Tesla gave us tech on wheels, so how come it forgot to incorporate the service centres? | John Naughton

The very first thing one learns when buying a Tesla, as this columnist did in December 2020, is that the neighbours instantly start to carry one personally answerable for Elon Musk. The co-founder and now Supreme Chief of the corporate is, one finds, broadly regarded by non-techies as a fruitcake with a nasty Twitter behavior, so it follows that anybody who buys one in all his automobiles should be a devotee of the world’s richest nutter and subsequently not correctly earthed.

Apparently, there was a time, not so very way back, 2005 to be exact, that this view of Musk was held by wise German males in fits, who laughed on the concept of this jerk constructing vehicles. Didn’t he know that making automobiles is arduous and that BMW, Mercedes, Ford, Common Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the remainder had spent one of the best a part of a century determining how one can do it profitably at scale? Certain, he would possibly be capable to produce costly toys for Silicon Valley sorts – however actual automobiles?

The trade’s derisive scepticism jogs my memory of 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone. This was at a time when Nokia and Blackberry dominated the world and the cell market was deemed “mature”. But right here was this Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck – a man with no expertise of the cell trade – touting a telephone with no keypad and a battery that customers couldn’t exchange.

Nicely, we all know how that story performed out. Nokia and co failed to note that what Jobs had created was a robust networked pc that fitted in your hand – and will do telephone calls too. In the long run, that telephone upended – and remodeled – a “mature” trade.

The attention-grabbing factor is that, with Tesla, historical past appears to have repeated itself. The corporate constructed almost 1,000,000 automobiles final yr and offered each one. There appears to be a ready record for each automobile they construct in the mean time. And simply as Nokia, a {hardware} firm that didn’t perceive software program, was eviscerated by the smartphone, so the Ice (inner combustion engine) boys have been outflanked by Tesla. They thought that EVs ought to simply be automobiles with electrical motors; Musk’s concept was that they need to be software program on wheels. Which is why all EVs at the moment are like Teslas – big skateboards with wheels on the 4 corners.

However Musk wasn’t content material with reimagining the automobile. He additionally sought to reimagine the trade. Teslas wouldn’t be offered by dealerships however on to clients. As a substitute, there can be small numbers of firm “service” centres, along with flying squads of technicians who might present help if required. The rationale for this was that EVs are a lot simpler than Ices and require a lot much less upkeep. No pesky sellers or their oil-soaked mechanics required. QED.

Now it’s undoubtedly the case that EVs require much less routine upkeep than standard vehicles, with their risky fluids, managed explosions and scorching gases. However automobiles, irrespective of how nicely made, nonetheless develop faults or malfunction. And one of many issues with Teslas from the outset is that their construct high quality – eg fragile paintwork or the way in which the physique panels match collectively, for instance – has sometimes left something to be desired and definitely wouldn’t cross muster on a BMW manufacturing line.

Within the Ice age, if the automobile you’ve purchased has defects or issues, then you definitely take it up with the vendor. However for Tesla house owners there’s no vendor – simply Musk’s company empire. And it seems that, for some pissed off drivers, that empire would possibly as nicely be on Mars. Within the US, the Federal Commerce Fee has had greater than a thousand complaints about poor service. A trawl of Trustpilot or Reddit reveals the frustrations of Tesla house owners who love their automobiles however are disillusioned with service failures.

For those who’re being charitable you might clarify this as rising pains. In any case, this can be a firm that has been increasing like loopy – from producing 35,000 cars in 2014 to 930,422 in 2021. However the variety of its service centres hasn’t elevated in proportion to that development. Within the first quarter of this yr, for instance, Tesla’s US manufacturing elevated by 68% over the identical quarter final yr, however the variety of service centres went up by only 20%. The corporate has simply 30 within the UK and 160 within the US, a rustic the place an Ice firm could have as much as 10,000 dealerships countrywide.

A much less charitable clarification is that Tesla, like all tech firms, subscribes to the pernicious delusion that using people to do customer support is a silly analogue concept when most of those capabilities can supposedly be dealt with by AI or a minimum of by a call-centre. In that sense, the difficulties that Tesla house owners expertise when making an attempt to get assist or repairs sound relatively like these suffered by Fb customers making an attempt to get entry to a deceased relative’s account or, as I recounted last week, a Google consumer making an attempt to get his account restored after an misguided cancellation. Tesla is a tech firm that occurs to make automobiles.

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