NACS Takes A Step Closer To De Facto Standard

Thanks. The user hostility thing is something I’ve been meaning to write about, but haven’t made the time to really flush out. But, since you asked, I’m going to slap out a very rough draft :). And just so it doesn’t go unsaid, I am not claiming that other car OEMs aren’t as bad or worse, both of those things can exist at the same time.

1. There’s room for a diversity of opinion around the extreme minimalism in the interior controls. Personally, I think the lack of a eyes front display and pushing all the controls into the center display is a potential safety issue, but since I haven’t driven a M3/MY I don’t know how much of that is a baseless theoretical issue, or something real. So this is a maybe.
2. Every OEM has nightmare service stories, so it’s possible to find similar examples, but none of the other OEMs own the vertical supply chain like Tesla does (let’s pretend that Lucid and Rivian don’t exist), so it’s fair to blame them in a way that isn’t exactly fair with a traditional OEM. Here’s an e.g., a friend leased a Model X, something happened with the fancy door and they had to replace some parts. So he brings in the car, they replace the parts, and discover that the car needs some firmware updates. They do the updates, and it bricks the new parts, and some other parts they replaced because of some other reason. These things got bricked because Telsa changes hardware, but doesn’t track those revisions in their firmware process, and they don’t do model years so the mechanics don’t know what parts go in what versions of the “2005” Model Y. The wrong firmware was applied on those parts, and he ended up waiting 3-4 months to get the car back. The whole time they had the car he had to pay for the lease, but they either didn’t give him a loaner or the loaner was POS (don’t remember exactly). The TL;DR is that the car broke, Tesla service broke it worse, and he paid a lot of money per month to have to park it at the service center. Tesla never did anything to make it right. There are many threads like this on Reddit, so not isolated.
3. Tesla often behaves like they license buyers a car, instead of selling it. The most obvious instance of this is when they retract features that were sold to buyers. Some e.g. -> https://www.missingremote.com/news/2020/02/apparently-tesla-doesnt-understand-what-it-means-to-sell-something, https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mb3w/people-are-jailbreaking-used-teslas-to-get-the-features-they-expect. I don’t think that’s user friendly. It definitely puts me off the brand.
4. Tesla doesn’t like 3rd parties working on the cars. This is related to #3, they’ve bullied shops that work on them. This obvious is a bad situation for anyone who owns an out-of-warranty Tesla.
5. Tesla enforces monopoly pressure on parts and service.
6. And then there’s FSD. I’m surprised that there haven’t been legal issues around the way FSD was sold to customers. NAL, but it feels a lot like fraud. Especially to people who leased the cars. Anyone who did that years ago, and handed the car back before FSD was delivered, has a legitimate gripe here. They paid a significant amount of money for something that there is no way that Tesla should have sold them. If you try to buy a used Tesla from Tesla, FSD isn’t even optional (or at least it wasn’t the last time I thought about buying one). It’s a cudgel to inflate used car prices.
7. The recent pricing volatility is the icing. How do they justify swinging the price around as much as they do? It’s not surprising that they have a demand problem now. They used to have the most awesome car buying experience. You knew that you were going to pay the same price as everyone else. No gross sales people, no gross sales managers. Now they’ve created a really toxic situation around pricing. This is a fixable problem, but it shouldn’t have existed.