Now that Twitter has telegraphed its clear intention to go tweets up (Xs are what artists draw on people’s eyes to indicate they’re dead, right?), goofball internet edgelord and sometime automobile executive Elon Musk would be advised to focus on his core business. That’s Tesla, in case you forgot.
The world’s preeminent electric vehicle manufacturer still holds an outsized share of the U.S. EV market, but that’s projected to drop precipitously in the near future, and Musk’s juvenile antics can’t be helping.
Well, now the guy who spent $44 billion to give Nazis a fair shot at the American dream is facing another PR firestorm after Reuters reported Thursday, in a deep dive into Tesla’s often exaggerated vehicle-range promises, that Musk himself has been, shall we say, less than honest with Tesla customers.
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According to Reuters, Tesla has frequently overpromised when it comes to the number of miles its customers can drive on a single charge. And in case you think that’s just an honest mistake, think again. Not only do Teslas frequently fail to deliver on the company’s lofty promises, Tesla also created a diversion program to handle complaints—in what any honest observer would think is a decidedly dishonest way.
The Reuters report begins with the personal experience of one customer who realized he would sometimes achieve less than half the promised mileage range for his Tesla Model 3—a figure that had been advertised as 353 miles on a fully charged battery. After the customer booked a service appointment to deal with the discrepancy, he got text messages saying remote diagnostics had found his battery was not defective and that he should consider canceling his visit.
Little did he know this was all part of a strategy to keep Tesla from bleeding money over a problem it had itself created. In fact, the company had assembled a dedicated team to handle—and effectively disappear—such complaints.
Reuters:
The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.
According to Reuters, Tesla’s managers told members of the diversion team that they saved the company $1,000 for every appointment they successfully canceled. The strategy was also reportedly designed to shorten sometimes lengthy waitlists at service centers.
That said, these customer service reps weren’t necessarily lying. Though it turns out Musk probably was.
In most cases, the complaining customers’ cars likely did not need repair, according to the people familiar with the matter. Rather, Tesla created the groundswell of complaints another way – by hyping the range of its futuristic electric vehicles, or EVs, raising consumer expectations beyond what the cars can deliver. Teslas often fail to achieve their advertised range estimates and the projections provided by the cars’ own equipment, according to Reuters interviews with three automotive experts who have tested or studied the company’s vehicles.
According to Reuters, Tesla began exaggerating its vehicles’ maximum ranges years ago by rigging the cars’ software. It decided, “for marketing purposes,” to create algorithms that would generate “rosy” estimates for the number of miles its cars could travel on a full battery. A source Reuters interviewed who was familiar with an early design for the software said when the battery fell below a 50% charge, the algorithm would start showing drivers “more realistic” projections.
Tellingly, according to this source, the decision to fudge the numbers came from Musk himself.
“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the source told Reuters. “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”
Maybe Musk should just say his cars go “X” number of miles. Because X solves everything.
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Of course, while this skeevy business decision seems at the very least fraud-adjacent, it’s hardly a radical departure for Musk.
Tesla, and by extension Musk, has a long, sordid history of overpromising and underdelivering. You’ll find numerous examples of Tesla’s broken promises here and Musk’s vaporware here. He even claimed that by 2020 he’d be able to put implants in people’s brains to connect their minds to computers! Which, to be fair, is his best idea yet. Imagine being able to play full games of Donkey Kong in your head as your Aunt Fanny fills you in on her latest scrapbooking adventures.
Unfortunately, the implant concept has yet to come to fruition.
Then there’s Musk’s vaunted Vegas hyperloop, which looks to be little more than a gimmick, as shown in this video:
But those broken promises look a bit less like fraud than the latest revelations from the Tesla Fudge Factory.
Reuters said it was unable to determine whether Tesla is still using fudgy algorithms, but it noted that regulators and testers “continue to flag the company for exaggerating the distance its vehicles can travel before their batteries run out.” After an 11-month investigation, South Korean regulators determined that Tesla’s cars achieved as little as half their advertised range in colder weather and fined the company $2.2 million in January. And according to Bloomberg, “[t]he Elon Musk-led company changed the advertisement on its Korean-language website in February [2022] when the watchdog started an investigation.”
Thus the need for a diversion team.
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As Reuters reports, Tesla’s diversion team was created in part out of necessity. As its sales surged, the company saw a burgeoning demand for service appointments. Their response to that problem wasn’t quite to say that the customer is always wrong, but the company wasn’t exactly being honest either.
According to one Reuters source, Tesla diversion team members were told to keep their mouths shut if remote diagnostics found additional problems with customers’ cars that were unrelated to range. The company also reportedly updated its phone app to prevent customers who complained about their mileage from booking appointments.
And in late 2022, according to one Reuters source, Tesla managers started telling customer service reps to stop running remote diagnostics on vehicles whose owners had reported mileage issues.
“Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” by customer reps who had never run diagnostics, according to the source.
Wow. That’s not good.
Something sure smells rotten. Might just be a Musk-y whiff of fraud. Stay tuned.
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