Tesla is expanding service at ‘max speed,’ says Elon Musk

CEO Elon Musk says that Tesla is now expanding its service presence and capacity at “max speed” as the global fleet is rapidly growing.

Over the last two years, Tesla significantly increased its production capacity and more than doubled the size of its fleet.

However, its service capacity hasn’t kept up with the pace of production, and it created some friction as wait times for service increased.

Norway is Tesla’s biggest market per capita, and we reported last year on a difficult service situation in the market, which we described as “a scary glimpse at the potential future in other markets” as the Model 3 grows Tesla’s fleet rapidly around the world.

After our report, Tesla acknowledged the issues and said that it was addressing them.

Recently, Tesla has made several statements about expanding service after CEO Elon Musk admitted a “foolish oversight” of Tesla’s service coverage and plans to open many more service centers around the world.

Today, Musk said that that the expansion of Tesla’s service is now at “max speed,” and owners can expect more service centers in Europe:

Service center expansion is at max speed, so yes

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2019

Last month, Tesla announced more than 30 new service centers opening, and they have many more planned for the coming months.

Only a few are planned in North America, but with the arrival of the Model 3 in Europe, Tesla is planning dozens of new service centers in the market (upcoming new centers in gray and existing ones in red):

Ultimately, Musk said that Tesla aims to make its vehicles so reliable that it will greatly reduce the workload on its service centers and help with the performance of the service around the world.

However, they are not quite there yet, so they need to improve service capacity with more service centers.

Musk noted that he believes the centers are also one of Tesla’s biggest assets to drive demand.

People feel more comfortable buying cars if they have a Tesla service center within a reasonable distance, and therefore, the CEO says that expanding service centers and the Supercharger network is going to help Tesla reach more customers.