Thousands of Tesla employees were blindsided by the company’s mass layoffs last week.
Workers were left in the dark, only to find out they were fired once their keycards no longer allowed them to get into the company’s buildings.
And while Tesla has already garnered a reputation for less-than-stellar customer service, the situation is only bound to get worse, The Independent reports, given the sheer scale of the layoffs, which affected about ten percent of its global workforce.
“The quality, at least in customer care, is going to get worse,” one person who was laid off told the newspaper. “It’s already pretty bad, with hour-long hold times and a skeleton crew of overworked agents… we needed more people, not fewer.”
Some customers have already seen the effects of this change, with the company’s service centers canceling seasonal tire swap appointments.
“They can’t honor them because they laid them off,” one redditor hypothesized.
Tesla’s unusual method of producing many cars only after receiving an order for them has resulted in workers simply standing out, The Independent reports, waiting for orders to come in.
But new orders are dropping significantly. The electric car manufacturer disappointed with its first-quarter earnings this year, alarming investors with worse-than-expected results headlined by a 20 percent quarter-over-quarter drop in deliveries.
The company’s shares are down about 44 percent so far this year — and investors are expecting those losses to grow, given a “nightmare” year ahead.
“There would be a lot of days where we would just stand there for three to four hours because we’d met our quota,” Deitrich Dickson, a laid off employee who worked on the Model 3 production line, told The Independent. “I think they over-hired because they were expecting to sell more cars.”
Numerous factors are contributing to Tesla’s hellish year, from falling overall demand for electric cars to an influx of cheaper Chinese alternatives. The company also has reportedly shifted its focus from a cheaper Model 2 vehicle to a “robotaxi,” despite plenty of controversy surrounding Tesla’s much-maligned driver assist software.
Just last week, the company had to recall every single Cyberrtuck that had been sold in the US over a design flaw that can cause the massive pickup’s accelerator pedal to get stuck down — a massive lapse in safety that could’ve easily led to somebody getting hurt.
Meanwhile, Tesla is in panic mode, slashing prices yet again for both its cars and the company’s Full Self-Driving feature to stave off waning enthusiasm for the brand.
Other experts have pointed the finger squarely at the company’s mercurial CEO Elon Musk, whose abhorrent behavior has alienated a huge swathe of Tesla’s potential customer base.
While stiffing laid-off employees by paying out “incorrectly low” severance packages, Musk has been pushing hard to reinstate a thrown-out $56 billion pay package for himself, going as far as to launch an entire website designed to convince other shareholders of the plan.
And that’s not to mention his incredibly problematic antics that have tarnished the company’s reputation.
“He’s trashed the Tesla brand,” investment management CEO and noted Tesla bull Ross Gerber told The Independent. “Is there any group of people that he hasn’t insulted other than white people…? Only him and Kanye West have reached this level of people’s distaste for him.”
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