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This is where the rubber hits the road for Musk’s dealer free model. Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing c

This is where the rubber hits the road for Musk’s dealer free model. Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. Sure, they’re very expensive but they also have most parts available for a their brands and an army of techs available. As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them. This is going to be 100% Tesla’s problem and is going to eat into margins in significant ways.

jmisavage 4y ago
They swap out parts so much when one supplier can't deliver I wonder if they could even have a reasonable amount of replacement parts at all their service centers. It's part of the reason why you see big auto makers reuse parts between models and for several years. It can make recalls costly if the part in question is garbage, but at least you know everything is the same.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Do they? I've heard of them removing features (ie. radar, lumbar support) from new revisions, but rarely have I heard of alternatives to existing parts. One that I know is rumored is a 1st party Radar sensor that is supposed to be coming soon, which would be them replacing the Continental radars that exist on older models. There's also battery changes, with the biggest being the LFP batteries on the new SR 3. I wouldn't necessarily categorize that under "swapping out" but testing out a new chemistry that will likely go fleet-wide at some point. One of the big things they wanted to do was create a lower cost model (3/Y) by trying to reuse as many parts and moulds as possible between the two, so I'd actually be surprised to hear of a lot of part substitution since it goes directly against that logic.
  - influxmoment 4y ago
    Tesla reuses parts same as any manufacture. When there were computer chip supply problems they swap out for alternatives. So only refering to some chips
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Can you be more specific? What components were unavailable due to the supply chain issues and what did they swap them with? I know they removed radar and lumbar support due to the supply issues (which I already mentioned), but they did not do any major swaps in the last few years AFAIK. In terms of their MCU, they are at V3, with each being a generational improvement over the last (Tegra to Intel Atom to Ryzen) and not related to the chip shortages. In terms of their AP computers, same thing, they had AP1 which was Mobileye rebranded, AP2, 2.5 and 3 which were each major changes to add computing power.
      - influxmoment 4y ago
        Don't have an link offhand sorry. Musk said in an interview they were quickly adapting to new chip designs because of shortages. It wouldn't be the AP hardware as that's made in in-house
ProAm 4y ago
Tesla can't make enough parts to fix things, its a two fold problem. No techs and no parts.
vardump 4y ago
> As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them. This is going to be 100% Tesla’s problem and is going to eat into margins in significant ways. This is mainly how the major established car manufacturers make money. Soon same should be true for Tesla as well, as their fleet ages.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Hardly. Toyota and Honda's OEMs sell parts to anybody. I had my old Accord serviced at a hole in the wall style repair shop that always had original OEM parts: I never went to the dealer in 10byears of owning it. The shop I went to was run by old-school mechanics who owned their business and didn't waste my time with ridiculous upsells.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- olyjohn 4y ago
  You mean that's how the dealers make money? I'm pretty sure you pay the dealer to work on your car, not the manufacturer. Warranty work is paid to the dealer by the manufacturer. But I don't believe any car company is making much money from repairing cars. Many car companies don't even make parts for cars that are over 10 years old. But I mean, if the dealership is the manufacturer, then you definitely have a bigger conflict of interest as far as repairs go.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    Sadly, it seems to just shift the conflict of interest around with the traditional dealer model. Service advisors are often paid on commission, and warranty work tends to have a lower bill rate. I think this is one of the reasons that they tried to pressure me into a very expensive repair work for my last major warranty repair. They hadn't even read the code right and wouldn't have even been replacing a part relevant to it. I'm not saying Tesla service is great, just to be clear, just that the bar is often really low.
ajross 4y ago
> Dealers are [...] generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. Oh, come on. They certainly are not. Pick any rapidly growing car model of the last six or seven decades (the Prius in 2005-08 comes to mind, Outbacks in the 90's, etc...) and you'll discover a flood of service problems reported. Tesla is having trouble scaling service because it turns out service might be harder to scale than factories. And one way you address that is by hiring more people to do service, which is exactly what is being reported here. The idea that these are "untrained" (!!!) employees is pure spin. These are, fundamentally, new employees, brought on[1] to service cars. And, duh, they're going to have to be trained before they can be useful. There isn't the remotest hint of an allegation anywhere in that article that Tesla was skipping training for service employees. It's all spin. Anti-Tesla headlines are an eyeball magnet. There was one going around a few days ago about something like 300 autopilot accidents had been identified by the NTSB (or NHTSA?), failing to note that if that holds up it represents an accident rate something like 6% of the average passenger car. [1] Albeit as transfers from other departments.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  It's amazing that someone can take Tesla taking a sales/marketing employee and having them instead temporarily servicing cars and characterize that as anything but an untrained employee servicing cars. Note that for pretty much all other automakers, "training" means something more than a few minutes watching a video. It means actual reading, instruction, and supervised hands-on exercises. A "new" Ford service technician will have several hundreds of hours of training, and most automakers will further certify technicians so that customers know that the person working on their car actually knows what they're doing. A "new" Tesla technician might have almost an hour. It's great that they're "starting somewhere" but it sucks for the customers whose service will be fucked up by someone who has no business handling paid, unsupervised service calls.
  - wfhordie 4y ago
    You gotta start somewhere. We’ll have to get used to it. Lots of people are going to be new at their job, given turnovers lately.
saurik 4y ago
> Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. Really? In the experience of myself and my friends, dealer repair is at best hit-and-miss and at worst feels downright dishonest... most of the people I know who felt "in the know" always used third-party repair people that they trusted. > As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them. This just means you need to hire people, not that those people need to be hired at arm's-length by third-party related businesses. Tesla has buildings where people work in them all over the world, just like Toyota. Their location near where I live looks just like a normal car dealer because it used to be a Buick dealership. They have a service center full of technicians, they are simply hired by Tesla. Taking a step back this is like insisting that companies like Panda Express, Starbucks, or Chipotle can't ever compete with franchises because obviously they are going to have to hire a billion people to cook and serve the food... well, you just hire them! To me the only thing that franchises are inherently good at doing is helping to fleece unsuspecting franchise purchasers with bad models. > Sure, they’re very expensive but they also have most parts available for a their brands and an army of techs available. And this is the real problem: Tesla as a company doesn't even have the parts available to make NEW cars right now (Musk has even been talking about pausing new orders as they have cars sitting all over the place just a few parts shy of being ready for pick up ;P) much less repair OLD cars, and their demand scaling up both processes at once is of course going to be hard. And like, to be clear: maybe their current lack of service people is inexcusable and incompetent... but this has nothing to do with being "dealer-free".
- rexf 4y ago
  > Really? In the experience of myself and my friends, dealer repair is at best hit-and-miss and at worst feels downright dishonest... most of the people I know who felt "in the know" always used third-party repair people that they trusted. Agree. I use dealers since they are the ones who provide authorized recall repairs. Otherwise, I go to the local, independent for much faster & cheaper service. Dealerships have a really bad reputation so they are sometimes called stealerships.
  - bombcar 4y ago
galkk 4y ago
I'm looking to buy Ford truck, and amount of stories about trucks, and cars at dealerships for months [1] is actually quite high. I don't think that ford is very special in that regard. [1]: one of recent examples - Gears & Gadgets f150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCnYeiYY9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCnYeiYY9g [2]: broken motor at bronco: 50 days in service, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-ZV-7JVeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-ZV-7JVeY
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Bronco has a brand new drivetrain with a critical flaw. That doesn't say anything about the reliability of their established products. If you get any early production run vehicle you're going to be a beta tester.
- doubled112 4y ago
  I've heard of over a year for some Hyundai parts. It's an anecdote, of course, but the solution 11 months later was to buy another car. You can bet it wasn't a Hyundai.
_ea1k 4y ago
> Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. I've had a dealer claim that my car wasn't covered by a manufacturer engine warranty extension when it plainly was. That was after struggling for a long time to get them to acknowledge the fix that was needed. Dealers are often not good at all at fixing problems. Ironically, one of the big problems with Tesla service is that they've copied the "that's in spec" mantra of a lot of dealers.
mdorazio 4y ago
Going to have to contradict you here. I’ve worked with multiple OEMs, including on dealer ops. Dealers are generally good at basic maintenance and repair items, and warranty work. They are generally not great for anything else and are expensive as hell (and exploitative) for any customer pay work. They will also absolutely keep cars for long periods of time and require multiple trips to fix uncommon issues. 3rd party repair shops are generally going to be the better way to go and from an outside perspective, the two flaws in Tesla’s service model are 1) not producing & distributing enough parts, and 2) not partnering with more repair centers to train and certify technicians to work on Teslas.
joncrane 4y ago
>Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. I'm going to have to stop you there. A little about me, I was a college dropout and worked as a mechanic for a few years, then went back and completed my undergrad, got a Master's and I've been white collar for a couple of decades, but I've always done as much work on my car myself as possible. 20 years ago we used to call the dealership service department the "stealership." I'm afraid nothing has changed. I normally won't let the Toyota dealer lay even a finger on my car but I recently had some recall work done (fuel pump). I also asked them to look at another issue since the car was there and they presumably had the specialized equipment and knowledge to diagnose a tricky automatic transmission problem. Well they couldn't even replicate the problem, even though I left detailed instructions on how to reproduce (yay bug reporting experience!). I watched the test drive on my dashcam and he didn't do what I said. Worse, they messed up the recall repair and left equipment in my car. I told them it was probably the sending unit. They diagnosed the car for over 6 hours, checking everything BUT the sending unit, before finally giving in and realizing it was indeed the sending unit (it's the fancy name for a float in the gas tank). It took them another 4 hours to finally fix it. I was left without my car for two full days for a repair that they told me was a 3-hour job. Never, EVER take your car to the dealership EVER once your car is out of warranty. I have friends that used to have car dealerships in the family. They don't make much money on the sale of cars, the service department is under intense pressure to generate most of the profits for the dealership. They will lie, cheat, and steal to get your money. I cannot stress this enough. STAY AWAY FROM AUTOMOTIVE DEALERSHIP SERVICE DEPARTMENTS. The average HN reader, with a little internet searching and some common sense, is better equipped to diagnose cars than a dealership.
- com2kid 4y ago
  My Kia dealership has an insanely good service center. After a quick oil change place put the wrong oil in my car, the service center got my entire engine warranty replaced. They regularly wave diagnostic fees, fix little extras for free, and are incredibly pleasant to deal with. The Kia dealership itself is terrible, trying to buy a car from there is literally insulting at times. That they cover a rental car for the duration of however long they have my car is a nice extra that independent repair shops don't offer.
ineedasername 4y ago
They could at least implement more robust 3rd party service, better availability of tools & parts & training for them.
annexrichmond 4y ago
Not only that but with Tesla's model, coupled with the car shortage, it seems you either have to accept delivery or risk waiting several more months before getting another one if there's a problem with the vehicle (which there so often is with a Tesla) Dealerships for the most part take care of this. They aren't selling people broken cars because if they do, it becomes their problem.
panick21_ 4y ago
That it will eat into their margin is totally wrong. In fact, service and part supply are a huge reason mature car companies are profitable at all. Telsa controlling the both in house rather then sharing profits with dealers is a gigantic advantage. The only problem is that while you are growing most of the cars are under warrenty most of the time. Therefore service is hugly negative. Tesla is only now getting to the point where service doesnt lose a huge amount of money. So its literally the exact opposite of what you suggested. The main reason Tesla has such problem is because of their growth. Any other startup car company even with dealer model would also face many of those challanges. But those companies wouldn't in the end get all the profits.
systemBuilder 4y ago
In my last 3 visits to dealers 1 resulted in a fix, two were absolute disasters and the dealer broke the car more ... Dealers seem to be losing any edge they once had ...

jmisavage 4y ago

They swap out parts so much when one supplier can't deliver I wonder if they could even have a reasonable amount of replacement parts at all their service centers. It's part of the reason why you see big auto makers reuse parts between models and for several years. It can make recalls costly if the part in question is garbage, but at least you know everything is the same.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
Do they? I've heard of them removing features (ie. radar, lumbar support) from new revisions, but rarely have I heard of alternatives to existing parts. One that I know is rumored is a 1st party Radar sensor that is supposed to be coming soon, which would be them replacing the Continental radars that exist on older models. There's also battery changes, with the biggest being the LFP batteries on the new SR 3. I wouldn't necessarily categorize that under "swapping out" but testing out a new chemistry that will likely go fleet-wide at some point. One of the big things they wanted to do was create a lower cost model (3/Y) by trying to reuse as many parts and moulds as possible between the two, so I'd actually be surprised to hear of a lot of part substitution since it goes directly against that logic.
- influxmoment 4y ago
  Tesla reuses parts same as any manufacture. When there were computer chip supply problems they swap out for alternatives. So only refering to some chips
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Can you be more specific? What components were unavailable due to the supply chain issues and what did they swap them with? I know they removed radar and lumbar support due to the supply issues (which I already mentioned), but they did not do any major swaps in the last few years AFAIK. In terms of their MCU, they are at V3, with each being a generational improvement over the last (Tegra to Intel Atom to Ryzen) and not related to the chip shortages. In terms of their AP computers, same thing, they had AP1 which was Mobileye rebranded, AP2, 2.5 and 3 which were each major changes to add computing power.
    - influxmoment 4y ago
      Don't have an link offhand sorry. Musk said in an interview they were quickly adapting to new chip designs because of shortages. It wouldn't be the AP hardware as that's made in in-house

ProAm 4y ago

Tesla can't make enough parts to fix things, its a two fold problem. No techs and no parts.

vardump 4y ago

> As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them. This is going to be 100% Tesla’s problem and is going to eat into margins in significant ways. This is mainly how the major established car manufacturers make money. Soon same should be true for Tesla as well, as their fleet ages.

rchaud 4y ago
Hardly. Toyota and Honda's OEMs sell parts to anybody. I had my old Accord serviced at a hole in the wall style repair shop that always had original OEM parts: I never went to the dealer in 10byears of owning it. The shop I went to was run by old-school mechanics who owned their business and didn't waste my time with ridiculous upsells.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
olyjohn 4y ago
You mean that's how the dealers make money? I'm pretty sure you pay the dealer to work on your car, not the manufacturer. Warranty work is paid to the dealer by the manufacturer. But I don't believe any car company is making much money from repairing cars. Many car companies don't even make parts for cars that are over 10 years old. But I mean, if the dealership is the manufacturer, then you definitely have a bigger conflict of interest as far as repairs go.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  Sadly, it seems to just shift the conflict of interest around with the traditional dealer model. Service advisors are often paid on commission, and warranty work tends to have a lower bill rate. I think this is one of the reasons that they tried to pressure me into a very expensive repair work for my last major warranty repair. They hadn't even read the code right and wouldn't have even been replacing a part relevant to it. I'm not saying Tesla service is great, just to be clear, just that the bar is often really low.

ajross 4y ago

> Dealers are [...] generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. Oh, come on. They certainly are not. Pick any rapidly growing car model of the last six or seven decades (the Prius in 2005-08 comes to mind, Outbacks in the 90's, etc...) and you'll discover a flood of service problems reported. Tesla is having trouble scaling service because it turns out service might be harder to scale than factories. And one way you address that is by hiring more people to do service, which is exactly what is being reported here. The idea that these are "untrained" (!!!) employees is pure spin. These are, fundamentally, new employees, brought on[1] to service cars. And, duh, they're going to have to be trained before they can be useful. There isn't the remotest hint of an allegation anywhere in that article that Tesla was skipping training for service employees. It's all spin. Anti-Tesla headlines are an eyeball magnet. There was one going around a few days ago about something like 300 autopilot accidents had been identified by the NTSB (or NHTSA?), failing to note that if that holds up it represents an accident rate something like 6% of the average passenger car. [1] Albeit as transfers from other departments.

gamblor956 4y ago
It's amazing that someone can take Tesla taking a sales/marketing employee and having them instead temporarily servicing cars and characterize that as anything but an untrained employee servicing cars. Note that for pretty much all other automakers, "training" means something more than a few minutes watching a video. It means actual reading, instruction, and supervised hands-on exercises. A "new" Ford service technician will have several hundreds of hours of training, and most automakers will further certify technicians so that customers know that the person working on their car actually knows what they're doing. A "new" Tesla technician might have almost an hour. It's great that they're "starting somewhere" but it sucks for the customers whose service will be fucked up by someone who has no business handling paid, unsupervised service calls.
- wfhordie 4y ago
  You gotta start somewhere. We’ll have to get used to it. Lots of people are going to be new at their job, given turnovers lately.

saurik 4y ago

> Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. Really? In the experience of myself and my friends, dealer repair is at best hit-and-miss and at worst feels downright dishonest... most of the people I know who felt "in the know" always used third-party repair people that they trusted. > As Teslas age, there’s going to be an army of technicians needed to fix them. This just means you need to hire people, not that those people need to be hired at arm's-length by third-party related businesses. Tesla has buildings where people work in them all over the world, just like Toyota. Their location near where I live looks just like a normal car dealer because it used to be a Buick dealership. They have a service center full of technicians, they are simply hired by Tesla. Taking a step back this is like insisting that companies like Panda Express, Starbucks, or Chipotle can't ever compete with franchises because obviously they are going to have to hire a billion people to cook and serve the food... well, you just hire them! To me the only thing that franchises are inherently good at doing is helping to fleece unsuspecting franchise purchasers with bad models. > Sure, they’re very expensive but they also have most parts available for a their brands and an army of techs available. And this is the real problem: Tesla as a company doesn't even have the parts available to make NEW cars right now (Musk has even been talking about pausing new orders as they have cars sitting all over the place just a few parts shy of being ready for pick up ;P) much less repair OLD cars, and their demand scaling up both processes at once is of course going to be hard. And like, to be clear: maybe their current lack of service people is inexcusable and incompetent... but this has nothing to do with being "dealer-free".

rexf 4y ago
> Really? In the experience of myself and my friends, dealer repair is at best hit-and-miss and at worst feels downright dishonest... most of the people I know who felt "in the know" always used third-party repair people that they trusted. Agree. I use dealers since they are the ones who provide authorized recall repairs. Otherwise, I go to the local, independent for much faster & cheaper service. Dealerships have a really bad reputation so they are sometimes called stealerships.
- bombcar 4y ago

galkk 4y ago

I'm looking to buy Ford truck, and amount of stories about trucks, and cars at dealerships for months [1] is actually quite high. I don't think that ford is very special in that regard. [1]: one of recent examples - Gears & Gadgets f150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCnYeiYY9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCnYeiYY9g [2]: broken motor at bronco: 50 days in service, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-ZV-7JVeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-ZV-7JVeY

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Bronco has a brand new drivetrain with a critical flaw. That doesn't say anything about the reliability of their established products. If you get any early production run vehicle you're going to be a beta tester.
doubled112 4y ago
I've heard of over a year for some Hyundai parts. It's an anecdote, of course, but the solution 11 months later was to buy another car. You can bet it wasn't a Hyundai.

_ea1k 4y ago

> Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. I've had a dealer claim that my car wasn't covered by a manufacturer engine warranty extension when it plainly was. That was after struggling for a long time to get them to acknowledge the fix that was needed. Dealers are often not good at all at fixing problems. Ironically, one of the big problems with Tesla service is that they've copied the "that's in spec" mantra of a lot of dealers.

mdorazio 4y ago

Going to have to contradict you here. I’ve worked with multiple OEMs, including on dealer ops. Dealers are generally good at basic maintenance and repair items, and warranty work. They are generally not great for anything else and are expensive as hell (and exploitative) for any customer pay work. They will also absolutely keep cars for long periods of time and require multiple trips to fix uncommon issues. 3rd party repair shops are generally going to be the better way to go and from an outside perspective, the two flaws in Tesla’s service model are 1) not producing & distributing enough parts, and 2) not partnering with more repair centers to train and certify technicians to work on Teslas.

joncrane 4y ago

>Dealers are terrible awful places to buy a car but they’re generally excellent at fixing cars quickly. I'm going to have to stop you there. A little about me, I was a college dropout and worked as a mechanic for a few years, then went back and completed my undergrad, got a Master's and I've been white collar for a couple of decades, but I've always done as much work on my car myself as possible. 20 years ago we used to call the dealership service department the "stealership." I'm afraid nothing has changed. I normally won't let the Toyota dealer lay even a finger on my car but I recently had some recall work done (fuel pump). I also asked them to look at another issue since the car was there and they presumably had the specialized equipment and knowledge to diagnose a tricky automatic transmission problem. Well they couldn't even replicate the problem, even though I left detailed instructions on how to reproduce (yay bug reporting experience!). I watched the test drive on my dashcam and he didn't do what I said. Worse, they messed up the recall repair and left equipment in my car. I told them it was probably the sending unit. They diagnosed the car for over 6 hours, checking everything BUT the sending unit, before finally giving in and realizing it was indeed the sending unit (it's the fancy name for a float in the gas tank). It took them another 4 hours to finally fix it. I was left without my car for two full days for a repair that they told me was a 3-hour job. Never, EVER take your car to the dealership EVER once your car is out of warranty. I have friends that used to have car dealerships in the family. They don't make much money on the sale of cars, the service department is under intense pressure to generate most of the profits for the dealership. They will lie, cheat, and steal to get your money. I cannot stress this enough. STAY AWAY FROM AUTOMOTIVE DEALERSHIP SERVICE DEPARTMENTS. The average HN reader, with a little internet searching and some common sense, is better equipped to diagnose cars than a dealership.

com2kid 4y ago
My Kia dealership has an insanely good service center. After a quick oil change place put the wrong oil in my car, the service center got my entire engine warranty replaced. They regularly wave diagnostic fees, fix little extras for free, and are incredibly pleasant to deal with. The Kia dealership itself is terrible, trying to buy a car from there is literally insulting at times. That they cover a rental car for the duration of however long they have my car is a nice extra that independent repair shops don't offer.

ineedasername 4y ago

They could at least implement more robust 3rd party service, better availability of tools & parts & training for them.

annexrichmond 4y ago

Not only that but with Tesla's model, coupled with the car shortage, it seems you either have to accept delivery or risk waiting several more months before getting another one if there's a problem with the vehicle (which there so often is with a Tesla) Dealerships for the most part take care of this. They aren't selling people broken cars because if they do, it becomes their problem.

panick21_ 4y ago

That it will eat into their margin is totally wrong. In fact, service and part supply are a huge reason mature car companies are profitable at all. Telsa controlling the both in house rather then sharing profits with dealers is a gigantic advantage. The only problem is that while you are growing most of the cars are under warrenty most of the time. Therefore service is hugly negative. Tesla is only now getting to the point where service doesnt lose a huge amount of money. So its literally the exact opposite of what you suggested. The main reason Tesla has such problem is because of their growth. Any other startup car company even with dealer model would also face many of those challanges. But those companies wouldn't in the end get all the profits.

systemBuilder 4y ago

In my last 3 visits to dealers 1 resulted in a fix, two were absolute disasters and the dealer broke the car more ... Dealers seem to be losing any edge they once had ...