liveforphysics said:
I know quite a few Tesla owners, and I've never heard anything but talk about how it's the best car they've ever owned and will never go back to another OEM again.
Roadster or S? Follow the news. George Clooney of all people really busted loose on Elon a few months ago about all the problems with his. Edmunds owns cars that their people drive all the time and theirs has had replacement motors, display screen, don't remember what all the guy was saying. It was ranked up there with Jaguar as this car people are all excited to get even with the reputation. I had an OLD Jaguar, dang, I hope the Tesla ain't THAT bad! Hey, when it died and stopped without quite finishing the turn into the driveway I was all excited pushing it. That didn't last.
Dad had MG's before I was born, but he moved on to a Porsche, an Alfa Romeo and a BMW in my lifetime. The Alfa had so much warranty work he was immediately saying he wished he kept the Porsche Speedster, basically a Volkswagen engined car. There definitely wasn't an extra car sitting in the driveway when I was growing up. 18, barely out of high school, I was the youngest in the family to buy my own, a $100 car as old as I was that I had to get started to bring home to finish working on. I eventually gave it to my sister, whose soon to be ex took all the cars when he moved out. After a year of problems the court ordered him to give her one of the cars so she was going to give it back to me but I didn't really want it. (Okay, how could I NOT 'Sort of' want it.) Then someone offered her $150 for it. (What a relief) The next day I was driving over to her place and guess what was at the side of the freeway.
But a car only gets away with that when it's a novelty. The more mainstream the Tesla becomes, the tougher it'll be for them when there's problems. GM has this problem with the keyswitch turning off on some older cars if there's a heavy keyring. Only a few problems. But it's in cheaper cars, so all hell is breaking loose. A smaller number of Tesla's have had much more problems.
One thing you have to get used to, the average customer expects a fully finished car. If that $3,000 Indian car came over people here would mostly want to start plugging in a stereo, air conditioning, even power steering. When it didn't work right with that they'd be calling it "Junk."
The fingers said:
The big manager at my night job just got a new Tesla for the 60 mile round trip commute. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. (makes over $100 grand a year)
Now THERE is the kind of guy to run around in one. He has all the problems with it that the Ferrari or Porsche would, comes to work teary eyed because it's in the shop again, everybody is envying him because they want one. It's not a problem until it's THEIR problem. Meanwhile the rich is just glad HE has the only one.
But they were supposed to solve all those problems before selling something to the not so rich.
