I love this car. I want to be very clear about that up front because everything that follows is going to sound like I don't.

My Model 3 is the best car I've ever owned. It is also attached to the worst customer service experience I've ever had, and I once spent four hours on hold with Comcast while they insisted I didn't live at my own address. Tesla is worse. Tesla is somehow worse than the company that made me prove I existed.

What Actually Happens

Your car does something weird. Maybe the screen goes black for no reason. Maybe there's a rattle in the door panel that sounds like a small animal is trapped in there and has accepted its fate. Maybe the trunk stopped opening and you're standing in a Trader Joe's parking lot with $80 worth of groceries and the specific kind of rage that only comes from being outsmarted by your own vehicle.

So you open the app. The app takes forty seconds to connect to the car that is ten feet away from you. You tap "Schedule Service." The next available appointment is in six weeks. Six weeks. There's a war that lasted less time than the gap between my trunk breaking and Tesla's willingness to look at it.

You show up to the service center, which is 47 minutes from your house because Tesla decided service centers should have the density of Michelin-starred restaurants. The waiting room has four chairs, a water cooler that's empty, and a TV playing a Tesla promotional video on loop. The video is about how Tesla is reinventing the customer experience. I sat there watching that video for two hours and I think I dissociated.

When someone finally talks to you, they're nice. Genuinely nice. This is somehow worse because you can see in their eyes that they know. They know the system is broken. They're doing their best inside a structure that treats human interaction like an engineering problem that hasn't been prioritized yet.

What It Could Be

Picture this. You wake up and your car has already told Tesla something's wrong. Not you. The car. Because it's a computer on wheels and computers are capable of sending a message that says "hey, my left rear sensor is reading weird" without needing a human to notice first.

You get a notification. Not a push notification that opens a broken screen. An actual message, from a person, that says something like "Hey, we noticed your sensor data looks off. We can send a mobile tech to your house Thursday between 10 and 12. Does that work?"

And then, and I know this sounds like fantasy, a person actually shows up on Thursday between 10 and 12.

That's it. That's the whole vision. A company that can land a rocket booster on a barge maybe also answers when you call.

The Phone Number Thing

Tesla famously does not have a phone number you can call. Let me say that again because it sounds fake. The company that sells you a $45,000 machine does not have a phone number. If your car breaks down on the side of the highway at 10pm, your option is to open an app, type a message into a text field, and wait. In the dark. On the highway. With trucks going past at 70 miles per hour.

I once typed a service request from the shoulder of I-95 and got an auto-reply that said "We'll get back to you within 24 hours." My brother had to drive 45 minutes to pick me up. When Tesla did respond, it was to ask if I'd tried rebooting the car. I had, in fact, tried rebooting the car. I had tried rebooting the car the way you try rebooting everything when you're desperate - multiple times, with increasing hostility, while muttering words your mother would not approve of.

The Ghost Town Service Center

I went to my nearest service center on a Tuesday morning. There were eleven cars in the lot waiting for service. There were two employees visible. One was on the phone. The other was explaining to a woman that her part was backordered and would arrive in "two to four weeks, probably."

The woman said "probably?" and the employee did this thing with his face that was technically a smile but communicated something closer to existential surrender. I recognized that face. I have made that face. It's the face of someone who joined a rocket ship company and ended up working a parts counter with no parts.

What I Actually Want

I don't want Tesla to be Nordstrom. I don't need someone to hand me a sparkling water and call me sir. I just want to be able to reach a human being when my very expensive car stops working. I want the gap between "this company builds incredible technology" and "this company cannot manage a service appointment" to be smaller. Even a little smaller. Close it by ten percent and I'd probably stop writing things like this.

The weird part is that Tesla has all the data. They know where every car is. They know what every car is doing. They have more information about my driving habits than my wife does. They could build the best predictive service system in automotive history. They could make every other car company look like they're scheduling appointments with a fax machine.

They just... don't. They built a spaceship and staffed the help desk with a chatbot and a dream.

I'll still drive the car tomorrow. I'll still love the way it feels pulling away from a light. But I'll also know that if something goes wrong, my best option is to hope nothing goes wrong. And that's a strange relationship to have with something you genuinely love.

It's like dating someone who's brilliant and funny and kind but will absolutely not answer a text for three days. You stay. But you notice.