TThe first thing he learns when he buys a Tesla, as this columnist did in December 2020, is that his neighbors immediately start holding Elon Musk personally accountable. The company’s co-founder and now CEO is considered fruitcake by non-techies with bad Twitter habits, so anyone buying one of the cars would have to be one of the world’s richest people. nutter and therefore not exactly ground.
Interestingly, not too long ago, in 2005 to be exact, this vision of Musk was captured by the German wise men who laughed at the idea of this jerk construction of automobiles. Didn’t he know how to make a car? heavy And have BMW, Mercedes, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest spent the better part of a century figuring out how to profitably scale? Sure, it might be able to produce expensive toys for Silicon Valley types – but Real Cars?
The ridiculous skepticism of the industry reminds me of 2007 when Apple launched the iPhone. This was at a time when Nokia and Blackberry were ruling the world and the mobile market was considered “mature”. Yet this was Steve Jobs in a black tie – a man with no experience in the mobile industry – visiting a phone with no keyboard and a user-replaceable battery.
Well, we know how that story played out. They don’t realize that Nokia and its affiliates have created a powerful network computer that fits in your hand and can make phone calls. Ultimately, that phone added — and changed — a “mature” industry.
Ironically, Tesla’s story seems to have repeated itself. The company built and sold nearly one million cars last year. There seems to be a waiting list for every car they build these days. And just as hardware company Nokia, which doesn’t understand software, has been outdone by its smartphones, the Snow Boys have been overtaken by Tesla. They thought that EVs should only be cars with electric motors; Musk’s idea was that they should be software on wheels. That’s why all EVs now look like Teslas – giant skateboards with wheels on the four corners.
But Musk isn’t content with reimagining the car. He tried to re-imagine the industry. Tesla sells directly to customers, not through dealers. Instead, there will be a small number of company “service” centers, with a fleet of technicians who can provide assistance if needed. The reason for this was that EVs were much smaller than snow and required more maintenance. No need for bad dealers or their oil-soaked mechanics. QED
Now there’s no doubt that EVs require less regular maintenance than conventional automobiles, with their variable fluids, controlled exhausts, and hot gases. But no matter how well cars work, they still develop defects or breakdowns. And one of the problems with Tesla from the start is that their build quality — poor paint or the way the body panels fit together, for example — sometimes leaves something to be desired and doesn’t make it through the BMW production line. .
In the ice age, if the car you bought has a defect or problem, then you take it with the dealer. But there is no distributor for Tesla owners – only Musk’s corporate empire. And for some frustrated drivers, that territory might as well be on Mars. The US Federal Trade Commission has more than a thousand complaints about poor service. A trawl of Trustpilot or Reddit reveals the frustration of Tesla owners who love their cars but are frustrated by service failures.
If you are charitable, you can explain this as growing pains. After all, this is a company that’s expanding like crazy – From producing 35,000 cars in 2014 to 930,422 in 2021. However, the number of service centers has not increased compared to that growth. In the first quarter of this year, for example, Tesla’s US production increased by 68% compared to the same quarter last year, but the number of service centers increased by only 20%. The company only has 30 in the UK and 160 in the US, an ice company can have up to 10,000 dealers nationwide.
A small charitable note is that Tesla, like all tech companies, subscribes to the trick of hiring people to provide customer service when more tasks can be handled by AI or at least a call center. In this sense, the problems Tesla owners face when trying to get help or repairs are similar to those experienced by Facebook users trying to find a dead relative’s account or, as I mentioned last week, trying to find a Google user account. Restored after error cancellation. Tesla is a technology company that makes cars.
What I read
Money never sleeps.
An economist who knows he’s passed the miracle is great. Atlantic Piece by Annie Lowry by Brad DeLong and his long lasting The history of capitalism.
Good returns
Rob Miller, a business strategist, asked in a beautiful article titled Cultivating Serendipity on the Robolog forum if it is possible to organize your life in a way that maximizes the risks of happiness.
Horse sense
Tik Tok: The Trojan Stallion is an interesting blog post by marketing professor Scott Galloway on his No Mercy/No Malic website.
