At the beginning of November after nearly four years of ownership I’ve parted ways with my Tesla Model S. I was an early adopter of Tesla, introduced to the brand and EV motoring for a friend that worked there. After a minor accident that involved writing off my previous Audi in March 2017 I took the plunge and bought a Tesla Model S 75 D that was a former demonstrator from Tesla with 11k miles on the clock.
Tesla at the time we’re an absolutely brilliant organisation to work with – customers we’re treated like VIPs, nothing was too much trouble for them, with few cars on the road people always turned their heads, and if you parked up someone always wanted to talk about it.
In the first couple of years of ownership I average over 20k miles (all with free supercharging) as my commute and other commitments led to reasonable travel. During those two years I suffered a couple of minor failures all taken care of over warranty. Around this time Tesla had become a large scale manufacturer having launched the model 3 and those of us that were early adopters noticed a change in the company. Gone were the days of VIP service, and sorting out any little problem – as the company scaled the service diminished and the quality of work dropped too.
At this point I was nearing my 50k warranty barrier (although had two years left to run), and my driving commitments changed substantially leading me to do 5-8k miles a year instead. For the next 1.5 years the car largely sat on the driveway, and once the warranty had expired I suffered a couple of big bills – reversing camera failure £600, daytime running light failure £1300, boot lock mech failure £200 – this car was starting to cost a lot of money to sit on the drive.
Tesla don’t have an eco system of repairers or parts suppliers that you can tap in to so it is always back to Tesla for parts and repairs which are expensive.
So at the end of Oct 2021 I sold my Model S through a brokerage and moved out of the EV game (temporarily), and back in to the world of ICE.
