I've
been postponing our Tesla S purchase for most of a year now,
waiting for bug fixes and upgrades to arrive. It's been month
after month of "real soon now" from their sales people. They
don't have a card up their sleeve, they don't have a "next"
product in the pipe line, they just have this suspension of
disbelief sales model.
The
spec on our order for the S is about $100K and nowhere in the
paperwork does it say "field beta test" ... but reports from
"early adopter" friends, such as being stuck on I5 for a day
while Tesla road service people tried all kinds of
"ctrl-alt-delete" reboots and nonsense, finally sending a
flatbed to tow it back to Fremont, was enough of a cautionary
tale for me to ask that they sort out the charging and
reliability issues.
Just
to be clear, it's about 50:50 coin toss on the good reports
and the bad. For every one person who says they have a gripe
or a serious WTF situation, there's another person saying
something positive like today, when a friend reported driving
from SF to LA and back with no drama and no anxiety, plus of
course it's sort of an adventure to do that trip the first
time, whistling along at 100 ... um 75 mph ... with only tire
and wind noise.
At
present, unless you're enamored by the appearance of the S,
the humble Prius plug-in trumps Tesla on all counts and gets
the prized white sticker access to the commute HOV lane.
As
for Tesla, now that the two also-ran makers have folded
(Fisker and CODE) it's just a matter of time before Tesla
either makes a success of their one car line-up (impossible,
if history is any guide) or they get real and roll out the X
and other rumored cars to compete with the Leaf f'rinstance,
which just updated nicely and seems to have struck on the
feature/function/benefit to get its sales going while the rest
of the auto industry, even Toyota, is reporting 5% to 10%
drops, month over month, in sales. Which begs the question
"What short term stunt did Tesla pull off to tweak their sales
higher?" As a customer, I know it was pressure sales. Phones
calls from two people, follow-up emails, threats that prices
would go higher, then dropping their entry-level model and
bait-n-switch to a higher priced model. Textbook car sales
tactics from last century.
The
good thing about Tesla is TSLA, which has produced enough
profits since the IPO (and very few trading losses) for me to
defray the cost of purchasing the car! Now, if they'd just
upgrade the charging system, swap out 3G for 4G cellular data,
upgrade the cabin trim so it doesn't resemble a really well
made kit car (there's your Ferrari content in this post ...
sorry!) and simple feature upgrades like automatic cruise
(already in the Prius plug-in and our family SUV from years
ago, hardly advanced technology these days) then we'd have
only niggling doubts about reliability. The last thing I want
to do is buy a five year old technology car in 2013, which
we'd normally own for five years, only to find their 2014
version finally delivers on their promises from 2012.
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