced? Having a car delivered with different seats, using them for 5 months and then getting brand new ones? I've spent time with both seats. The Next Gens might look nicer but other than better side bolsters they're hardly anything more than an aesthetic upgrade and their omission certainly doesn't ruin the car. I think there's a whole lot of very well articulated complaining about nothing in your post and again, I can certainly understand the disappointment but the bloom was off the rose? This really set you that far back? Maybe you have other stories to tell but this one, the one you chose as your example for disappointment, doesn't seem really bad at all. I've experienced worse with my BMWs.
Let me offer a slightly different perspective. I just bought a low VIN 2013 S85. I bought it from an early adopter who said he never had any issues with it. Well, as it turns out, the drive unit makes a noise at part throttle that my higher VIN S85 didn't. A tech went on a drive with me, told me it was perfectly normal and harmless and then offered to swap out the drive unit nonetheless. That's akin to me taking my M5 to BMW complaining of an injector ticking and them telling me it's totally fine but oh yeah, if you want us to replace the engine for you we'll totally do that.
In my experience Tesla has gone above and beyond to address problems that pop up. And right they should. Their future is contingent on our happiness. Anyone that owned an original iPhone can probably attest to how lax Apple used to be with their warranties. You could go in there on day 364 and tell them the phone was verbally abusing your wife and they'd scold it front of you and then proceed to replace it with a brand new one. And they needed to do this because it was new technology that people were on the fence about. So it was absolutely mission critical that people that had the iPhone love the iPhone. Now you can walk into an Apple store with your phone spitting flames out the lightning port and they'll tell you to make a genius bar appointment to get it looked at next week only to then offer to fix it for your first born and $600.
The point is, Tesla is in that early stage where they're fixing problems no matter how trivial. Let's not confuse the growing pains of a company making their first car with straight up incompetence or intentional unwillingness to help the customer. This is a company that made their first car arguably the safest car on the market and one of the best overall cars in the world. When you look at companies like Fisker and just how wrong things can go so easily, it is absolutely mind blowing that Tesla didn't only just put out an acceptable car as their first offering but a critically acclaimed vehicle.
Keeping all this in mind? I guess I don't get why you'd get too bent out of shape over seats that arrived 5 months late, especially when you had full use of your car.
In and of itself the seat issue was not that big of a deal, and if it were the only issue I've experienced I expect I'd still be a dyed-in-the-wool Tesla evangelist. But just to elaborate a bit on why the seat issue bothered me, I felt like Tesla was displaying an attitude of not caring about me as a brand new customer. They had fallen short. Agreed--not all that short--but short. My car was not delivered as ordered. They should have done something - ANYTHING - some small gesture - to acknowledge that the mistake was theirs, that they were sorry, and that they valued my business. At the time there were lots of small gestures Tesla could make being discussed in various threads. Ideas ranged from some small credit in the Tesla store to short extensions of the warranty, etc. No one was asking for or expecting anything significant, because we all, for the most part, agreed, as you point out, that the inconvenience was not great. We were just looking for a gesture that was never made.
I don't want to turn this thread into a debate on all the negative issues of the past several months. But you talk about Tesla going "above and beyond" while that has not been my experience. So I will just list briefly some of the other issues. Again, I do not want to get into a major discussion of any of them, and one of them I'm not going to type another word about in this thread after this, as there are PLENTY of other threads discussing the topic. (I'll place an asterisk by that one, in case anyone has any difficulty figuring out which one I'm talking about.
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--Efficiency issues - My car is not as efficient as it was advertised as being. Also, when originally delivered, it had no Torque Sleep functionality at all, so was actually significantly less efficient than it is now, yet Tesla did not explain this at all until some time later, at which point they acknowledged that Torque Sleep would be available soon. It made me wonder what kind of company delivers less than their customers have paid for but says nothing, in the hopes the customers won't notice. The answer was not the kind of company I had heard and believed Tesla was.
--Center console issue--I had planned to purchase the obeche matte center console from the time I ordered my car. For months it was shown as "coming soon" in the Tesla Store, and I was on the waiting list. The date I'd be able to get it kept getting pushed back. Then eventually Tesla decided they would not produce it at all, leaving me without an option for a Tesla Center Console that actually matched my trim.
--Ranger / Valet issue--Before purchasing my car I was told I'd have ranger service come to me at no charge (or at most a $100 charge at times) and that if the ranger service could not provide the needed service my car would be valeted to a service center and a loaner car provided and that there would be no charge for this. Living more than 200 miles from the nearest service center this information was material in my decision to purchase a car that could not be serviced anywhere else. Now Tesla is saying that valet service will cost $3.00 per one-way mile, which would cost me more than $600 any time my car needs service. The fee has been waived once, but it's not clear what the future holds. My position is that Tesla can change their policy going forward, for new customers, if they must, but that promises made to existing customers, that the existing customers made purchase decisions based on, should be honored.
--691 HP issue *
--Delayed Auto-Pilot issue--The auto-steer beta works very well. But it was demo'd more than a year before it was released, and talked about at the D presentation in the present tense. Tesla botched the expectations-setting big-time.
There are other issues as well, but I think the above are enough to demonstrate why my feelings towards Tesla have changed. Believe it or not, they could still change back, but for that to happen will take some work and some changes on Tesla's part.
