My Tesla Model X delivery experience

I picked up my first Tesla in 2015 at the Service Center in Möhlin, Switzerland. I am comparing this prior experience to the recent pick-up of my new 2023 Model X LR.

Your car will be ready for pick-up soon !

In 2015 the sales representative called me personally and told me that my car would be ready to pick up and asked me for a date and time that would fit for me. The only thing I needed to bring to the pick-up would be my license plates and the papers for my old car, which would be exchanged for the new papers.

Fast forward 8 years and the notification, that my car would be ready for pick-up soon, came via an SMS from Tesla with a link where I could pick a date and time for the delivery of the car. About two weeks earlier I realized that my car had a VIN number and I was able to find it on one of the Höegh lines ships arriving in Rotterdam on March 30th.

It would have been nice if a Tesla sales person had called me a couple of weeks earlier telling me that my car was actually on a ship and on the way to Europe. None of that was done. I had to do all the detective work myself. After waiting for this car for 674 days, a little bit of customer care would have been nice.

Trade-in

At first I had planned to trade in my old Model S 85D with Tesla. It still was in great condition and prices on the private market in Switzerland were around 28-30K CHF. Tesla offered me 7.5K CHF…..so I declined their rather crappy offer and went to find an offer on the private market.

After some googling I found a garage that mainly buys and sells new cars and got a good deal at 25K CHF. Everything was more or less done in one day and the payment was done one day prior to pick-up via bank transfer. So overall a great experience at Keller Autoankauf.

After picking a date, I called up the Tesla Sales team to ask how the pick-up would work and what documents I would need to provide. I was told that I would only need to provide my current license plates and the “car documents” / “Fahrzeugausweis”. Thinking that the process would be the same as in 2015, I did not think twice and waited for April 18th to arrive.

Pick-up preparations

I made my payment on April 10th and either on that day or one day later Tesla announced a significant price drop for the Model X and S. I contacted the Tesla sales team letting them know that I was quite disappointed by this recent price change and that I would expect them to check if something could be done to also lower my price. On April 14th I got a nice message from Tesla informing me that my final invoice had been “updated”. And indeed it had been reduced by 7k CHF which was a nice additional birthday present for me 😀.

I called up the sales representative to ask about the refund and while I had him on the phone he asked me “did you already register your new car at the road traffic office?”. I was perplexed and told him that I was not aware that I had to take care of this myself. So on Tuesday April 18th I had to run to the local office to get the new Model X registered. The necessary paperwork that would be needed to do so arrived on April 17th by mail. So that could have run a little smoother.

• 2015:
  • Bring your license plates
  • Bring your old car documents
• 2023:
  • Wait for a specific 13.20A document and send this to my insurance
  • Get an insurance certificate based on the 13.2A document
  • Take the insurance document as well as the 13.20A document to the local road traffic office
  • Get the new car documents for the Model X
  • Bring your license plates
  • Bring the new car document

I told my local sales representative that this whole process could have been made more transparent and he agreed and apologized for the confusion. Apparently the fact that I had asked for a trade-in and had then declined changed the process and the person at Tesla forgot to inform me accordingly.

Delivery day

In 2015 I picked the car up at the local service center in Möhlin. It was a rather private affair with only a delivery specialist present. The car had a nice bow on the hood and the delivery specialist took about 30-45 minutes to guide us through all the cars features.

2015 vs 2023:

Fast forward to 2023. Tesla does not deliver at service centers anymore (as far as I can tell) and has now centralized this at a couple of delivery centers, one of which is close to Zürich airport in an industrial park in Bassersdorf.

No bells nor whistles attached

So we parked in front of the delivery complex which has a sort of service center on the right where you could see Tesla cars being worked on. There is a delivery center in the middle and a small customer lounge to the left of that. There was nobody around and a small sign said “to pick up your new Tesla, please go to the customer lounge on the left”. So off the the lounge we went.

There was one guy sitting behind the desk at the customer lounge and he immediately asked for my name and for the car papers. He handed us a small cardboard box containing the key cards and told us that the car was in slot D5. We should please go check it out and we should place the license plates in front of the car so that a service technician could install them later. So off we went.

Basically the whole delivery process only took like 30 minutes, including the registration of two small issues listed below.

So if you are used to the delivery experience you get at a legacy dealership where they arrange this big celebration with a big bow or with a tarp being ceremoniously removed from you new car, there is none of that here.

There was also no introduction to the functions of the car. Since I had been waiting for the car for almost 2 years I already had read the user manual more than a dozen times so that was fine for me. However I would assume that for new Tesla owners this would not be such a great experience. The delivery guy did not even ask me if I had previous experience with a Tesla or not. I am certainly not asking for a slimy car salesman to shake my hand and to very emotionally congratulate me on my new purchase, but a little bit more customer care would have been nice.

The car

The car itself of course is just great. After reading a lot of horror stories about the quality of cars coming out of Freemont, I had a huge “pick-up checklist prepared. Fortunately, everything looked very good. I only had two issues with the car, which I reported to the delivery team. The door handles on the drivers side did not match up perfectly (yes I’m a stickler when it comes to stuff being aligned properly) and the panel gap on the left side of the hood was a little too l large for my taste. Both otherwise I am very happy with the car. See pictures below:

Off we go 🙂

So after these two minor issues where taken care off (I have a date at the local service center next week to get them fixed), it was time to take the “Millennium falcon” home.

Final thoughts

• The information about what is really expected from the customer prior to pick-up was not 100% transparent in my case. Maybe I’m getting old 😉
• If you are a self service kind of person who just wants to get the goods and get out, the Tesla process and experience defenitely is for you. I would not have minded just a little bit more customer care and maybe even a handshake and a “thanks for spending 100k at Tesla”.
• Don’t get me wrong, the process works and if I would have had questions about the workings of the car I am sure the people there would have gladly answered all the questions I might have had. I am just missing a little more proactive customer care.
• The quality of the car is great. Everything from the seats to the interior trim, the smoothness of the ride, to the lack of noise when driving, everything is a lot better compared to my 2015 Model S.
• So overall I am very happy with the whole process and the car itself. For customers who are used to being pampered every second and who like to be greeted by an army of cheering sales people with a glass of champagne at the time of pick-up, this will be quite a harsh change 😜.