> It’s true for Tesla. Especially for body work. Takes many weeks due to backlog.
That's growing pains though. Give it a few years and there should be greater parts availability and independent electric car repair shops.
> But anecdotally, after many many years of disappointing experiences with independent repair shops, when I could finally afford repairs at the dealer, I was no longer disappointed.
There are a lot of bad mechanics out there. The trouble is as many of them work for the dealerships as not, so it's not much of a filter in general. Even if the quality at dealerships is slightly higher, the possibility of going to an independent shop is the only thing keeping their prices in check. Or their service quality for that matter.
You'll find no trouble getting service for your ten year old car. Ask Apple to support your ten year old iPhone.
I've watches some videos on youtube of guys who try to salvage Tesla's. I am not sure if these are growing pains or if Tesla is just more interested in a model without independent mechanics.
In these videos it seems more that Tesla is VERY hostile against people who repair their car. They have no access whatsoever to parts, so their only chance is to buy damaged cars and salvage the parts. My feeling was that it was very hard for the owners to keep the cars updated and to super charge these cars.
My experience with dealers repairs and independent contractors is that most of the dealers change assembly groups and good mechanics change what's damaged. You've got less problems if you change assembly groups but it is way more expensive.
Using used parts for repairs is normal practice. It makes little sense to manufacture a new body panel when there is a perfectly good one from a vehicle with a bad drivetrain just sitting there in a junkyard.
The trouble right now is because Tesla has only recently started delivering in meaningful volumes, there is no big supply of them in junkyards to pull parts from. And for much the same reason there are no independent parts suppliers yet, so the company has a temporary monopoly on parts.
Whether their attitude changes when the parts monopoly erodes remains to be seen, but competition has a way of shifting corporate behavior.
And some of the current behavior is within reason, e.g. if you have free supercharging it's not so you can modify your car to sell that power back to the grid, or take the VIN of a wrecked car with free supercharging and try to transfer it to an entirely different car by exchanging a couple of parts. There has to be some process to make sure that's not what's happening.
Car dealers love repairing cars because the repair shop is where most of their profit comes from. Not so with Apple, which makes most of their profit on hardware sales. I expect this is at least partly a ploy by Apple to discourage repairs altogether, so they can sell more new hardware. Virtually all of Apple's behavior for the last 10 years has supported that idea.
That's growing pains though. Give it a few years and there should be greater parts availability and independent electric car repair shops.
> But anecdotally, after many many years of disappointing experiences with independent repair shops, when I could finally afford repairs at the dealer, I was no longer disappointed.
There are a lot of bad mechanics out there. The trouble is as many of them work for the dealerships as not, so it's not much of a filter in general. Even if the quality at dealerships is slightly higher, the possibility of going to an independent shop is the only thing keeping their prices in check. Or their service quality for that matter.
You'll find no trouble getting service for your ten year old car. Ask Apple to support your ten year old iPhone.