Photo: Tesla Motors
For some odd reason, Tesla Motors has recently made some changes to its service plans, which will surely impact current and future Tesla owners in a negative way.
The smaller change concerns a slight increase in the pricing for the two Tesla Motors service plans for Model S and Model X owners. As before, the cars will need to be serviced either annually or every 12,500 miles, but the prepaid four-year service plan will now cost $2,100 instead of $1,900, while the eight-year plan will go for $4,000 instead of $3,800.
What do you get for those extra $200, you ask? Nothing, actually, not to mention that the prepaid yearly maintenance no longer includes wheel alignments.
The biggest and weirdest change in Tesla's service plans involves those multi-year extended warranties that you can buy. Apparently, they are no longer transferable when selling the car, which is bound to hit second-hand prices in a pretty big way.
Neither the extended warranty nor the prepaid service plans mentioned above are transferable to a new owner, although it seems that owners of said plans can cancel and get a reimbursement if they decide to sell the car.
“Tesla has an affluent customer base, and these buyers rarely keep a car longer than 4 years or 50,000 miles,” Karl Brauer, automotive industry analyst for Kelley Blue Book, told The Verge. “By eliminating the warranty transfer option Tesla has largely neutralized the benefits of its extended warranty coverage. It lets Tesla technically offer longer vehicle coverage while exposing the automaker to minimal real-world cost increases... Bottom line, if you can't transfer the warranty, your options as a buyer are reduced.”
We'll wait for an official confirmation of the reasons behind these actions from either a Tesla spokesperson or Elon Musk himself, but at first glance it looks like the Model S and Model X will get hit pretty hard as far as their resale value is concerned in the following years.
What do you get for those extra $200, you ask? Nothing, actually, not to mention that the prepaid yearly maintenance no longer includes wheel alignments.
The biggest and weirdest change in Tesla's service plans involves those multi-year extended warranties that you can buy. Apparently, they are no longer transferable when selling the car, which is bound to hit second-hand prices in a pretty big way.
Neither the extended warranty nor the prepaid service plans mentioned above are transferable to a new owner, although it seems that owners of said plans can cancel and get a reimbursement if they decide to sell the car.
“Tesla has an affluent customer base, and these buyers rarely keep a car longer than 4 years or 50,000 miles,” Karl Brauer, automotive industry analyst for Kelley Blue Book, told The Verge. “By eliminating the warranty transfer option Tesla has largely neutralized the benefits of its extended warranty coverage. It lets Tesla technically offer longer vehicle coverage while exposing the automaker to minimal real-world cost increases... Bottom line, if you can't transfer the warranty, your options as a buyer are reduced.”
We'll wait for an official confirmation of the reasons behind these actions from either a Tesla spokesperson or Elon Musk himself, but at first glance it looks like the Model S and Model X will get hit pretty hard as far as their resale value is concerned in the following years.
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