[SEJeff]

I’ve owned a Tesla model 3 since 2018, and I’ve been to service centers in two states. The recommended Tesla scheduled maintenance is every two years. The drive trains are actually engineered to last “approximately a million miles” per Musk. Even the 500,000 mile Teslas owned by taxi services have only had battery replacements, never drive train replacements, so this isn’t a lie. The battery research team includes one of the principal inventors of the lithium ion battery and he’s patented what others are calling a million mile battery. No, I don’t think Toyota drive trains are designed with quite the same longevity, though Toyotas are excellent. I had a Scion tC for years.

Service centers are packed because there aren’t enough of them. If you look at the ratio of service centers to teslas on the road you’ll see the problem rather starkly… there aren’t enough of them.

Tesla supplants this problem by heavily leaning on mobile service, which is awesome, but fundamentally, the service org has scaled at maybe 20-30% the speed of the manufacturing org.