Buying a Tesla is not like buying a normal car, in a lot of different ways. I figured the purchase itself might be worth a separate post.
I have the benefit of having a quasi-local Tesla dealer, and they have stuff on hand to test drive, and were doing well with the touchless/masked/distanced test drives, so there's not a whole lot to say there. I pre-scheduled the test drives on their website (scheduled both for the same time, and they just asked which car I wanted to start with when I got there). The sales manager I was working with gave the kids both scale models of the Model 3 to take home, which was cool. Also I was amused that because the Jeep was in the shop, I ended up taking the 23 year old beater pickup to the middle of fancy-pants Tyson's Corner. But I digress...
While I could have put my order in at the showroom, I wasn't 100% decided yet, so I told the sales folks that I'd do it online. It's a completely unremarkable process that feels exactly like every other thing you've ever ordered online. You create a Tesla account, and if you have a friend who has a Tesla, you go in via their referral code (here's mine!) so that you both get some perks (we both got 1000 miles of free supercharging) tick a few boxes for the various options you want for your car, enter some information, give them a credit card for the $100 nonrefundable deposit, and you're done. The site said approximately 6 weeks to delivery, but nothing more specific than that.
Worth noting that I did consider a lease, since in a lot of ways this is less like buying a car and more like buying a new phone, in that the technology moves so fast that you're mostly trying to avoid it being obsoleted by the newer, slightly shinier version the minute you get it in your hot little hands. However, Tesla's leases have been a little weird at various points. About 5 years ago, when I was considering buying a Model S, there was no lease program at all. The closest they had was a guaranteed re-purchase price, where at the end of 3 years, you could sell the car back to them at a pre-agreed price. However, unlike a lease, where you're financing the difference between the purchase price and residual value, which makes the payments cheaper, you still had to finance the whole purchase price, eliminating the primary benefit of a lease. They did eventually add a real lease program, but I was no longer in the market for a car by then. The Model 3/Y have a lease option, but when we were discussing it, the sales person said that the lease for Model 3 and Y had an important caveat - you can not buy out the car at the end of the lease. You have to give it back. This is because right now, Tesla believes that they will be at a point when these things start coming back from their leases that they'll want a ready supply of vehicles to make into an autonomous taxi fleet (or perhaps a zipcar style "car as a service" model). Interesting gamble, but ultimately the combination of the equity in my Jeep and favorable financing made a lease unnecessary to get my payments where I wanted them, so I decided not to fool with that just in case I wanted to hang on to this thing longer than 3 years or have equity to trade up at some point.
Once the order is accepted, they take you through some additional steps, including the option to fill out a credit application for their financing, which I did because their offered 2.3% for 72 mo. was as good as anywhere else I could find, the delivery info (who to put on the registration, proof of insurance, where you're taking delivery, etc) and the option to trade in a vehicle.
When the credit application is approved (usually less than 24 hours), then you have the option to lock in the final financing terms. You don't have to do it immediately, but it appears (more on this later) that Tesla doesn't consider the order complete and put you in line for an actual car until you complete this, and that means you have to know how much you want to finance vs what you're paying on delivery. If you're wrangling a trade, this requires some guesswork. I went to the usual "what's my car worth" sites and got an average price and deducted that much from my purchase price to figure out my amount to finance.
The trade-in process is probably the only part of this that may be more trouble than it's worth. Tesla has no used car business, so trades are going directly to the auction, and it's clear they're mostly doing it for convenience. While you can take your vehicle to be evaluated for trade-in value at the dealer, they offer an online version too. I'm not sure if that's a function of trying to reduce contact due to COVID or of the fact that not everyone has a dealer nearby, or just to make it easier, but anyway... You put in your VIN, and they want pictures of each side of the vehicle's exterior, along with a picture of the front seats from the passenger side door, and a picture of the odometer. The first problem is that the picture upload function limits the size to 4MB per picture, which is smaller than the pictures your average smartphone camera produces anymore, and your average person may not know how to reduce the size of their pictures, so Tesla's website really should handle this itself. Second problem is that I was taking pictures in my garage, because it was raining, and couldn't fit the whole car in the picture straight on, so they rejected my pictures. I didn't get email about this, one of their folks called me to tell me, and I mentioned that part of the problem was the size limit, and he gave me an email address to send the updated pictures to, assuring me that he'd associate them with my account, but saying that as of right now, the value on the Jeep was probably around $18K. I'd read that Tesla would match the value from an official Carmax offer, so I mentioned that I'd probably be doing that, and he told me that they've stopped matching Carmax, so if I thought I'd get a better price there, I should deal with them directly. I didn't hear anything further after I emailed him new pictures, so I assumed things were ok. But I got a phone call about 3 weeks later, asking if I could take delivery before the end of the month/quarter and take advantage of an incentive to get another 1000 miles free Supercharging. During this call, the person I was working with (different person than before) revealed that rather than this being a call to tell me my car was ready, because my trade-in evaluation wasn't completed, my order was essentially stalled. I pointed them to the person I had emailed updated pictures to previously, but also told them that it was likely I'd cancel the trade-in completely, but I needed some sort of assurance that they actually had a car ready for me before I got rid of my current vehicle. They couldn't give me a guarantee, but said that they were trying very hard to fulfill all open orders before the end of the quarter. I realized that I didn't really need the Jeep even if the delivery slipped a couple of weeks, so I went to Carmax the following weekend, they offered me $20K, so I sold it to them that day. While I was waiting for Carmax to cut me a check, I went into Tesla's system and cancelled the trade-in, and less than 24 hours later, I got a text asking to schedule my delivery.
TL;DR unless you really have to do trade-in via Tesla, because you can't work out the logistics of selling your current car via another method, you're better off avoiding that part.
Once you've been assigned a vehicle, they contact you to schedule delivery. Before delivery, you have to have proof of insurance uploaded. In some states, they require the actual VIN to be on the policy by then, in VA, I just have to have proof of an active policy, and have it officially on your insurance by the day you drive it home. You also have the option to pay off your balance, so that the day of delivery, you inspect the vehicle, they activate it and associate it with your Tesla account and phone, they put license plates on it, and off you go. Instead of having to muck about with cashier's checks, they support ACH transfers, which is nice.
One other nice little detail about the delivery process - I was in a situation where I didn't have anyone available to drop me off at the Tesla dealer on a Tuesday afternoon when my delivery was scheduled. When Tesla's representative called to confirm delivery time and tell me where to go when I got there, I asked where they wanted me to park my truck since I was going to have to drive it up there, leave it overnight, and then get a ride back to retrieve it the next day. "Oh, you don't have to do that... we'll just set up an Uber to pick you up from your house and bring you to the dealer, if that's ok with you..." So Tesla paid for my ride to the dealer.
I was prepared to find all sorts of fit and finish issues on my initial delivery inspection, because I had seen all of these videos and pictures online of early delivery Model Ys where it was clear they hadn't gotten the bugs worked out of assembly yet, but mine was pleasantly devoid of those. Panel gaps were consistent, and I didn't find any noticeable defects in paint, trim, or fit and finish generally. Six months appears to have made a significant difference in that regard.
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