Yeah, so, given that I'm not that active on Facebook any more and I know what would happen if I posted this there, figured I'll add to the website forum content that one or two others may see, just as a form of, shall we say, venting.

As a preamble, I'm still fully of the mind that every service center is fine, but there are certainly going to be examples of less than desirable service. There are many things outside of their and our control, so the important thing is to not expect to be treated like royalty no matter how much you paid for your vehicle, understand humans make mistakes up and down the supply chain, and sometimes folks just have a bad day.

I've been to Owings Mills, Rockville (old location), and Silver Spring and am not going to say avoid any of them. I can certainly say I've been to these locations more than I should, as Tesla still hasn't quite figured out how to get their build quality to where it needs to be, but that's another topic for another day.

My saga with Silver Spring lately has made me consider maybe not using them again, though -- again, this is not recommending everyone not use it, but my personal experience has not been great. No one there's been mean or unprofessional, staff has always been pleasant to work with. But they gotta follow that up with being able to fix my problem.

It's a relatively minor one, but it started after the first flub on their end. Last year, my steering column on my 2024 Model 3 Highland started vibrating when it moved for profile changes in a way that strongly suggested failure was going to happen sooner or later; the service center agreed and went to replace it on a Friday.

(They were also going to reattach the frunk wire that they forgot to do when they installed my HomeLink kit, so, not getting things right has been going almost ever since I picked up my Highland from them end of March 2024...)

Except they were busy (they're always busy) and the assigned guy to do it apparently didn't get to it until late enough in the day that, despite my telling the service staff to not even start if it wasn't going to be done in time because I needed the car, he started and left before completing, leaving my car partially disassembled and without a steering column.

I was not happy that the message I sent did not make it to, or was ignored by, the technician, but I am within walking distance and they said it'd be done Saturday as they were working that morning to help with the overload of work.

Saturday, the app says the car will be ready by noon, so I start walking at 1115 (it's a 45 minute walk). After I had left, they updated the status to say it'll be ready by 6PM on Saturday. Neat trick as they close at noon on Saturday, and weren't there when I got there a bit before noon. Thankfully, one of the sales guys there who was looking into WTF [my words], found a loaner for me.

My car was ready Monday morning, and they were very apologetic. Minor inconvenience to have to take off work to do this (at the time I was an hourly contractor, so if I didn't work, I didn't get paid, but that could easily be made up by working later).

Around that time, and this is my impression as I have no data to back this up, voice commands started to get a little finicky. When I went to send a text, it would get that I wanted to send a text, but when it was time to start listening to what I wanted to send after telling it which number to send it to (still a pet peeve of mine: doesn't the Tesla software know which numbers are tagged as mobile vs. home or work?), it would just stop listening. Music would start playing, but the prompt was there as if it was trying to listen. And once it did that, it would continue doing that until I got out of the car.

Took it back to Silver Spring later, and they agreed with my suggestion that maybe a cable was not attached properly or otherwise damaged in the steering column. They found proof of that and resolved it, but it did not resolve my issue.

Try #2 was roughly a month later, where they went to replace something in the center console. And they did, but it still didn't resolve the issue that they could clearly reproduce by now (I sent them a video and screen shots of the error messages; it was clearly a hardware issue as it survived many firmware updates). I do not blame them for try #2, as that went fine and was a short wait. But it's frustrating that this problem persisted past then.

Try #3 was just this past Friday, where they ordered a new microphone as that was the latest possible culprit. My two to three hour wait turned into dropping it off to be picked up by end of day (with me stressing that end of day thing and not to start if it can't be done in time, again), so my wife gave me a ride home and I had work to do anyway.

Around 4PM, the service manager sent me a message, they ordered the wrong part. I wasn't aware this was even possible, but, apparently it still is.

At least they left the fully assembled vehicle in the parking lot, but I told them the app was still in Service Mode, please fix that. (One of the earlier visits for another new vehicle cosmetic defect in 2024 had the app still displaying service mode but not displaying service mode in the car, so it would not lock, which required them flipping a bit on their end to resolve.)

No response. I got there after my last call of the day and my wife dropping me off around 5:45. Service folks left at 5. I walked with a very unhappy look on my face into the sales area, and one of the guys there happily offered to show me how to take the car out of service mode. I said I knew how to do that, hadn't tried it yet, but the last time it needed someone in the service center to handle it.

Thankfully taking the car out of service mode took the app out, so that was not an issue. And the service manager took my strong suggestion of making the next attempt a mobile visit, scheduling still TBD.

But... damn. This is way more frustrating than it needs to be.