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Opinion: Tesla has a service problem, and it needs to get addressed as soon as possible
Just recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was reminded of the fact that the company needs to expand its network of physical service centers. This is a point that needs to be highlighted these days, especially as Tesla’s vehicle production and deliveries reach new records. With Tesla poised to start producing vehicles by the millions in the near future, it is time for the company to acknowledge its service issues and ensure that its service network expansion sees the same level of dedication as its Supercharger Network ramp.
Tesla may be evolving into a robotics and AI company, but at the end of the day, it is also an electric car maker. And while EVs require far less service than their combustion engine-powered counterparts, they still need service and maintenance from time to time. This is especially true in cases of physical repairs such as the replacement of upper control arms, which are better suited for actual service centers.
It should be noted that while Tesla’s mobile service team is excellent and universally appreciated, they cannot address every single concern and repair. This could become a pain point for owners today, especially those who require repairs and maintenance that could not be accomplished by the mobile service team. Some Tesla owners have shared on social media that at times, they could end up traveling for hours just to get to the nearest service center. This system creates a negative ownership experience that could be detrimental to Tesla in the long run.
“Good Service” is Better Than “No Service” — At Least for Now
The company, after all, is producing vehicles at a scale that would have scared the pants off EV skeptics just a handful of years ago. Tesla will likely produce and deliver over a million vehicles per year within the next year or two, and by that time, the repair and maintenance needs of customers would likely be more substantial. A good portion of the company’s fleet would also be comprised of older vehicles then, some of which would likely require more maintenance and repairs.
The issue of the company’s lack of service centers has been brought up in past earnings calls, and most of the time, Tesla’s executives would respond by pointing to the growth of the company’s mobile service network, which could address an increasing number of repairs and issues from the comfort of owners’ homes or workplaces. Tesla also adopts the idea of the “best service” being “no service” at all. These goals would likely be attained in the future — especially as its factories become more automated and batteries become more advanced — but for now, Tesla has to focus on ensuring that existing customers, both new and old, are supported in the near-term.
Granted, the margin of error for physical service centers is substantial. There is a big human factor that determines if customers are provided a negative or positive experience during a service center visit, after all. This was highlighted recently by @JeffTutorials, the Model 3 owner Elon Musk recently responded to on Twitter, who reported that his experience with the company’s Princeton, NJ Tesla Service Center was nothing short of horrible due to the site’s staff. Such negative experiences could be prevented, however, provided that Tesla adopts strict policies for its service employees.
A $360 Billion Upside
Ultimately, there seems to be little downside to Tesla ramping its service centers at a similar pace as its Supercharger Network, which is already one of, if not the, best rapid charging system in the world. Apart from improving its customers’ overall ownership experience, expanding its service network would also allow Tesla to tap into a large, lucrative market. In Europe, for example, Tesla could breach the company car segment, which is worth $360 billion annually. Company cars are huge in Europe, with 60% of all new vehicle sales being made through corporate channels.
SAP SE, a German software maker and one of Europe’s largest tech companies, noted back in May that its employees are actually very interested in Tesla’s electric cars. And while it provides vehicles to its workers, SAP SE simply cannot commit to Teslas just yet because of the company’s poor service center network in the region. The same was true for chemicals giant BASF SE, which noted that it could not offer Teslas as a company car option for its 50,000 German employees until service centers are expanded.
It’s important to note is that improving service is not an “either/or” situation. Yes, mobile service could be ramped to address an increasing number of issues, but the company could also expand its physical service centers at the same time, and just as aggressively. Fortunately, Tesla does seem to have this in its plans, as confirmed by Elon Musk on Twitter. And if Tesla is indeed expediting its service center openings, then the company would effectively address one of its customers’ most persistent pain points.
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Plus, in the long-term, wouldn’t service centers be a good site for Tesla Bots to practice their physical work capabilities?
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
