Imagine you’re a car owner for whom money were no object, or not much of one, but even so, you couldn’t get anything fixed locally. To have routine maintenance on a car, for example, you either had to travel several countries away or rely on someone closer who wasn’t really authorized to work on your expensive, very high-tech vehicle. That wouldn’t feel all that great, but you might go ahead and get the car anyway and take your chances. Or, you could do what an enthusiastic group of Tesla owners in the UAE did, and appeal directly to the manufacturer, as reported in Electrek.
The owner group is specifically appealing to Tesla to open service centers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In fact, in order to even buy their Teslas the group’s members had to travel to other countries or use brokering services to have their cars imported to the UAE. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has said in the past that the company will expand to the Middle East by the end of this year, but has not named any particular country. Certainly the UAE has plenty of people with the financial means to buy Teslas if the cars were available.
There are no Tesla stores, service centers, or Superchargers anywhere in the UAE, so anyone in country who buys a Tesla today will have to seek non-Tesla service and support. Market demand, along with Tesla’s goal to increase production of all models, is likely to draw the company to the country. A group of Tesla Model S owners met at a mall in Abu Dhabi and in the process made an impressive and perhaps persuasive video. As Electrek commented, perhaps the UAE owners were inspired by a similar appeal by Tesla owners in Portugal in May who made their own video.
Perhaps this will be the way Tesla will expand in other countries: wait until enough enthusiastic owners make an impressive video plea that’s also a powerful marketing piece.
