Elon Musk revealed that he is working to make Tesla’s vehicles available for same-hour service as often as possible by employing “Formula 1 pit crew techniques.”
“Excited to work with Tesla Service to enable same-hour service as often as possible! Applying Formula 1 pit crew techniques to Teslas,” Musk Tweeted.
Tesla has already announced a similar initiative. In 2015, Tesla hired Kenny Handkammer, a former Red Bull Racing head technician, as its Global Director of Service Innovation, Electrek reported.
One of the first things he implemented was F1-inspired ‘fast lanes’ at service centers to reduce wait times. Handkammer departed Tesla in 2017 and is now the worldwide technical service and operations director of Lucid Motors.
This recent announcement comes after Tesla had pledged a renewed focus on service in recent months. Musk indicated in June that Tesla is working on service in North America, intending to make the majority of appointments for same-day repairs. The company wants to schedule the bulk of appointments for same-day repairs. As previously stated, it is critical since Tesla’s client fleet is expanding faster than its support infrastructure. Musk did not, however, go into detail about how Tesla plans to do this.
So because the company was assigning untrained workers from other areas to work on automobiles, the service problem at Tesla was far worse than we initially expected.
“I believe we still have a relatively conventional approach to servicing, even though we use the vehicle app. So we definitely have better servicing than the rest of the industry, but I really want Tesla to look at how we can revolutionize service and, I don’t know, make it ten times better than the rest of the industry,” Musk said at a company-wide meeting a week later, when an employee wondered aloud.
Musk added that one of the objectives is to have same-day repairs performed on two-thirds of appointments. According to him, Tesla has evaluated all repair data and believes that 95% of repairs may be finished the same day if components are available at the service centers.
Musk indicated that he wants Tesla to reach this aim by having larger service centers and a higher level of specialization. Each service center will have service bays for carrying out particular procedures. The newly announced “Formula 1 pit crew techniques” seem to apply to the new models.