To recap the second quarter, Tesla issued its shareholder letter and held its quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts. The news, as always, is a mixed bag. While improving over its $702M loss in Q1, Tesla still missed Wall Street’s expectations, posting a Q2 loss of $408M. Traders can expect a bumpy ride in the short term. That said, there were some highlights worth considering for those long-term TSLA investors.
My Polish friends (and I) have long been waiting for a Tesla service center in Poland. Thankfully, we now have one. Apparently as a birthday gift for my eldest daughter (who does love Tesla), the company announced via email the other day that a service center opened up in Warsaw.
While Tesla’s car production and sales volumes have grown at an unprecedented pace, the company continues to struggle with the challenges of servicing this massive influx of new customers. As the volume of cars delivered has grown, so have the complaints about long waits for scheduled service, extended delays in having even basic service jobs completed, and the inability to get replacement body and mechanical parts in a timely fashion.
Tesla is refocusing on service as its top priority now that it has stabilized production and delivery for Model 3, CEO Elon Musk said yesterday on the company’s Q4 2018 earnings call. Elon said on the call, “One of our major priorities for this quarter is improving service operations,” with a specific focus on North America, which is home to the majority of Tesla’s vehicles.
New drone footage of Tesla’s Lathrop facility shows that the facility is all buttoned up on the outside. The Lathrop facility is shaping up to be a massive parts depot for the automotive manufacturer, based on job listings for the location. This seems logical as Tesla works to beef up its parts supply chain coming in and out of its Fremont, California, automotive factory.
Tesla CEO @ElonMusk took to Twitter to admit that Tesla had found some gaps in its global service center coverage and is now hard at work to improve its coverage over the next 3–6 months.
Tesla is making headway on CEO Elon Musk’s goal of taking 30+ days to perform body work on Tesla vehicles down to same-day repairs with its new Tesla Body Repair Centers, according to reports on Reddit.
Tesla repair demand exceeds capacity right now in Norway.
As electric vehicle adoption is increasing by the day, it’s important for Tesla (and other EV) owners to know what’s involved in servicing and maintaining an electric car. Compared to traditional gas-powered vehicles, EVs have a low cost of maintenance and require fewer visits to the service center for routine maintenance.
Tesla established itself as the leader in quality of service from its service centers prior to the Model 3 launch, but many people were concerned about Tesla’s ability to scale its service offerings up while maintaining the high levels of quality it had delivered to Model S and X buyers. More and more Model 3s are making it into the hands of eager customers, which invariably means more service calls for issues small and large … and even some small ones that come with large repair bills.
