Tesla Service Centers Can Be Hundreds of Miles From Owners

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
Tesla Service Centers Can Be Hundreds of Miles From Owners

© courtesy of Tesla Motors Corp.

Consumer Reports released a criticism of the Tesla Model X. Among the complaints was reliability problems. A Tesla customer who needs one of these fixed may have to travel hundreds of miles.

Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) has 70 service centers in the United States, according to its website. Most of these are clustered in high population states, which is to be expected. California has 18. The repair problem is multiplied by the number of cars that company sells. In its last quarterly statement, management wrote:

Q1 deliveries consisted of 12,420 Model S vehicles and 2,400 Model X vehicles. Q1 deliveries were almost 50% more than Q1 last year and Tesla remains on track to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 new vehicles in 2016.

Based on the Tesla list, an owner in North Dakota may have to go as far as Seattle for repairs. An owner in Alabama might need to go to Louisiana or Florida.
[recirclink id=326265]
Tesla has done the logical thing, made a smart business move. The electric car company has superchargers across the country. Each is close enough to owners so that none of them are out of range. Service centers cost more than chargers. The math, in this case, works against the owner. That is only a problem if an owner’s Tesla vehicle is broken.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618