A recent article from Vox.com reports that about a fifth of Tesla owners who took their vehicles in for servicing were unhappy with how long the process took. And investigative reporters at Vox have perused over a thousand complaints about Tesla to the Federal Trade Commission, revealing a variety of problems with a type of vehicle that was supposed to all but do away with automotive repair shops.
The Better Business Bureau has received over 9,000 reports on Tesla, many having to do with faulty or delayed service, inadequate supplies of spare parts, poor communication with the customer, and poor manufacturing quality in the first place.
One mitigating factor in making bad service less bad overall is that electric vehicles (EVs) supposedly need a lot less service than internal-combustion (IC) cars do. And while that may be the case eventually, Vox quotes a representative of the consumer-research firm J. D. Power as saying Tesla owners need service about as frequently as owners of conventional cars do. So it looks like even Tesla owners need to go to the shop about as often as the rest of us do, which doesn't help if the experience with Tesla service is a bad one.
In Tesla's defense, their service-center count may not include their mobile units that schedule appointments at the customer's home or business. And because so much of the Tesla functionality is computerized, remote software upgrades, diagnosis, and repairs are often done without any need to bring the physical car into a shop. Even so, there are enough purely mechanical or electrical problems that necessitate a trip to the service center to warrant many times the number of locations that Tesla presently operates.
Some independent garages are starting to work on Teslas, but this can cause problems with the car's warranty, and Elon Musk has gone on record as opposing the right-to-repair movement that seeks to break up manufacturers' monopolies on service.
As every general knows, maintenance and repair are a vital part of any mechanized military effort. A lack of spare parts can defeat an army as effectively as enemy fire. Tesla is in a unique and transient situation, as they have exploited a cultural trend against fossil fuels that is especially popular among the upper classes who can afford electric cars, and done an end run around the established automakers by reinventing carmaking from scratch and dominating the U. S. EV market.
But people who wear Rolexes and drive Teslas are not happy when they have to wait a month for a service appointment and then find it's canceled at the last minute. At the present time and for some time in the future, most people will look at the prospect of an all-electric car and decide the questionable advantages are not worth the extra cost and the other problems: limited range, scarcity of charging stations, and now, unreliable service. So while Tesla has done a good job exploiting the low-hanging market fruit of relatively wealthy and environmentally-conscious customers, that market may be close to saturation.
To people who simply want a reliable and economical means of transportation, service is at least as important as features. And no matter how well-built a machine is initially, sooner or later something will go wrong and a qualified person will have to get their hands on the car to fix it.
I will confess to some feeling of nostalgia as I take my seventeen-year-old Element in to the independent shop that is used to seeing me every few months as yet another piece of it reaches the end of its service life, and thinking, "Gee, with the coming of EVs, all these garages will go the way of the village blacksmith before the Model T." Now I'm not so sure.
For one thing, electric vehicles are really hard on tires. The sudden torque strains and the added battery weight will destroy ordinary car tires in short order, so EV tires have to be specially designed to take the added punishment. And most Teslas don't have spare tires—don't ask me why, but they don't. Maybe the car's too heavy to safely change a tire on the road.
While the electronics industry has gotten us used to the concept—for good or ill—of using it and throwing it away when it breaks or a software upgrade renders it useless, a $45,000 investment can't be treated like that. Lots of people out there keep their cars for five, ten, or fifteen years, and a century's worth of progress in auto manufacturing has made that kind of longevity possible.
Even if everything else on a Tesla worked perfectly forever, the battery has a known and limited lifetime. So far, the relative scarcity and prestige of Teslas make it economical to replace worn-out batteries, but this may not always be the case. Life-cycle engineering takes a holistic view of a product from inception to end-of-life disposal or preferably recycling. With Tesla's current focus on getting cars out the door, it looks like the company has neglected the maintenance part of the cycle. This may well be a temporary condition, though.
If I were a young gearhead wanting to open my own automotive service center, I might well choose to specialize in Teslas and take my chances that Tesla wouldn't shut me down. Because the demand is certainly there, and it doesn't sound like Tesla is anywhere close to meeting it with their own service centers.
Sources: The Vox article "Missing parts, long waits, and a dead mouse: the perils of getting a Tesla fixed" by Rebecca Heilweil appeared on Aug. 24, 2022 at https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev.
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