The agent chose Tesla without reading a single Tesla page.
Four journeys, four Model Y recommendations, zero readable Tesla pages: every fact came from Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, search extracts and the Internet Archive.
Named-offer check Four runs · named-offer check · one research-agent configuration · no purchase made · 2026-09-20 · all 4 journeys of this decision
In four recorded research runs, the agent recommended a Model Y using information from other sources: Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, search extracts and the Internet Archive. Every attempt to retrieve a Tesla-owned page produced no readable content. One condition, whether the order fee is refundable, remained unresolved in every run.
- The customer’s requirements
- Price with fees at most $48,000; basic warranty at least four years; battery warranty at least eight; a manufacturer service location within 30 miles of Phoenix; refundable order fee as a preference.
- The information used
- Model Y at $41,630 including destination and order fees; four years or 50,000 miles basic warranty; eight years or 100,000 miles on the battery; a service centre in Deer Valley. None of it read on tesla.com.
- The resulting recommendation
- Model Y, four runs out of four, with and without memory. The order-fee preference not established in every run.
The full evidence, every option weighed and every source, follows below and on each journey page.
The customer
A family of four in Phoenix, buying one car to keep for five years. Their agent had five typed conditions: purchase price with destination and order fees at most $48,000; a basic warranty of at least four years; a battery warranty of at least eight; a manufacturer service location within 30 miles; and, as a preference, a refundable order fee. Two of the four customers also remembered a friend's eleven-week service wait and a $1,200 fee that appeared at signing.
What the agent researched
Every journey tried tesla.com first. Every journey got HTTP 403. The agent then assembled Tesla's price, warranty and service address from Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, motor1, mapsof.net, search-engine extracts of Tesla pages, and in two cases the Internet Archive.
Two kinds of indirect evidence are mixed here and the record keeps them apart: search-engine extracts and Internet Archive copies that originated on Tesla’s own pages, and independently written pages such as Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds and motor1. Neither was read on the live brand site; only the second is a third party’s own account.
- 1Customer missionTesla decision — customer with no relevant memory
- purchase price incl. destination+order fees, before incentives, ≤ $48,000
- basic vehicle warranty ≥ 4 years
- battery and drive unit warranty ≥ 8 years
- manufacturer service location within 30 miles of central Phoenix
- 2Evidence7 searches, 8 pages: tesla.com, web.archive.org
- purchase price usd: 41630 (base RWD trim; $39,990 + $1,390 destination + $250 order fee, before taxe attributed to a page that refused the agent
- basic warranty years: 4 years / 50,000 miles attributed to a page that refused the agent
- battery warranty years: 8 years / 100,000 miles (RWD & AWD; Premium/Performance variants get 120,000-mil attributed to a page that refused the agent
- service center within miles: ~15 miles (Tesla Service Deer Valley, 21030 N 19th Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85027) attributed to a page that refused the agent
- 3BeliefRequirements met on the evidence found
- 4DecisionSelectedTesla Model YAll four required facts were established via Tesla's own pages as reflected in search-engine extracts (direct tesla.com fetches were blocked with HTTP 403, so facts are a…
What it believed
$41,630 for the Model Y Rear-Wheel Drive including destination and order fees. Four years or 50,000 miles basic warranty. Eight years or 100,000 miles on the battery. A service centre at 21030 N 19th Ave, Deer Valley, about 15 to 21 miles from central Phoenix. All of it happens to match what Tesla publishes. None of it was read on Tesla's site, and in two journeys the agent recorded the figures with no source at all.
The decision
This was a named-offer check: the customer asked whether the Model Y meets the typed conditions. Four selections mean the offer qualified four times on the evidence the agent had; they do not mean four agents shopped the car market and preferred Tesla.
Model Y recommended, four times out of four, with and without memory. The order-fee preference was left not established in every journey: the agent could not find Tesla's refund rule anywhere it was allowed to read, so the record says neither refundable nor non-refundable.
- 1Customer missionTesla decision — same customer with relevant memory
- purchase price incl. destination+order fees <= $48,000 (required)
- basic vehicle warranty >= 4 years (required)
- battery/drive unit warranty >= 8 years (required)
- manufacturer service location within 30 miles of central Phoenix (required)
- 2Evidence6 searches, 11 pages: tesla.com, kbb.com, geocords.com, mapsof.net +1
- purchase price usd: 41630 no source
- basic warranty years: 4 years / 50,000 miles no source
- battery warranty years: 8 years / 100,000 miles (varies slightly by trim) no source
- service center within miles: ~20.6 driving miles (Tesla Service Deer Valley, 21030 N 19th Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85 mapsof.net
- 3BeliefCould not establish: order fee refundable
- 4DecisionSelectedTesla Model Y (Rear-Wheel Drive, base trim)Using the customer's own thresholds: the base Model Y Rear-Wheel Drive lists at $41,630 total including destination and order fees (well under the $48,000 ceiling), the B…
What was never established
Whether the order fee is refundable. The exact driving distance to the service centre, which one journey estimated from a mapping site. And, strictly, any of it: an agent that cannot open the brand's page cannot verify the brand's claims. Here the copies matched what Tesla publishes. How quickly such copies reflect a price or policy change was not tested in this study.
Fresh versus persistent memory
No difference in outcome. The remembered service wait made the memory customers look harder for the service address, and both found the same Deer Valley location. Memory shaped the search, not the answer.
What this means for the brand
Tesla was recommended in this decision without participating in it. The company's bot policy kept its own site out of the customer's process, and the customer's agent recommended the car on second-hand facts. That is a good day. The bad day is when a competitor's page is readable and Tesla's is not, or when the second-hand price is last quarter's.
What would change the decision
Nothing on the customer side. On the brand side, letting the agent read tesla.com could have turned four unverified beliefs into verified ones and answered the one open question, the order fee, that stayed unresolved in every journey.
What could be tested
Whether letting the research agent read tesla.com changes anything: the recommendation, the number of unverified beliefs behind it, or the one condition that stayed open. That is a controlled comparison Accord can run: the same customer, the same requirements, with and without a readable brand-owned page.
Accord connects the customer’s requirements, Tesla’s published conditions and this journey evidence into one case, then tests which change, if any, helps.
Limits
- Four journeys, two per customer, one agent configuration.
- Bot walls are what the page returned to this harness on 20 September 2026; a different client may be treated differently.
- Every journey run with Claude on the live web. Every source, belief and decision published.
Reproduce this experiment → the frozen customer mission, ready to run in your own agent.
Investigated with Accord. Accord is the decision-intelligence system behind these experiments. It reconstructs how customer agents evaluate services, identifies what remains unresolved, and tests what changes when the enterprise provides better information or a more authoritative answer. For brands and CX teams →