I am fascinated by Elon Musk’s detailed response (with speed, battery charge, GPS, inside temperature data in many graphs like one shown below) to the NY Times article on a journalist’s less than satisfactory test drive in a Tesla Model S.
Personally, I think it puts more pressure on Tesla and other electric car makers. “Fixes” supposedly suggested by Tesla customer support to the journalist like conditioning the battery for half an hour while the temperature is set to low in freezing weather are not going to please prospects already plagued by “range anxiety”. The amount of car data Tesla has access to is bound to raise privacy concerns.
However, looking forward, I can see consumers benefitting from all these diagnostics – defending against unfair traffic citations, monitoring young drivers, more precise accident forensics etc etc.
And personally, I would love to see companies of every color investigate complaints so thoroughly.
I wish Southwest would provide me performance data on their Row 44 wi-fi rather than just telling me “it’s getting better all the time” and periodically issuing me credit vouchers. I wish AT&T would quit advertising about how great its 4G coverage is and actually respond to specific complaints that even 3G coverage is not available in many places. I wish Bank of America would investigate my complaint that after 10-12 tries I cannot get their mobile deposit feature to work on my iPhone. Be nice for them to say we see “your flash was not on” or “you are not on the latest app version”. Something.
Elon, you may not win this battle with the NYT. But you have raised the bar for diagnostics of customer complaints.
Comments