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With customers like this, who needs hackers? The customer support story was bad enough, and I mean this from Tesla’s perspective. I do fault Tesla for not just

by zaroth 8y ago

With customers like this, who needs hackers? The customer support story was bad enough, and I mean this from Tesla’s perspective. I do fault Tesla for not just saying NO when a customer “complains” they want to change how their car is configured after they take delivery. There are a lot of Tesla owners who have some real issues with their cars that they would like to address, while this guy is calling in to get more forum posts. This guy, who after getting direct replies from Elon on Twitter complains they don’t respond quickly enough on Twitter. This guy, who after getting mistakenly elevated privledges in the forum, proceeds to poke around the whole site, fuck with settings on his own threads, start a conspiracy theory, and then crash most of the entire forum! This guy, who now thinks he should be paid a bug bounty for that (rather than being brought up on CFAA charges?) Disclaimer: Took delivery of my Model 3 last Saturday and really enjoying my new spaceship.

rkangel 8y ago
If they'd said "now is the last opportunity to decide X" that would be fine, but they said something else and then couldn't work out how to do it. He tried to report the forum thing and was ignored for a period of time. You should be able to get customer support without tweeting the CEO. [disclaimer: I'm jealous of your spaceship]
- zaroth 8y ago
  They do say that all over the site, in their deposit agreement, and in their purchase agreement. The problem is it also says any changes can impact your delivery date. So I don’t blame a customer for wanting a change but not wanting to reset their place in line. Case in point, I ordered the upgraded 19” wheels, because I didn’t like the look of the aero rims. I didn’t realize at the time you could pop off the aero faceplate and have nice dark colored rims underneath. And I have the dark grey metallic paint which would have matched. So now I have silver rims which I plan on powder coating to match the dark grey, which I paid $1,500 extra for plus another $1,000 to power coat, when the aero rims with the faceplate removed would have been perfect. But I didn’t want to bump my place in line, so I left it. And I didn’t tweet, email, call, beg, escalate, and blog about it to get it “taken care of” specially. It’s not fair to the thousands of other early adopters to monopolize their limited customer support resources like that and squeeze them for special treatment. Of course the squeaky wheel will get the grease. When something goes wrong with my iPhone that is a bit fishy but probably because it got dropped one too many times, sure I press Apple to go above and beyond to make my day a little better. With Tesla I personally think it’s my responsibility to go at it the other way around. They need customer advocates not customer leaches. It’s part of being an early adopter to a company that is running everything so close to the wire in order to radically change a very stagnant (and in some ways corrupt) industry.
simion314 8y ago
And the main issue was caused mainly because a moderator deleted a forum post because it was critical of Tesla. I wonder how that moderator feels now, he just wanted to hide bad stuff about Tesla and it backfired hard.
- zaroth 8y ago
  I read the post, I don’t know that I would have left it up either. The biggest problem is the guy humble bragging about all the special treatment. “I got to add FSD for $3k after delivery!” — “They promised me free lifetime LTE!”. “I just really really want to make sure I get all these free extra goodies, and they haven’t promised me them in writing after 3 days!” (These are not exact quotes) You post that in a forum and now, what is everyone else’s reaction going to be? And finally, “I found a defect after delivery, they took the car back and are fixing it. They scratched my car during the repair and now are bringing it to the body shop to touch up” isn’t exactly a complaint. That’s about the absolute best service you can get from a dealer.
  - simion314 8y ago
    He wrote that he had email confirmation for what he requested, is this false? is anything false he reported in the forum post or the tone was the cause for deleting it. There also should be clear rule for when a post is deleted
    - zaroth 8y ago
      On a company forum? This is not Twitter. I would assume the rule is “any post can be removed for any or no reason at any time.” Here’s what Tesla says about reserving the right to remove posts or suspend accounts: https://forums.tesla.com/node/58282 https://forums.tesla.com/node/58282 My point was just that there’s a business reason not to leave a post up about a gripe for special treatment that goes against their stated policy. I completely agree there was nothing wrong with the tone of the post and that it was factual. The stated purpose of the forum is specifically not to post your gripes as a way to get special treatment from Tesla customer support. Tesla provides the forum as a space for enthusiasts to geek out about their spaceships. If it became a place to rant for special treatment it would devolve quickly and probably be shut down.
tyingq 8y ago
I wonder what Tesla did to ensure no backdoors were left behind. Drupal even evals PHP code in it's database in some cases.

by zaroth 8y ago

rkangel 8y ago

If they'd said "now is the last opportunity to decide X" that would be fine, but they said something else and then couldn't work out how to do it. He tried to report the forum thing and was ignored for a period of time. You should be able to get customer support without tweeting the CEO. [disclaimer: I'm jealous of your spaceship]

zaroth 8y ago
They do say that all over the site, in their deposit agreement, and in their purchase agreement. The problem is it also says any changes can impact your delivery date. So I don’t blame a customer for wanting a change but not wanting to reset their place in line. Case in point, I ordered the upgraded 19” wheels, because I didn’t like the look of the aero rims. I didn’t realize at the time you could pop off the aero faceplate and have nice dark colored rims underneath. And I have the dark grey metallic paint which would have matched. So now I have silver rims which I plan on powder coating to match the dark grey, which I paid $1,500 extra for plus another $1,000 to power coat, when the aero rims with the faceplate removed would have been perfect. But I didn’t want to bump my place in line, so I left it. And I didn’t tweet, email, call, beg, escalate, and blog about it to get it “taken care of” specially. It’s not fair to the thousands of other early adopters to monopolize their limited customer support resources like that and squeeze them for special treatment. Of course the squeaky wheel will get the grease. When something goes wrong with my iPhone that is a bit fishy but probably because it got dropped one too many times, sure I press Apple to go above and beyond to make my day a little better. With Tesla I personally think it’s my responsibility to go at it the other way around. They need customer advocates not customer leaches. It’s part of being an early adopter to a company that is running everything so close to the wire in order to radically change a very stagnant (and in some ways corrupt) industry.

simion314 8y ago

And the main issue was caused mainly because a moderator deleted a forum post because it was critical of Tesla. I wonder how that moderator feels now, he just wanted to hide bad stuff about Tesla and it backfired hard.

zaroth 8y ago
I read the post, I don’t know that I would have left it up either. The biggest problem is the guy humble bragging about all the special treatment. “I got to add FSD for $3k after delivery!” — “They promised me free lifetime LTE!”. “I just really really want to make sure I get all these free extra goodies, and they haven’t promised me them in writing after 3 days!” (These are not exact quotes) You post that in a forum and now, what is everyone else’s reaction going to be? And finally, “I found a defect after delivery, they took the car back and are fixing it. They scratched my car during the repair and now are bringing it to the body shop to touch up” isn’t exactly a complaint. That’s about the absolute best service you can get from a dealer.
- simion314 8y ago
  He wrote that he had email confirmation for what he requested, is this false? is anything false he reported in the forum post or the tone was the cause for deleting it. There also should be clear rule for when a post is deleted
  - zaroth 8y ago
    On a company forum? This is not Twitter. I would assume the rule is “any post can be removed for any or no reason at any time.” Here’s what Tesla says about reserving the right to remove posts or suspend accounts: https://forums.tesla.com/node/58282 https://forums.tesla.com/node/58282 My point was just that there’s a business reason not to leave a post up about a gripe for special treatment that goes against their stated policy. I completely agree there was nothing wrong with the tone of the post and that it was factual. The stated purpose of the forum is specifically not to post your gripes as a way to get special treatment from Tesla customer support. Tesla provides the forum as a space for enthusiasts to geek out about their spaceships. If it became a place to rant for special treatment it would devolve quickly and probably be shut down.

tyingq 8y ago

I wonder what Tesla did to ensure no backdoors were left behind. Drupal even evals PHP code in it's database in some cases.