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> 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, de

by 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
  Dealerships can vary in quality - but I was disappointed with the local one here as they wouldn’t try to find the problem “because the ECM was reset so there was no code to read” so I had to figure it out myself.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    > Dealerships can vary in quality Which is part of the puzzle people are seemingly missing. Get rid of dealerships - and you're stuck with the manufacturer's service - for better or worse. Don't like that one particular dealership? Go to a different one... Unless you live in the middle of no where, you likely have at least two or more dealerships for your car's make within a reasonable distance. Find one that treats you right - for both service and sales.
    - lupire 4y ago
      > Get rid of dealerships - and you're stuck with the manufacturer's service That's not true at all. Independent mechanics service cars, including almost most gas stations.
      - Alupis 4y ago
        For warranty, recall, and factory maintenance, it usually does.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Most of those can actually be performed by independent repair shops if a dealer is too far away - but in the USA, that's pretty rare.
- mcguire 4y ago
  Are there independent Tesla service shops? My understanding is that all work has to be done by Tesla to keep OTA updates.
enlyth 4y ago
Anecdote warning, but what you describe is not my experience at all. My Toyota dealership has been like 6 out of 5 stars, and I normally hate praising corporations or businesses. They seem to care about my vehicle more than me. If it goes for any service I get a link to a video with a mechanic, snapchat style recorded from a phone explaining any problem they found and recording it on video to me, I simply love the transparency. But I completely appreciate this is probably a local thing and my dealership just happens to have really enthusiastic staff, with corporations of such huge size, there is probably great variance in the quality of customer service. The same probably applies for Tesla. I cannot afford one myself, but I imagine that a certain % of people get excellent service or no problems at all, and another percent like comment OP get many problems and then whoever they're dealing with probably shrugs and says, well, most of our customers never had any issue, we'll just drag this guy along. It sucks and these businesses that earn such huge margins on EVs should strive to dig into their pockets and deliver better customer service. For me personally, it's the treatment of that last percent of customers who are outliers and have rare issues that's very influential of how much I trust a company.
- lupire 4y ago
  I never hear people complaining about being mistreated by Lexus, like I do constantly for Tesla.
- christoph 4y ago
  Anecdote warning as well... Same with my somewhat local (UK) Porsche dealership. They've been stellar over 4 years of looking after me with a 10+yr old car. They typically give me a cost and say it might be a bit more in labour if the job gets difficult/complicated (rusted bolts shearing, etc.), but give me an upper limit. I totally understand that from an engineering point of view. Sometimes, old rusty shit just breaks. They've still come in under the initial quotes pretty much every single time. I've actually spent less on maintenance of the car than I did on a previous Ford in a similar time period. I now just trust them as they've always been honest with me from day 1. They've always got the work done within a day and if they think it's going to run over, they give me a loaner no questions asked and tell me to come back at my convenience in a few days time. Conversations typically run along the lines of "I talked to the mechanic who saw your car last time and he's confident on his time estimate. He's suggested doing x while he does y, as it's really only going to be a parts cost as he's stripping x off in the process of doing y, and it'll need doing in x months anyway, but it's up to you". Anything they want to raise to my attention, they send me a simple clear video with a mechanic clearly describing/visually highlighting the problem(s), how long they think it's safe to leave to be fixed and have an open discussion with me about what I want to do and when I want to do it. I literally can't fault them. It's certainly dealer specific - I researched where to go on a UK car forum, and found out the nearest dealership seems like an absolute shit show of basically scamming customers, so I travel a bit further out and haven't been disappointed (yet).

by saurik 4y ago

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
Dealerships can vary in quality - but I was disappointed with the local one here as they wouldn’t try to find the problem “because the ECM was reset so there was no code to read” so I had to figure it out myself.
- Alupis 4y ago
  > Dealerships can vary in quality Which is part of the puzzle people are seemingly missing. Get rid of dealerships - and you're stuck with the manufacturer's service - for better or worse. Don't like that one particular dealership? Go to a different one... Unless you live in the middle of no where, you likely have at least two or more dealerships for your car's make within a reasonable distance. Find one that treats you right - for both service and sales.
  - lupire 4y ago
    > Get rid of dealerships - and you're stuck with the manufacturer's service That's not true at all. Independent mechanics service cars, including almost most gas stations.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      For warranty, recall, and factory maintenance, it usually does.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Most of those can actually be performed by independent repair shops if a dealer is too far away - but in the USA, that's pretty rare.
mcguire 4y ago
Are there independent Tesla service shops? My understanding is that all work has to be done by Tesla to keep OTA updates.

enlyth 4y ago

Anecdote warning, but what you describe is not my experience at all. My Toyota dealership has been like 6 out of 5 stars, and I normally hate praising corporations or businesses. They seem to care about my vehicle more than me. If it goes for any service I get a link to a video with a mechanic, snapchat style recorded from a phone explaining any problem they found and recording it on video to me, I simply love the transparency. But I completely appreciate this is probably a local thing and my dealership just happens to have really enthusiastic staff, with corporations of such huge size, there is probably great variance in the quality of customer service. The same probably applies for Tesla. I cannot afford one myself, but I imagine that a certain % of people get excellent service or no problems at all, and another percent like comment OP get many problems and then whoever they're dealing with probably shrugs and says, well, most of our customers never had any issue, we'll just drag this guy along. It sucks and these businesses that earn such huge margins on EVs should strive to dig into their pockets and deliver better customer service. For me personally, it's the treatment of that last percent of customers who are outliers and have rare issues that's very influential of how much I trust a company.

lupire 4y ago
I never hear people complaining about being mistreated by Lexus, like I do constantly for Tesla.
christoph 4y ago
Anecdote warning as well... Same with my somewhat local (UK) Porsche dealership. They've been stellar over 4 years of looking after me with a 10+yr old car. They typically give me a cost and say it might be a bit more in labour if the job gets difficult/complicated (rusted bolts shearing, etc.), but give me an upper limit. I totally understand that from an engineering point of view. Sometimes, old rusty shit just breaks. They've still come in under the initial quotes pretty much every single time. I've actually spent less on maintenance of the car than I did on a previous Ford in a similar time period. I now just trust them as they've always been honest with me from day 1. They've always got the work done within a day and if they think it's going to run over, they give me a loaner no questions asked and tell me to come back at my convenience in a few days time. Conversations typically run along the lines of "I talked to the mechanic who saw your car last time and he's confident on his time estimate. He's suggested doing x while he does y, as it's really only going to be a parts cost as he's stripping x off in the process of doing y, and it'll need doing in x months anyway, but it's up to you". Anything they want to raise to my attention, they send me a simple clear video with a mechanic clearly describing/visually highlighting the problem(s), how long they think it's safe to leave to be fixed and have an open discussion with me about what I want to do and when I want to do it. I literally can't fault them. It's certainly dealer specific - I researched where to go on a UK car forum, and found out the nearest dealership seems like an absolute shit show of basically scamming customers, so I travel a bit further out and haven't been disappointed (yet).