A super weird story about Tesla

This is a super weird story about Tesla.

We bought a new Tesla from the Auckland dealership in August.

We traded in an older car with them, which they valued at $13,500.

They took the car, but they didn’t take the amount off the Tesla purchase – we paid them the full ~70K for the Tesla, and they promised they’d refund us the $13,500 within three weeks.

The money never showed up, and so I started trying to enquire about it about 8 weeks in.

I called a couple of times – and found they often don’t answer at all, even the sales line which you’d think would be picked up during normal business hours. You can leave a message but my messages haven’t ever been returned.

So I emailed the generic email which is oddly the only email address in all the documentation from the purchase. I eventually got a response from someone there, who said they’d follow up.

They came back to me a couple of weeks later and said they’d need bank proof to process the refund, and that it would take a further 3-5 weeks once they had the bank proof. This was now 10 weeks in.?

I'd already send the bank proof right back at the start - and asked why they hadn’t asked for the bank proof earlier if they thought they didn't have it. But re-sent them the proof anyway.

Then the line went dead.

No response from that email address since, after many requests for an update.

So I tried calling again. Again, usually no one picked up the phone, but occasionally someone would, and they said they didn’t know who they needed to speak to, but they promised to have someone call me that day.

This happened three times, but no one ever called back. In the last calls I’d asked to speak to someone senior, or have someone senior call me who had the power to sort it out. There are only 4 people who work at Tesla in NZ on Linked In – all obviously very junior people. And no information on the website of who the GM or similar is. Basically they’ve made it impossible to find out who to contact when there’s an issue like this.?

At this point I was feeling pretty bewildered – they’d taken our car and our money, and genuinely seemed like they were just not going to pay us.

I’ll note at this point that there was never a disagreement, an argument, any animosity that would give them reason to not want to call me – we’d bought a car, paid in full, and then the line went dead.

I kept calling and emailing with no responses. At one point I realised I’d been called by the salesperson who'd handled the sale, back when we were buying, and I still had his mobile number in my phone. I called him – no answer, and a voicemail message that said not to leave messages. I texted the number asking him to call me back – no response.

Eventually, 12 or so weeks in, I had a call from a young guy who said he was picking up the issue and that they still needed bank proof (which I’d already provided). I asked him could he please get someone senior to call me as he was just the messenger, and didn’t have the ability to put me on to anyone who could actually sort it or who I could ask what on earth was going on. But he promised to sort it out.

I supplied the bank proof again – this time a strange story that the bank account needed to be the same one that we’d paid for the Tesla from, not the one that we’d given them for the refund (just a different suffix). So I got them that, and the young guy promised he’d get it sorted, but I could hear in his voice that he wasn’t really sure what, if anything, would happen, and he obviously didn’t even know who would follow up or who I could contact.

And again, the line went dead. No follow up, no calls answered, no emails returned.

They took our car in August. It’s now mid-November.

At this point I don’t have anything left to do, and it seems super bizarre but I really think they’re just not going to pay us for the car they took, which is a really creepy feeling.

The Tesla is one of the biggest single purchases we’ve made, and hands down the worst, and strangest, customer service experience I’ve ever had.

I’m not really sure what to do next. What do you do when a global company takes $13,500 from you and just refuses to give it back?

UPDATE: The power of social media! Tesla NZ have transferred the money to us this afternoon, after much social media action, hearing about others who'd had the same experience, and involvement from a prominent journalist.

They promised to improve their process - the story is that everyone I called thought someone else was on it and mistakenly thought it was being resolved, and so didn't escalate the issue. *Slightly* suspicious given I'd been extremely clear to everyone I spoke to that it definitely wasn't being resolved and that I explicitly wanted it to be escalated, and they all assured me they understood and would do so.

But a result in the end - thank you David at Tesla NZ for resolving, and please Tesla (global) could you adjust your obviously obfuscatory mechanisms to limit customers' ability to raise issues, contact a support person (a local, human one), or chase up large sums of money which are in your best interests to hold and earn interest on for as long as possible - an especially pernicious and unnecessary tactic when your company is owned by the richest person in the world. Thanks!