The company has just 30 in the UK and 160 in the US, a country where an Ice company may have up to 10,000 dealerships countrywide.Ī less charitable explanation is that Tesla, like all tech companies, subscribes to the pernicious delusion that employing humans to do customer service is a stupid analogue idea when most of these functions can supposedly be handled by AI or at least by a call-centre. In the first quarter of this year, for example, Tesla’s US production increased by 68% over the same quarter last year, but the number of service centres went up by only 20%. But the number of its service centres hasn’t increased in proportion to that growth. After all, this is a company that has been expanding like crazy – from producing 35,000 cars in 2014 to 930,422 in 2021. If you’re being charitable you could explain this as growing pains. A trawl of Trustpilot or Reddit reveals the frustrations of Tesla owners who love their cars but are disappointed with service failures. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has had more than a thousand complaints about poor service. And it turns out that, for some frustrated drivers, that empire might as well be on Mars. But for Tesla owners there’s no dealer – just Musk’s corporate empire. In the Ice age, if the car you’ve bought has defects or problems, then you take it up with the dealer. And one of the problems with Teslas from the outset is that their build quality – eg fragile paintwork or the way the body panels fit together, for example – has occasionally left something to be desired and certainly wouldn’t pass muster on a BMW production line. But cars, no matter how well made, still develop faults or malfunction. Now it is undoubtedly the case that EVs require less routine maintenance than conventional automobiles, with their volatile fluids, controlled explosions and hot gases. No pesky dealers or their oil-soaked mechanics required. The rationale for this was that EVs are much less complicated than Ices and require much less maintenance. Instead, there would be small numbers of company “service” centres, together with flying squads of technicians who could provide assistance if required. Teslas would not be sold by dealerships but directly to customers. He also sought to reimagine the industry. Which is why all EVs are now like Teslas – giant skateboards with wheels at the four corners.īut Musk wasn’t content with reimagining the car. They thought that EVs should just be cars with electric motors Musk’s idea was that they should be software on wheels. And just as Nokia, a hardware company that didn’t understand software, was eviscerated by the smartphone, so the Ice (internal combustion engine) boys were outflanked by Tesla. There seems to be a waiting list for every car they build at the moment. The company built nearly a million cars last year and sold every one. The interesting thing is that, with Tesla, history seems to have repeated itself. Musk wasn’t content with reimagining the car. In the end, that phone upended – and transformed – a “mature” industry. Nokia and co failed to notice that what Jobs had created was a powerful networked computer that fitted in your hand – and could do phone calls too. Yet here was this Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck – a guy with no experience of the mobile industry – touting a phone with no keypad and a battery that users couldn’t replace. This was at a time when Nokia and Blackberry ruled the world and the mobile marketplace was deemed “mature”. The industry’s derisive scepticism reminds me of 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone.
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1/11/2024 10:47:24 am
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