Tesla owner smashes windscreen over delayed delivery

A Tesla Model S owner smashed his car windscreen right after he picked it up over the weekend in Beijing to protest poor customer service from the luxury electric car maker and demanded that the head of Tesla China resolve his problem.

"I smashed the car mainly because Tesla delayed its delivery, which was not in line with the booking order," Yu Xinquan, founder and CEO of Inner Mongolia Langlaile E-commerce Limited Co, who is one of the first batch of Tesla Model S owners in China, told the Global Times Sunday.

Yu had previously come to Beijing in October 2013 to pay a deposit of 250,000 yuan ($39,867.6) for the Tesla Model S, but he didn't receive the car this April which the auto seller had promised.

Yu had come to Beijing on the weekend specifically to pick up his car from Tesla's garage facility. After smashing his car, Yu left it at the garage and returned to his hometown in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

"My request is to be able to talk to Tesla Vice President Veronica Wu who is in charge of Tesla's China business to fulfill the company's promise," Yu said.

Yu said a Tesla sales manager named Pu Yang had promised to give him a response on Monday. Calls to Pu Yang went unanswered by press time.

In addition to the delayed delivery, Yu said Tesla also didn't install a charging point for him as it had promised, but only delivered it to his home, which will require him to install it himself.

"Tesla didn't offer basic after-sales services and I always could not get through whenever I called the company hotline," said an angry Yu.

Yu also complained that the Tesla Model S had a hidden safety issue. Yu said another Tesla Model S owner had experienced a problem with his display screen as it stopped working several times when he drove his car from Beijing to Taiyuan in North China's Shanxi Province.

"The issues that the car owner complained about are inaccurate," a staff member at the Tesla experience store at Parkview Green shopping center in Beijing, who did not give his name, told the Global Times via phone Sunday, without providing further explanation.

Calls to the headquarters of Tesla China could not be reached by press time.

Editor-in-chief of industry Web portal auto.gasgoo.com Wu Shuocheng said Tesla will face big challenges if it cannot resolve issues like poor after-sale services.

"Tesla needs to allocate more resources including human resources in China."

Earlier in April 2014, Yu and 30 other Tesla Model S owners living outside Beijing and Shanghai, sent a letter through a lawyer to Tesla to complain about the delay. Some Tesla customers in Beijing and Shanghai received their cars on time.

After the angry customers protested for nearly two weeks, media reported that Tesla reached a consensus with some of the protesting customers.

Tesla spokesman Simon Sproule explained in April that the company delayed deliveries to customers outside of Beijing and Shanghai until June because of a lack of service centers and charging facilities in the places where they lived.