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> 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 se
by 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 agoIt'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 agoYou 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.
- olivermarks 4y agoThat's not a compelling reason to buy or continue to own a Tesla. The fantasy that BEVs are 'much simpler' than ICE vehicles has confused a lot of people. The reality is that the complex electronics, battery management systems etc can only be worked on by Tesla techs with access to DRM protected diagnostics and restricted access online workshop manuals. All modern vehicles, whether ICE, hybrid or BEV are incredibly complex so fewer and fewer people can or want to work on them. This is a huge problem going forward for everyone. We need to get back to the VW Beetle/Golf etc era where it was possible for even a knowledgable owner could perform major repairs on the vehicle they own, and which were bread and butter for local mechanic shops
- DennisP 4y ago> DRM protected diagnostics and restricted access online workshop manuals This sounds like a problem Tesla created for itself, unnecessarily. Aptera is taking the opposite approach: https://aptera.us/right-to-repair-commitment-feat-rich-rebuilds/ https://aptera.us/right-to-repair-commitment-feat-rich-rebui...
- olivermarks 4y agoIt's true of all car manufacturers this century sadly, not just Tesla
- olivermarks 4y agoUseful video As Teslas Age | Gruber Motors https://youtu.be/GcpPyBYRDcM https://youtu.be/GcpPyBYRDcM
- doubled112 4y agoMaybe MkIVs ruined me, that's where most of my experience is. Please never say "back to the VW" and "Beetle" in the same sentence. They're shoehorned together in the worst of ways. If we're going to go back to the Beetle era where it was easy to work on, I think you have to go back pretty far. That's probably too old for most people. Completely different than a Golf or Jetta the same years, which usually allows you to get to whatever you'd like. If not, at least the service position let's you yank the engine quick.
- ajross 4y ago> It's amazing that someone can take Tesla taking a sales/marketing employee and having them instead temporarily servicing cars Why is it any more amazing than taking a random person off the street[1] and have them service cars? What you're doing is exactly what the author of the linked article wants you to do: you're taking the frame from the headline (that the new servicefolk won't be trained before working on cars) as a prior and assuming it to be true, despite that fact that this isn't alleged anywhere in the article. > A "new" Ford service technician will have several hundreds of hours of training It's not hundreds of hours. These people get trained, but you can start on stuff like tire replacements or diagnostic reading after a day or two. Not every service is replacing a cylinder or rebuilding a transmission! [1] A "new employee", in the jargon.
- _ea1k 4y agoLots of dealers use salesmen as the front line people in their service departments. If you know a little bit about cars, you'll be amazed at the strange comments sometimes.
- lupire 4y agoYour most recent example is from 15 years ago?