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I'll spare the moral judgements against Tesla for this: The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional wei

• nr2x 4y ago
  Well said, I’m potentially in the market for a car and this is like reason #5 I’m ruling out Tesla.
  • chitowneats 4y ago
    Care to share the others? I'm weighing my options as well. Anything you are leaning towards buying?
    • nr2x 4y ago
      Battery issues being a cost of early adoption aside, I love my Bolt. It’s a hatchback and with the 0-60 of an EV it handles like Mario Kart. Super fun.
  • duncan_idaho 4y ago
    I'd say this is a great reason to not a used one. Which Tesla doesn't care about at all and probably want to discourage.
    • AlexandrB 4y ago
      That seems short-sighted. Having a healthy secondary market makes purchasing a new one more appealing since you can recover some of the purchase price later. It also allows the superfans to buy the latest and greatest model more often.
      • failTide 4y ago
        Agreed. They're giving the middle finger to people who can't afford a new one but were still interested in Tesla. Could have been a good opportunity to create loyal customers who are on a budget now, but could afford to spend more later in life.
      • tqi 4y ago
        Also if TSLA actually cares about "saving the planet" then they probably need to support a used car market...
    • raisin_churn 4y ago
      You don't think car makers have a vested interest in there being a robust secondary market for their cars? If I have a choice between a $50k car that will have a $25k resale value after 5 years, and one that will have a $10k resale value, that's a strong incentive to buy the former. That's another $15k in my budget for my next car, and if I liked the last one, there's a good chance that money is going right back to that same manufacturer.
  • pkulak 4y ago
    Same, though there were about a dozen previous reasons, starting with "pedo guy". This won't help, but I was pretty much long gone as a customer.
    • balls187 4y ago
      Funny enough, it was test driving a Tesla that got me interested in getting an EV as my next vehicle. And like many, Musk's behavior has dissuaded me from purchasing one, and instead likely a Ford.
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        • spookie 4y ago
          > actual anti-semite Who? Current Ford's great-grandfather? Not the same person.
          • chrisseaton 4y ago
            > Not the same person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
            • spookie 4y ago
              Henry Ford is dead.
              • chrisseaton 4y ago
                Says that in the article I linked you to.
                • spookie 4y ago
  • jen20 4y ago
    Quite - I'm absolutely in the market for an EV, and 5 years ago it would have been a Tesla no questions asked, but Musk's behaviour and Tesla's general inability to do quality control mean I instead placed an order for a BMW i4.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  A year ago, I would have chosen a new Tesla, hands down (disclosure: I am probably not gonna actually buy an EV for as many years as I can eke out of my trusty Subie). Nowadays, I have chatted with numerous folks that have purchased alternative EVs. The Tesla owners still seem the giddiest (There's a lot of 'em around here), but I have not heard one ounce of buyer's remorse from any of the other brands. The one that brought the Rivian, is every bit as giddy as any Tesla owner I know. I think that Tesla has managed to establish itself, and will last, but the free ride is over.
  • skykooler 4y ago
    Bit of buyer's remorse from a Nissan Leaf now that most fast-charging stations don't support CHAdeMO.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I don't know any Leaf or Volt owners. I know a Bolt owner though, and they seem pleased. I also know someone that has a Fusion plug-in hybrid. He loves it. I have seen the F-150 Lightnings around, but don't know anyone that got one (yet).
      • js2 4y ago
        Hi, I'm a Volt owner. We purchased it almost 6 years ago and are still thrilled with it. The 50'ish miles of EV range covers 95% of my wife's driving, but she can also take it on road trips w/o having to find a place to plug it in.
    • madengr 4y ago
      None here. I bought a 2015 Leaf in 2017 with 19k miles for $8,500. At 75k mile now with zero issues. Just plug it in at night and drive it around town. It's a glorified golf cart, but it works great.
    • acomjean 4y ago
      We got the leaf too. Its great for day trips, around town. The charging situation for electric cars for road trips is still a thing... It seems to have found a standard in CSS. I expected there to be adapters, but apparently making adapters is slightly non trivial as there is a lot of chatting between the car and charger.
• crooked-v 4y ago
  > They didn't buy from Tesla, but they're still a customer buying servicing from them. This strikes me as a result of Tesla's whole "ignore everything known by car companies and act like software companies" approach. So far the software industry is young enough that most companies can expect that anyone approaching them for support is the same person who bought the software... but that's not at all the case for cars, what with resales, inheritances, etc being standard practice. I think a lot of software companies are going to be in for a rude awakening over the next 25 years or so, as hand-me-down devices and accounts become increasingly common. I wonder how many lawsuits it's going to take before companies purporting to "sell" software actually take wills into account.
  • babypuncher 4y ago
    What consumer software actually sells with that kind of long-term support commitment? I doubt Microsoft will ever lose a lawsuit from someone seeking security updates for a copy of Windows 95 they inherited from their grandfather.
    • crooked-v 4y ago
      None, sure, right now. But what happens when a judge eventually rules that putting 'actually, this is just a temporary license' in the fine print isn't sufficient? It's likely to happen eventually.
      • babypuncher 4y ago
        I think it is a stretch to go from "EULAs that declare software licenses to be temporary are invalid" to "software products must be actively supported with patches indefinitely".
        • crooked-v 4y ago
          Sure, but that's also not what I was talking about at all. Consider Steam, right now. What happens when some judge eventually rules that it's entirely reasonable to put your Steam library in your will and divide it up between different people?
• mikestew 4y ago
  As one who bought TSLA when it was in the low double digits, I thought for sure that we'd one day own a Tesla (we sure made enough off TSLA to justify one). But this situation is but one of many little duck bites that have now put us off the brand. Sure, a duck doesn't bite all that hard, but enough of those little nibbles can cause some harm. And so "pedo guy", "taking TSLA private", "no, FSD does not transfer to the next owner" (EDIT: bad example, apparently it does), "FSD for realsies this year", yada, yada, yada, and eventually it adds up to "I'm not validating that bullshit with a $75K purchase." At the end of the day, given that Hyundai/Kia, VW, Ford, et. al, are all sold out of EVs for the year, we decided we'd just rather do without a new car than buy a Tesla. Hang in there, l'il 2011 Leaf; you've served us well so far.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    There are some places starting to provide upgraded battery packs for old Nissan Leafs. I hope that gets more widespread. I'm on my second Leaf. Was eyeing an EV 6 but that's an unnecessary expense.
  • wmeredith 4y ago
    My family is in the exact same boat. It's a very strange decision by Tesla.
  • freerobby 4y ago
    FSD does transfer to next owner with any private sale. If you sell it to Tesla, they often remove FSD and resell without it; but that's no different than anyone else modifying a vehicle they own and then selling it in its new state.
    • mikestew 4y ago
      My mistake, thanks for the correction; edited (leaving my error for prosperity, and so the replies make sense). I added another bullet point to make up for it. :-)
    • thomaslord 4y ago
      There are documented cases of Tesla selling a pre-owned vehicle that was purchased with an optional feature, listing that optional feature in the sale ad, and then disabling the feature after the person they sold the car to has taken possession.
• v0idzer0 4y ago
  Agree with all of this, but if I wrote a thread about all the times Ford screwed me, it would never go viral. There’s no market for that. Tesla has extremely high customer satisfaction rates. And switching to them has been significantly more harmonious for me.
• deleted 4y ago
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• azernik 4y ago
  Yup - at two previous companies (one I ran, one I didn't) we had as a design philosophy "we don't cause regressions". If we gave a customer an extra feature by mistake and they've since started using it and relying on it, that's on us. They don't care that they weren't "supposed" to have that feature, they see that it was taken away. Reputation and the customer relationship are worth more than the company's sense of "fairness", especially when (as in this case) you're not even deterring future customers from doing anything, because the customer who's affected is not responsible for the error.
  • Enginerrrd 4y ago
    >They don't care that they weren't "supposed" to have that feature, they see that it was taken away. Bingo. One of the issues with conventional large corporations (mostly outside of tech) is that middle management incentives often align poorly with this type of philosophy. A few companies have gotten this right, at least at times. Costco comes to mind in the present. They go out of their way to save their customers money, and to fix issues customers have as easily as they can. Their returns policy is pretty legendary. Amazon, somewhat ironically given recent issues, had a philosophy early on that, if a customer was talking to them, they probably didn't want to be! ...And it's probably because something in Amazon's process went wrong. So while I think their reputation has fallen greatly, they did spend a lot of engineering effort into "harmonizing" their purchasing and returns process. Mostly because Bezos saw the value in that. And despite all the bad press, I think they still have that not 'right' but 'decent'. Becuase, while I've had a few issues with amazon, they resolved them really quickly and easily for me as a customer. (I think you get screwed as a vendor though...) Another example I can think of is Vortex optics. Most optics companies had a pretty good guarantee, often lifetime. Vortex just heavily marketed it and took away the edge cases. So while leupold wouldn't replace your scope if you sent it in along with a video of you driving over it with a truck, vortex would. That allowed them to really rapidly acquire a ton of market share. At the end of the day, customers are human and despite tech's best efforts, they still try to interact with companies as humans would each other. Fucking over your neighbor while being technically correct still leaves you with a pissed off neighbor who will not respond well to anything you bring to them in the future.
• anotheracctfo 4y ago
  This is an excellent business model! Its the complete rejection of "Right of first sale" and the entire concept of ownership. Its an inversion of communism where instead of the state owning something and forcing you to rent it, a corporation does. Its incredibly profitable for the ruling class. Too bad you aren't in it.
• rendall 4y ago
  > If the bad publicity alone causes even a tiny fraction of the population to choose another manufacturer Yeah, that's me. With all of the nonsense with Tesla, why would anyone do that to themselves? Just buy another car. It's not like there aren't plenty of other EV options in the world.
• ajross 4y ago
  > I'll spare the moral judgements against Tesla for this [...] [Tesla's] business plan and practices is creating [...] huge cognitive dissonance in your customers I think you forgot to spare anything. Meh. This is a software configuration issue like we've seen before. Like lots of devices in the modern world, the cars can be configured with common hardware but disjoint behavior. You might have the hardware for FSD, but you didn't buy it so you can't use it. You might have the same motor as the performance car, but the current limit is set to long range. You might have the mobile radio, but if you don't pay for the service you won't get satellite pictures. Or you might have a large battery, but be configured to use only a fraction. And in this case they messed up and accidentally granted a customer access to a feature they hadn't paid for. And the mistake wasn't discovered until the car got reconfigured when it was sold. I just don't see the "ransom" here. It's a messup. No one ever paid for that extra battery capacity they enabled. Should they honor the mistake? Maybe. But we really need to turn down the rhetoric in this community.
  • Enginerrrd 4y ago
    Oh I did. I'm not calling it "ransom" or other rhetoric. You did a fantastic job of justifying what they did though. The fact that you can do so was actually my whole point: You can totally justify this! ...and yet... someone still feels like they got fucked. ...and people on the internet agree. That is the antithesis of harmony. Some amount of dissonance is unavoidable, but there are many brands and businesses out there that make sure if a mistake was made, customers leave feeling good. The point is that there are better ways to do business and maintain more harmony between you and your customers, and I've seen many companies be deeply rewarded for that as a whole. It does however often come at the expense of degraded metrics middle managers are commonly evaluated by. Penny-wise pound-foolish is very old wisdom. I think the real key is to evaluate from a systems perspective how that kind of dissonance can be avoided.
• misiti3780 4y ago
  What business, running at scale in 2022 doesnt fall into this category - LOL
• mabbo 4y ago
  > If the bad publicity alone causes even a tiny fraction of the population to choose another manufacturer, the've lost their $4,500 and then some This week, I begin shopping for an EV family car. On my list of options are the Ioniq 5, EV6, and odel X. What a great time to see how Tesla treats customers.
• deleted 4y ago
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• tomjakubowski 4y ago
  > Harmony is a really underrated concept. When things are harmonious, you don't have problems like this, and you can still make money. OK, I think I agree. How do we build things that are harmonious?
• valdiorn 4y ago
  This post has quite literally made me change my mind on buying a new Tesla, which is something I've been working towards for the last few weeks. Back to square 1 looking at the competition.