After three years and three months of owning a Tesla Model X, I’m selling the car and will never buy a Tesla again.
When I first heard about the Model X, I was excited that somebody had finally decided to make an electric family car. I watched the announcement and it seemed like the perfect car for us. It seated seven, had a two hundred mile range and those Falcon wing doors looked so damn cool! Finally, the future has arrived, or so I thought.
I eagerly put down the five thousand dollar deposit and started waiting for the day my dream car would arrive. They told me to expect the car in early 2014, which was a couple of years away. It was a long wait, but I wanted to support the company, so I waited.
2014 came and went, then in late 2015 I received an email saying that the car will no longer seat seven by default, it’ll cost an additional $4,500 to get something that was promised when I put down the deposit. Looking back, that should’ve been a warning sign, but I figured I waited all those years, what’s another few thousand dollars?
Finally, in June 2016 I received an email to come pick up my long awaited Tesla. I was happy to finally get the car I waited for four years, and for the first three months it was great. Then I read something about a newer revision of Model X which had new hardware that would enable full automated driving.
That’s strange, I thought to myself, because I’d just paid $4,000 for Autopilot a few months ago, and it’s already obsoleted? I did some research, and sure enough, for reasons that completely baffles me, Tesla had decided to stiff everyone (dumb enough) to put down deposit and waited patiently for years for them to deliver, and obsoleted the car they bought only a few months ago.
After the initial honey moon, we began noticing that the cool looking Falcon wing doors are a lot less cool to live with. They are supposed to be an improvement over the sliding minivan doors or regular car doors, because they swing upwards and out of the way. But in reality the sensors don’t work very well, so often they just open half way even though there’s space for them to open fully. So you have to reach in and pull an awkwardly placed latch, and the door grudgingly open (meaning it opens very slowly while emitting an obnoxious sound…
