Remember how a few months ago I was not recommending buying a Tesla because of the bad customer support? Well… I still don’t. Despite some positive signs (which I will detail below), the overall customer experience remains sub-optimal. And on top of that, I just stumbled upon two additional frustrating issues.

The good

There were some improvements since my post in December 2018. First, the mirror problem was finally addressed. A Tesla Ranger came to my house and replaced the faulty piece in less than half an hour. Definitely a positive experience, but the fact that I had to wait more than two months to have it fixed is still a big issue.
The second positive issue: the Tesla Service managed to reply one of my emails in 14 hours during a weekend period.

The bad

Let’s say you drive with your Model S to location X. Then, a few hours later, you come back to the place you parked your car, and can’t find it anymore. You open the Tesla iOS app, it updates, and it still shows that your Model S is in the location X (which is not). Your Model S was towed away to location Y, but you will never see the location Y from the app.
Here is what Tesla says about this:

I can confirm that this is indeed normal behavior.
The GPS location of the vehicle only updates when the car is actually being driven.
You will experience the same if the car is being transported on a ferry.
When the vehicle starts driving again, the GPS location will refresh. In some cases it will takes a couple of drives for it to refresh afterwards, but in most cases it will pick up at the first drive.

Tesla EMEA Customer Support responding to the scenario described above

I am absolutely stunned by this behavior. Not only it violates the principle of least surprise, but it also means that you can never trust the location shown in your app (unless you have your car in sight). Not being able to see the real-time location of your car despite having the technical means to do it is simply astonishing. I am authenticated as the owner of this car, I am asking you to show me the location, you have the means to do it – so just show me where it is!
I asked Tesla if they plan to update this behavior and I will update this post if I receive an answer.

The ugly

I just found out that the Tesla dashcam only stores one hour of video recordings on the USB drive. At the moment you cannot change this setting, it is not documented anywhere (I found the information on reddit) and it doesn’t make any difference if your USB drive would be able to store more than that. It’s such an arbitrary and artificial limit and the fact that it’s not documented anywhere makes it even more frustrating (principle of least surprise again).
There are workarounds: the expensive way (have several USB drives and rotate them periodically), or the nerd way (use a Raspberry Pi to sync the contents of the USB drive with your file server when you get home). None of them are ideal, the right thing to do is to allow me (the owner of the car) to decide about the matter (1, 2, 100 or 0 hours of video storage).
Again, I asked Tesla if they plan any change related to this behavior.

Update 18 February: Tesla confirmed the 1-hour recording limit and logged my request to make this limit user-configurable. “As for expanding this time, we are hoping so we get a lot of requests for it.“

Update 20 February: On 16 February I asked Tesla if they plan to change the current set up, where the real-time location of the car is not shown unless you drive car. On 20 February they replied: “I have submitted this as a feature request for the development team to review. “

In the last day of the year, it’s time to look back at the year and highlight the things that enjoyed in 2018. For reference, here is the list from the last year.

1. Two books: Daemon and Freedom, by Daniel Suarez. Absolutely brilliant, I don’t know how I missed them for so many years. Here’s an excerpt:

The most striking revelation in a long time is about democracy.
Source: https://t.co/0ctn4yDhRW pic.twitter.com/SwEjY7bvVH

— Dorin M. (@dorinmoise) September 6, 2018

The Code book from Simon Singh was probably the runner-up – a few months ago I ordered the printed version and read it again after 5 years.

2. My new notebook: Huawei Matebook x Pro. Say what you want about Huawei, but they came up with a brilliant device. Miles ahead of the premium-priced Macbooks, it fundamentally changed my workflow. Never been a tablet guy and probably never be, so the combination of an iPhone + an ultrabook like the Matebook works best for me.

3. WorkFlowy: an exponent of the makers (*) culture, WorkFlowy is a dead-simple, cross-platform note-taking app. The hierarchical structure of the notes makes it compatible with mind-mapping and I found myself using it in a variety of ways. For instance, I drafted the outline of this post in WorkFlowy. Others wrote books with it:

(*) the makers culture: Peter Levels https://levels.io/ https://makebook.io/
https://twitter.com/ajlkn https://carrd.co/

4. A place: the Austrian Alps in the summer time. I had the chance to spend about a week in the mountains. The combination of mountains, clean air, outdoor activities and clear blue sky is amazing. Just have a look:

5. Security. There were plenty of security things that I learned in 2018. Went to a few classroom training sessions (CISM, CISSP, TLS), passed some challenging certification exams, and realized that (IT) security is a fascinating domain with a lot of brilliant people.

The IT industry rocks (as one of the security guys that I follow said today), and on top of that, the security aspects make things much more interesting to watch.

6. Simona Halep: not only for finally winning her Grand Slam, but also for having the capacity to remain competitive for a long time: never dropped out of the top 10 for over 5 years and currently number 1 for more than a year (with a brief 4-weeks interruption). Well deserved and very inspirational.

7. Two series: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I enjoyed watching Breaking Bad when it was released on Netflix, and found the Better Call Saul a very good continuation of the series. Now that Better Call Saul is over, I went back to re-watch Breaking Bad – it’s amazing how a few years and another prequel change the perspective.

8. Jurgen Klopp. He joined Liverpool 3 years ago and built an amazing team around him. One can learn a lot about leadership just by listening to his interviews. Humble and determined, he’s a perfect fit for Liverpool and you can sense how everybody around the club loves him.

9. The iPhone X – because the dimensions are finally right, and, more importantly, because its camera allowed me to take some amazing photos throughout the year: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dorin_moise

10. Tesla Model S. Finally, I left this at the end because it offered me some very mixed feelings. As I said in a recent post, the car is really amazing and it offers an experience that you will not find anywhere else. But the quality of the support services is disappointing here in Belgium. I hope that things will improve, even though I’m not holding my breath.

Here’s for a brilliant 2019 and remember, in the end it’s all about getting better.

TL;DR: The Model S is a great car and it offers you an extraordinary driving experience. Tesla customer service in Europe (more specifically in Belgium) is dreadful. Tesla doesn’t take security seriously and the Model S doesn’t seem to be very mature yet. I am still loving my Model S.

The statements above are not mutually exclusive. I’m loving it, but I don’t recommend buying one. Not for the moment at least. Customer care is part of the experience of owning a car, and Tesla does it badly here in Europe. 

More details about my statements above:

• if you plan to call your customer service, expect waiting times in the region 1-2 hours. Yes, you read that right. Freaking hours, on the phone.
• if you get in touch with someone from support, there’s no guarantee that they will actually do something to help. Recent example: called to report a problem with the left mirror. After an hour of waiting, I am told to send an email to the technical team, and they will reach back to me. That was 2 weeks ago. Nobody called.
• the Model S is not mature enough. As a technical guy, I am used to technical issues. I see my Model S as a computer on wheels, so a few non-safety related bugs are tolerable. Resetting your car to fix the air conditioning flow or the internet connectivity is fine for me. But when these things start to happen on a regular basis, things can get annoying. Especially when Tesla doesn’t seem to care about it.
• the Model S’s produced before June 2018 have a known vulnerability that can lead to the car being stolen with minimal effort. The solution is simple: upgrade the chip on the key fobs and re-link them with your car. Tesla fixed this problem for the cars produced after June 2018, but is asking the existing owners (pre-June 2018) to pay for the fix from their own pocket (about 250 EUR). The alternative recommended by Tesla is to disable the Passive Entry. Because that’s the normal thing to do after you sell a $100k+ car with a security hole in it: ask the customer to disable a feature for which he already paid. But hey, they take security seriously…

All that being said, I still love to drive my Model S. But I don’t recommend  anyone buying one. There are other electric car producers out there. Look for one that actually gives a s*it about you. Unfortunately Tesla is not one of them. Yet.