General Motors has a “new business” and that’s servicing Tesla electric vehicles at its dealerships. Since 2021, GM claims that its dealers have fixed over 11,000 Tesla EVs across the nation. The business is a growing one it says and comes at a time when Tesla is still fine-tuning its own service model.
During the Detroit carmaker’s Investor Day on Thursday in New York City, General Motors revealed a new source of income; fixing Teslas. GM President Mark Reuss dropped that bombshell while talking to investors and analysts. “That’s a growing business for us,” he said before adding that “I gotta say it’s a new business.”
Servicing Tesla vehicles is certainly unexpected but it’s easy to see the benefit for both sides. General Motors gets a stream of revenue and income that it wasn’t planning on. From the customer standpoint, they’re not having to wait on what can be lengthy turnaround times for service through Tesla itself.
Read: Elon Musk Admits He Made Decisions At Tesla Without Board Approval
As Barrons rightly points out, Tesla doesn’t have a network of dealers. While it does have its own service centers, they aren’t as numerous as GM dealers across the nation. That, in part, may be one reason that many Tesla customers have reported long wait times for service appointments.
It’s worth noting that Reuss didn’t go into detail about exactly what services GM Dealers are performing on Tesla vehicles – though, we’ve reached out to GM for more information and will update this story if we hear back.
We also don’t know how many are no longer under warranty with Tesla. In addition, many deeper functions are things that only Tesla service centers can affect. But that doesn’t mean that this revenue stream isn’t a big win for both sides.
Having the ability to get service completed in a single day impacts customer satisfaction in a large way. Surely, that’s why Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a large push towards improving the service experience for customers earlier this year. Now, with his attention split even further by Twitter, it’ll be interesting to track how much Tesla’s service improves in 2023. Either way, the gap between the two automakers might be shrinking.
