Electric car company Tesla had its employees suppress thousands of driving range complaints from customers and cancel owners’ service appointments, according to a recent investigation by Reuters.
According to the report, the electric carmaker created a secret team to squash complaints of the vehicles’ poor driving range and requests to bring the cars in for service. The company had become inundated with calls from customers complaining about poor driving range, with many expecting better performance based on the company’s published estimates and projections shown by the in-dash meters of the cars.
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In response, Tesla created a team in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible and even cultivated a culture of celebrating canceling the appointments, with some employees striking a metal xylophone as they put customers on hold, triggering applause from other co-workers. The team would close hundreds of cases a week, and staffers were tracked on metrics of how many average canceled appointments they had per day.
According to Reuters, the cars themselves did not necessitate repair, but instead, Tesla created the groundwork for complaints by overhyping the range of its EVs and raising consumer expectations beyond the actual capabilities of the vehicle. About a decade ago, the company began rigging the dashboard readouts of its EVs to provide more positive projections of how far owners need to drive before needing to recharge.
This isn’t the only instance of the company landing in hot water recently. A CNBC report stated the California attorney general is investigating the car company and gathering testimonials from customers and former employees about autopilot safety problems and false advertising complaints. Tesla customers have been complaining about “phantom braking,” the abrupt braking of a car for no apparent reason, to federal agencies for years.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk had made pledges to deliver features to vehicles that would eventually make their cars self-driving and autonomous. However, the latest version of the vehicles with “level-2” systems still require a driver behind the wheel to steer and brake at any time.
A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to the Washington Examiner about either investigation.
