Tesla Service — Uber Credits, Loaner Vehicles, Customer Satisfaction
By: Electric Motoring W Dave Clark
Tags: Electric Vehicles, Electric Car, Tesla

But, Uber has been working on integrating with carmakers and repair centers, as the overhead cost is much less and some, like Tesla, are starting to use them. Over time, this is likely to become more and more common across the auto service and repair industry.

Currently, the other luxury brand auto dealers have clear policies on how they will handle loaner cars.

This Audi dealer clearly states: “For the convenience of our clients, Our dealership provides Audi loaner cars, for the time necessary to service or repair your Audi, when it is anticipated the work will require more than 2-Hours”

Many other manufacturer dealers were very similar to the time requirements of these two Audi and BMW service locations.

The official statement on this subject from the Tesla website states: “Depending on the service being performed, Tesla will offer alternative transport while your car is at our Service Center.” Clearly, they do not specifically say a loaner vehicle will be provided and allows for the use of Uber credits to meet the definition of alternative transport.

But, is this really a big deal in most cases? My answer is, it depends. But from what I have heard, the biggest issue for most people is time, meaning the amount of time it takes to repair a car vs losing that time being at work or other requirements. They’d rather not sit in the service center waiting on their car to be repaired if they can be out doing other tasks. But, what is the average amount of time needed to repair a Tesla? There likely is no clear cut way to determine this as some issues are going to be more involved than others, but let’s review the currently published service bulletins as a guideline for setting the average amount of time needed to do most repairs for a 2018 Model 3.

As of December 2020, Tesla has 75 published service bulletins, which provide a general idea of common service tasks on the Model 3, and the amount of time to perform each task. The average amount of time came out to be approximately 2 ½ hours.

In March 2020, I had my Model 3’s FSD computer upgrade performed, and the total amount of time they needed to perform this upgrade was 3 ½ hours. Yes, Tesla Service did offer me a $100 Uber credit when I had this upgrade performed, but I had a need to drive some distance for work that day, and they did provide me a loaner because of those requirements once we discussed it.

Ultimately, I believe Tesla’s long term goal is to minimize the need to visit a Service Center at all for the vast majority of issues that occur with the car. And Tesla has 2 major advantages toward making this a reality and reducing the need for a loaner vehicle or Uber credits:

The ability to troubleshoot and fix some issues remotely since these cars are always connected to the Tesla network. This works well for software related issues. The mobile service fleet, where they come to you and can address most minor issues.

Today, in North America alone, mobile service teams are completing more than 30% of all service jobs.

Tesla continues to rapidly expand its capability to do more and more tasks anywhere they sell cars via mobile service.

In 2019 alone, Tesla doubled its mobile service fleet to 743 vehicles and they continue to expand the number of services they can perform, which now also include minor collision repairs, such as fixing paint scratches, small dents, bolt-on replacement parts, and damage to doors, mirrors, fenders, or bumpers. Recently, the Tesla mobile service scored 98% for customer satisfaction.

Ultimately, it is about providing quality customer service through the full life of a vehicle that is most important toward the retention of customers and ensuring they will buy from you again. Tesla has had the highest customer satisfaction level of any car maker, for 7 of the last 8 years, according to Consumer Reports.

But, there continue to be concerns related to service, which is improving since struggling with service demands shortly after starting deliveries of Models 3s. Tesla has acknowledged they did not plan well enough to ensure they had the service capacity to support the growth in the number of cars on the road when the Model 3 started volume production.

And Tesla worked hard to fix it by opening dozens of new service centers throughout the world since the fall of 2018.

An article by Bloomberg published the results of a very interesting Model 3 survey in October 2019. In it, they asked many questions, in areas such as quality and reliability, AutoPilot, Market Evolution, and Service.

In the Server category, they polled 5,000 owners showed that most owner’s still had to wait 10 or more days for a service appointment, which was the primary issue of dissatisfaction. This time to get an appointment is no different if you want or need to go to a service center or have mobile service come to you. Tesla is hopeful that these times will improve as they continue to expand the number of service centers and add vehicles to the mobile service fleet.

However, the biggest challenge to Tesla's service continues to be the length of time for collision repairs that require new parts. Although Tesla has improved over the last year, by lowering the wait time by about 65%, it is still taking several weeks in many cases to get the needed parts delivered to repair the vehicles. Hopefully, Tesla continues to improve in this area moving forward.

Overall my impressions from interacting with the Tesla Service Center have been very positive. I have only been in for service 3 times since buying my car in July 2018. Once for doing 2 technical service bulletins which took about an hour to complete, once for the full self-driving computer upgrade as mentioned earlier that took only 3 ½ hours, and the other time was for collision repair service after striking a flying tire tread kicked up by another car on the highway. The total repair time was 18 days, as we had to wait on a new front facia to be delivered from the factory. We were able to drive the car during the waiting period and the install itself of the part only took an hour.

So, in nearly 2 years of ownership, my car has been physically in the Service Center for about 6 hours. However, I do have to agree that the wait time to get an appointment to perform service is still too long. My average wait time from requesting service to actually having it performed is about 2 weeks. Tesla needs to work on getting this down to under a week, with a long term goal of only a few days, especially for events when the car is undrivable until repaired.

This article is also a YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/d8kmz_yZJHQ