Cars and motorcycles have always been a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. I grew up dreaming for an E30 M3, 993 TT, or 22B. The Elise always interested me but being tall it was quickly crossed off my wish list the first time I sat in one and wasn’t able to maneuver the shifter under my leg to get it into first gear, let alone reverse. The electric Tesla Roadster sounded like an amazing alternative for gear heads concerned about petrol consumption but never made it onto my radar since it’s the same size as the Elise …then Tesla announced the “S,” a sedan version.
The Tesla Model S is an electric performance sedan which is obviously pretty unchartered territory in the automotive industry. Tesla is a new company so they’re starting from the ground up with design. Their vision is impressive but there have certainly been mixed reviews about the Tesla S – with the most recent being the now notorious controversy between the New York Times and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk. Libel and lawsuits over battery life aren’t the only areas that Tesla seems to be hitting some bugs in, though.
The auto blog Jalopnik just labeled the Model S as “The World’s Most Expensive Beta Test.” This prompts the question: Is it fair to your paying consumers to give them a beta product?
Sure, Google’s Gmail was technically in beta for years but not only was it free, it was also pretty polished, even in beta form. In contrast, the Tesla costs between $60,000 and $90,000 and has some serious bugs. Here are some examples of the bugs mentioned in Jalopik’s article:
- The touch-screen center console often doesn’t work right
- The trick door handles don’t work sometimes, and doors and the rear hatches open on their own
- They experience issues with power and charging
Sixty thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money for a car you might not be able to get into, that might not start, and might not have a functional dashboard. What does the uTest community think? Obviously we’d like to get a fleet of Tesla’s to test but what scenarios justify rolling out a beta product?
For more information on In-The-Wild testing, Jamie wrote a blog post earlier this week on “Why Testing In-The-Wild is Inevitable” and, if you’re Elon Musk, we have a free white paper on In-The-Wild Testing available for download.