Earlier this week, Bloomberg released the results of their survey of 5,000 Tesla owners. Part I was about “Quality & Reliability”, where they found that early production issues led to some reduced quality, and some reliability issues frustrated other. But the overall the Tesla owners surveyed raved about their vehicles and found it to be an amazing change from ICE vehicles.
Now the results from Part II have been released, and this time they talk about service and charging. With the quality issues found in Part I, it should come as no surprise that that meant a rise in need for service, which at the beginning of Model 3 production, Tesla Service Centres were not prepared for.
Customer Service
To help ease the rush on Tesla Service Centres, Tesla has been creating “Mobile Service” vehicles, or Tesla Rangers, that when possible travel to where owners live or work to fix their vehicles. In another shift away from traditional automakers, Tesla also made it possible to schedule and track service using the Tesla app. These features received some of the highest ratings in the survey, and rightfully so. As you can see, satisfaction decreased with interactions online or by phone.
Since purchasing my Model 3, I have only had to arrange for one Tesla Ranger visit, and it was seamless. The reason for the service call were some very minor fixes that could not be corrected on my delivery day (the Tesla Vancouver store was delivering up to 150 vehicles per day when I picked up mine). Due to Tesla’s improved manufacturing quality, the number of service visits required to fix these kinds of defects that initially come with the car are decreasing.
Charging
When it comes to charging, it should be no surprise that Tesla received very high marks. Where the problems arose were when owners relied on the Supercharger network for charging as they had no at-home charging options because they lived in a condo or owners who park on the streets and have no easy access to a plug.
Interestingly, Canadian were the least satisfied, in particular with the Supercharger network, which was sparse and had a huge gap in central Canada for years, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised that a cross-country network would be available soon. We now know that Tesla is making good on their word, with multiple new Superchargers opening, and many more under construction, closing the gap and making a cross-country road trip in your Tesla that much easier. As an added bonus for having to wait, most of the new Superchargers being installed in Canada are Tesla’s latest V3 Superchargers, capable of charging at up to 250kW, equating up to 1,600km/h!
Battery Degradation
Bloomberg also took a look at battery degradation amongst the Tesla owners surveyed. In order to come up with these stats, Bloomberg asked Model 3 owners to report how many miles of remaining range the display showed after a full charge and compare that to the rated range on Tesla’s website. Those numbers were then plotted against each owner’s current odometer reading.
These numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt though. Since Bloomberg doesn’t have access to study the actual battery degradation by running tests on the battery, the numbers are not going to be accurate. Additionally, most Tesla owners know that the range displayed on the vehicle after charging is just an estimate, and can vary by many percentage points based on a number of factors like driving style and temperature.
With that in mind, the survey found the Model 3’s battery declined less than 1% for every 10,000 miles of driving. For comparison, a previous generation of Nissan Leaf batteries was found to degrade more than three times faster, according to Bloomberg.
The next segment of Bloomberg’s survey, Part III, will be on Tesla’s Autpilot technology, and will be released November 5.
You can read the full survey results here.
