Washing the cars has been a problem too. From the Reuters report:
> Lundeen said in an interview that a Tesla service manager told him that a power-steering connector had corroded. The manager said the likely cause was a car wash, which he described as a known problem.
Lundeen paid $4,400 to replace the steering rack and a wiring harness.
“This is the only car that I’ve ever heard of where a car wash can damage the wiring,” Lundeen recalled telling the manager.
Lundeen said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”
I’m a bit surprised tesla managed to get the guy with 115 miles on the car to pay for the collapsed suspension. Maybe they don’t have lemon laws there?
I hoping a class action lawsuit more than covers these peoples’ expenses.
A fool and his money are quickly separated. The guy probably didn't educate himself as a consumer and did not want to put more effort into chasing Tesla to uphold their legal commitments. Perhaps he read about https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/5/21502379/tesla-modely-roo... and decided to take the loss and move on.
Tesla's target demographics often skew towards those that are well to do financially, a good subset of which are not native. This is an easier to abuse subset of the population as they are not clued into how to use their state Attorney General to push Tesla to make it right, or use the other legal avenues available.
I suppose someone who's done the research wouldn't buy a Tesla in the first place...
A bit like Nigerian spammers and phishers having sloppy writing, which is (either by design or not) a filter so only the less mentally able readers would fall into their net by responding.
Lots of people have no issues with their Tesla, just as other car makers put out some duds and inconsistent results. There is no perfect car to buy. That’s why we have warranties.
The fact that Tesla requested payment and the owner paid strongly suggests that the owner had reason to believe — rightly or wrongly — their actions to be the root cause of the failure.
Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
> The suspension collapse in Jain’s car fortunately occurred at low speed. It was nonetheless shocking in a car he had owned for less than 24 hours. The automaker told him the suspension collapse was caused by the separation of a lower control arm from the steering knuckle, which connects to the wheel assembly. Jain expected Tesla to cover the damage.
A Tesla Service representative had texted Jain that an initial inspection found “no evidence of any external damage” that caused the incident and implied Tesla would pay for the repairs, according to a copy of the text Jain provided to Reuters.
About a week later, Tesla sent Jain a letter denying responsibility, saying it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
Jain said he was the only driver of the car during the one day he owned it and hadn’t had an accident before the suspension failure. “I was like, ‘Bloody hell, how can metal just snap like that when I know for sure the car has not hit anything?’” he said.
The repair took about three months. Jain paid a deductible of about $1,250 to have the work covered by his insurance company, which after the claim hiked his rates sharply on another car he owned, he said.
Fed up with the ordeal, Jain sold the repaired Tesla – for about $10,000 less than the $55,000 he paid for it.
> [Tesla said] it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
And then Jain ended up paying the bill. That is a critically important data point which _suggests that he had reason to believe_ his actions caused the damage. I repeat: Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
It's possible that Jain didn't damage the car. But it's also possible that he did, and this damage was immediately apparent the moment that a technician lifted the car for a proper inspection. We don't know anything about the initial inspection which led to the interim diagnosis of manufacturing defect. It might have been a guess by someone who didn't even lay eyes on the car.
> That is a critically important data point which _suggests that he had reason to believe_ his actions caused the damage.
No, all it suggests is that he didn't know how to stand up for himself. He went along with allowing his insurance to pay for it.
To quote the Reuters report again:
> Jain is one of tens of thousands of Tesla owners who have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts, according to a Reuters review of thousands of Tesla documents. The chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe, according to the records and interviews with more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians.
People struggle to integrate what's true. Take you, for example. You can't get your mind around the idea that Tesla is in fact a grubby company that lies routinely. Tesla keeps lying because it can rely on people like you who simply refuse to believe that Tesla lies.
Tesla lies about full self-driving. Look, in 2016 Tesla said "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie : https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
It’s quite possible you’re right. It might even be likely. But likely isn’t knowing. This wouldn’t be the first story on the internet without all the facts. I can’t imagine many people would walk away from $12k so easily. Also, why would the insurance pay for it? They’d tell him it’s under warranty and get Tesla to pay for it.
Insurance companies send a claims adjuster to inspect it themselves. They aren’t just going to fix your car unless they think it’s covered because of some type of accident. It sounds like they agreed with Tesla at their expense.
Either that, or Tesla service technicians have earned a reputation of trustworthiness among insurance providers. (Which I'm fairly certain is not the case.)
Look mate, we get it. Believing this fits your preconceptions as Hacker News' most obsessive and prolific hater of Tesla and Musk. In your view, anything bad that happens is Musk's fault. In your view, every single one of the million Tesla customers only ever tell the truth. It's the worst company on the planet exclusively selling cars to the most honest people who ever lived. That's your simple reality of it.
The obvious first thing, if you genuinely believe a vehicle manufacturer is lying to you, is get it inspected by an independent third party. It's a suspension arm, after all. Any decent mechanic could assess it.
I have no idea about what actually happened here. But the part of the story which makes me slightly more inclined to believe the Tesla service technician is that they did initially class it as a manufacturing defect prior to proper inspection. This demonstrates a willingness to accept blame. It was only after a proper inspection that it was re-classed as customer caused. If blaming customers for manufacturing defects was company policy, that's not how it would have played out.
> If blaming customers for manufacturing defects was company policy, that's not how it would have played out.
Your Beliefs don't matter.
To quote the Reuters article yet again:
> The control-arm problem continued for years, across Tesla’s model lineup. The automaker replaced front upper control arms on about 120,000 cars globally from January 2021 through March 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of repair records included in the Tesla documents. Most of the replacements came on the Model 3, Tesla’s least expensive vehicle. Many of the customer complaints were for noise.
And:
> Former service managers and technicians in Norway, the country with the most Teslas per capita, said in interviews that they were inundated with angry customers complaining of early control-arm failures. They said that tension increased as the automaker, starting in 2017, told service employees to push the cost of the frequent and repeated failures onto customers to cut warranty and goodwill repair costs.
One manager said he was forced out after resisting the company’s push to blame customers for the failures of faulty control arms. “I said: ‘Now, we have to quit talking bullshit,’” he recalled. A service technician said he started in 2018 and quit a year later over the issue. “I wasn’t doing anything else than just constantly changing those control arms,” he said.
And on half shaft failures:
> One repair analysis showed the company replaced nearly 66,000 half shafts between January 2021 and March 2022. Customers paid for about 10% of those repairs.
> More than one engineer made a point of saying the issue had nothing to do with damage caused by customers. Engineer Anastasia Skolariki, who was troubleshooting repair problems and customer complaints for Tesla in Europe, wrote in May 2020 to other engineers and technicians that the problem was a design issue “and not abusive behavior from the customer side.” The company needed to cover repairs for cars under warranty, she said, “no matter how many times the vehicle comes to Service with the same issue.”
And here's an exciting half shaft failure:
> In 2019, a Tesla engineer in Shanghai flagged a failure on a brand-new Model S with 160 kilometers (99 miles) on it. The car’s rear left half shaft had broken into three pieces when the owner stepped on the accelerator; one of the pieces pierced the electric-drive unit that powers the car.
You should have a proper read of the Reuters article:
Said another way, Tesla paid for about 90% of those repairs. Again, consistent with not blaming customers for manufacturing defects. Is it your contention that 100% of half-shaft failures were identical and resulting from the same underlying cause? That Tesla was just selecting 10% of customers at random to pay for their repairs? That 0.00% of Tesla customers abused their cars?
By the numbers you quote, that is indeed a lot of half-shaft failures, but still only represents around 2% of Tesla's sold at the time. This would be consistent with a failure in quality control, not a consistently poor part. The notion that 0.2% of any car maker's customers abused their vehicles seems well within the bounds of plausibility to me.
Is it possible that some instances were misdiagnosed? Yes. It's very possible that some customers got a free repair when the cause was abuse. It's very possible that some customers paid for a repair they shouldn't have. This is the reality with every automaker, not just Tesla.
After all, nobody has anything bad to say about car dealerships. No other automaker has ever made a lemon. This is a Tesla problem. Tesla are special. They're bad. They're evil. And it's all Elon's fault. :eyeroll:
You're hysterical over the say-so of two engineers out of how many globally, maybe two thousand? How does that 1:1000 ratio compare to the statistical likelihood of incompetence? The statistical likelihood of being a liar or scumbag? The statistical likelihood of having an unrelated workplace dispute?
If these allegations were true, I'd expect DRAMATICALLY more whistleblowers to come forward.
You're the one stating high confidence. You have a pattern of believing any claim unfavourable to Tesla on face value. Let's be real here, I'm not taking Tesla's side. I'm saying that I don't think this minuscule amount of hearsay is sufficient to come to any conclusions. You don't like that? Fine. Just be aware of what you're actually doing.
Tesla vehicles have a LOT of telemetry, which the company has used to establish fault for accidents and damage. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these cases involve the driver being less than forthcoming about what was happening when the damage occurred.
Technology Review covered this back in 2016 after a driver falsely claimed their Model X crashed into a wall on its own.
I don't know the right in england, but in the US what happens is that the driver (who is not responsible) can file a claim against his own insurance company. They will fix it for their customer, then subrogate against the responsible party to recover the money (if they feel it makes financial sense)
You take the population of vehicles in the field A and multiple it by the probable rate of failure B, then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement C.
A times B times C equals X.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
In all the attempts that have been tried there was no separation of judiciary power (generally it’s a lot easier to murder and rob millions of their property when this is the case) so good luck suing the state that controls all courts
I agree; not saying what I'd do. Just answering the question of what would likely be different in a communist society, based on real world examples. The value given to human life seems demonstrably lower on average.
The reality is, we likely wouldn’t have this particular problem because we wouldn’t have Tesla. Capitalistic incentives are what drive that kind of innovation. We would, however, have a whole slew of other problems, as evidenced by historical attempts at communism.
I think humans are curious beings.I don’t think it would stifle innovation. Quite the Contrary, more effort will be spent on useful innovation rather than profit seeking.
So long as they can continue to sell as many as they can manufacture, the PR costs are $0. The bill might come due in a few years though, by lowering the peak of their growth potential.
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a dildo, never your dildo.
In my experience, enough of the “news” about Tesla has proven to be strongly biased that I default to assuming this is another piece of clickbait following a narrative that reporters know has traction at this moment in time.
This is such a ridiculous distortion. Not by you, by the headline writers. The study found nothing of the sort.
The study found that people who were interested in insuring a Tesla had a higher accident rate than other people.
These are people many of whom do not even own a Tesla yet.
And have never driven a Tesla.
And did not have an accident in a Tesla. SOME of them did have an accident in a Tesla, but many (an unknown number, the article is not interested in facts) did not.
They did have an accident, probably not in a Tesla, and possibly not even their fault.
So. They have an accident, and for some subset of people, the accident was bad enough that they need to acquire another car. Then some of them think "hmm, what kind of car should I buy." And some of them think "hey, what about Tesla?" And some of them go ask for a quote to see how much insurance would cost. And they just had an accident.
And the study records, for people looking to insure a given brand, who may not even own that brand yet, how many of them had accidents in the past.
The study says less about whether Tesla owners have accidents, and more about what new car people are interested in.
And yet the article distorts this to be "Teslas crash more than any other brand." Wow.
And then people uncritically repost it, and here we are.
There is a reason the media gets criticism, and a reason people are advised to be skeptical.
Land Rovers have had shitty long term maintenance since forever and people still buy them. People buying Teslas just don't care enough to stop buying them.
People don’t buy Teslas for their build quality (or any other similar high price vehicles that aren’t known for build quality like other mid-range vehicles like Toyota/Honda).
They buy them for the status that (for now) comes with owning a Tesla.
Maybe that's true for some people. I can only answer for myself. When we bought our Model Y back in mid 2021, I test drove basically all the competitors: iPace, Mach E, the Volvo XC something Recharge, etc. The MY had practically double the cargo space of any of those, with the same size footprint. It had more acceleration than any of the others (which doesn't really matter, but is fun) even in the long range version. And it was the only one that had a 7-seat config, which is extremely handy for occasionally transporting kids' friends. I actually didn't want to buy a Tesla because even then Elon was off-putting (though not nearly like now), but it was just clearly the best option available at the time. (Supercharging also played a role there.)
Because the cars are actually quite good for the most part despite what you read on the news. They are incredibly safe, reasonably priced, and efficient.
Well, reasonable compared to other electric cars I guess. But yes, a $50k car, even though it's the average cost of a new vehicle in the US, is still quite expensive and out of reach of most people.
Only if you're getting news from HN. Negative stories and false hitpieces are heavily upvoted, bad news about competitors is buried as is positive news. If you dare write any non-negative comments you get downvoted and angry replies so people slowly stop posting anything that doesn't go with the negativity.
EVs don't need to be any different in suspension parts than conventional vehicles, yet Tesla apparently thought otherwise. Reinventing the wheel, literally.
I'm not an expert but I know that the cast suspension parts they're using won't take overloads as gracefully as traditional stamped steel ones; the latter will bend before breaking and give a lot of early warning of failure, while the former tends to just snap. Combine that with aggressive cost/weight optimisation along with natural manufacturing variance and these failures are not surprising.
> EVs don't need to be any different in suspension parts than conventional vehicles
This came across HN a few week ago. It seems like there are fundamental reasons why/how EV wheels/suspension can be designed differently than ICE vehicles:
Good call out about the cast vs stamped parts, didn't know that. One of the owners in the article mentioned "didn't know metal could break like that" - it usually doesn't unless it's cast
You say it’s bonkers, I’d argue that a very small risk of a large repair bill is the norm for 10 year old cars from many brands. There are some brands (e.g. Range Rover) where bills like that are closer to the rule than the exception.
A friend of mine paid more than that on a Volkswagen Passat engine replacement. Another friend of mine received a bill for nearly $10k to rebuild a diesel engine in a Volkswagen Golf (which he didn’t pay, the car was ultimately totaled).
As an owner of a 2020 Model 3 in Germany I can say:
The build quality is shockingly bad, and the quality assurance basically non-existing. When I picked up the car, the doors weren't aligned properly and would not close. I had to point this out for them to correct it.
Everything that you take for granted with all car manufactures to work in a middle-class sedan does not work. They did not put in a $3 Bosch rain sensor, so not even the camera-based automatic wipers work correctly. Everything that worked in my 15 years old Chrysler 300C does not work.
It's insane that any of their Autopilot related features are legal. The system is detecting 100% of trash bins next to the road, but maximum 50% of kids crossing the road. If you don't manually disable the various driver assistance systems every time you enter the car, the "emergency lane assist" stuff will happily drive you into opposing traffic for no reasons and will do dangerous phantom emergency braking etc.
Whatever traditional car feature you are looking at - compared to the 15 years old Chrysler everything is worse. Wind noise. Audio system. Comfortable seats.
All the "But it works in my Tesla" fan boys are part of a religious cult and are simply lying. Whenever I checked, the "works for me" replies stopped when I either did a test drive together or asked for a video showing that things like wipers and assistance systems really work.
So, why did I buy this car then and did not return it?
- Their battery technology is mature. When you try to buy a EV from an "established" car manufacturers most of them still don't have a heat pump and battery temperature conditioning.
- You can BUY them. While Germany's big pride, Volkswagen, are announcing to maybe have a competitive EV in 2026, and other manufacturers have waiting lists of 6 months and up, when I wanted to buy the Model 3 I ordered it and was able to pick it up one week later. Actually being able to BUY a real car instead of vaporware is a killer feature.
- All of the nerd humor, Easter eggs etc. It's refreshing to see that they fail on getting basic car software features to work, but that at least they are having fun implementing wacky fun stuff.
Obviously due to Elon Musk meanwhile having turned into a conspiracy-spewing crazy fascist, I would not buy a Tesla car again. But if I'd want to buy a EV in Germany today with proper battery technology and acceptable delivery times, I still would not have any other choice. I would have to buy something far inferior at a higher price "just" for political reasons.
> All the "But it works in my Tesla" fan boys are part of a religious cult and are simply lying. Whenever I checked, the "works for me" replies stopped when I either did a test drive together or asked for a video showing that things like wipers and assistance systems really work.
So all those fanboys are lying, but we should definitely trust your take on this?
No. You can easily do your own research. Do a test drive. Or, if you want to verify from the comfort of your home: Hours and hours of videos to watch on YouTube just for "Tesla Wipers" alone. You then can cross-check with a search term like "Ford Wipers" or "Mercedes Wipers" to see if this really is a subject any owner of a different car brand has to deal with.
When I lived in Beijing I saw a poorly modified compact car (maybe a civic or a scion?) have all four of its wheels pop off while speeding down the third ring road. We were in the taxi behind, these things always happen in slow motion so the wheels popped, the sparks flew beneath the car, it hit another car and finally careened to the side of the road, we saw him get out of the car before our taxi just continued on as if nothing happened.
Anyways, I scratched that off my list of things to see.
> What keeps Tesla from having that knowledge, then, isn't that the company is too young to have acquired it, or that it simply cannot be had except by learning it from scratch. The knowledge can be had in the person of any number of far-less-than-100-years-old engineers Tesla could hire; moreover it can be had by reverse-engineering a frickin' Miata. The reason Tesla hasn't "worked all the bugs out yet" is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn't as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works. You must reinvent, almost literally in this case, the wheel—this time, apparently on the premise of "...and what if it sucked?"
> All the upside-down incentives and warped prerogatives of the startup world are on display here (including a preference for lying and monkeying with data over actually doing good work). They're also, in turn, mere appendages of a deeper and more profound decadence. In 2023, discovery, exploration, and invention are just vibes you rent, by investing in a future-costumed effort to ignore all of what's already been learned and pretend "making a car that works" (or tunnels, or spaceships, or social media) is a new frontier.
My control arms were the bad kind. One side of the car started squeaking after 4.5 years. They switched them out for the latest revision in an afternoon for 200 bucks. Gave me a sweet loaner car in the meantime.
That was the first maintenance I ever had to pay for on my car aside from new tires.
In my now 5 years of ownership my Tesla has been less hassle than any other car I've ever owned. Its "up time" has been spectacular.
91 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread> Lundeen said in an interview that a Tesla service manager told him that a power-steering connector had corroded. The manager said the likely cause was a car wash, which he described as a known problem.
Lundeen paid $4,400 to replace the steering rack and a wiring harness.
“This is the only car that I’ve ever heard of where a car wash can damage the wiring,” Lundeen recalled telling the manager.
Lundeen said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”
Meanwhile, his boss:
> At this point, I know more about manufacturing than anybody else on Earth.
I hoping a class action lawsuit more than covers these peoples’ expenses.
This though is simply Tesla abusing customers.
Tesla's target demographics often skew towards those that are well to do financially, a good subset of which are not native. This is an easier to abuse subset of the population as they are not clued into how to use their state Attorney General to push Tesla to make it right, or use the other legal avenues available.
A bit like Nigerian spammers and phishers having sloppy writing, which is (either by design or not) a filter so only the less mentally able readers would fall into their net by responding.
Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
Sure we do. Here it is: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
To quote the Reuters report:
> The suspension collapse in Jain’s car fortunately occurred at low speed. It was nonetheless shocking in a car he had owned for less than 24 hours. The automaker told him the suspension collapse was caused by the separation of a lower control arm from the steering knuckle, which connects to the wheel assembly. Jain expected Tesla to cover the damage.
A Tesla Service representative had texted Jain that an initial inspection found “no evidence of any external damage” that caused the incident and implied Tesla would pay for the repairs, according to a copy of the text Jain provided to Reuters.
About a week later, Tesla sent Jain a letter denying responsibility, saying it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
Jain said he was the only driver of the car during the one day he owned it and hadn’t had an accident before the suspension failure. “I was like, ‘Bloody hell, how can metal just snap like that when I know for sure the car has not hit anything?’” he said.
The repair took about three months. Jain paid a deductible of about $1,250 to have the work covered by his insurance company, which after the claim hiked his rates sharply on another car he owned, he said.
Fed up with the ordeal, Jain sold the repaired Tesla – for about $10,000 less than the $55,000 he paid for it.
> [Tesla said] it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
And then Jain ended up paying the bill. That is a critically important data point which _suggests that he had reason to believe_ his actions caused the damage. I repeat: Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
It's possible that Jain didn't damage the car. But it's also possible that he did, and this damage was immediately apparent the moment that a technician lifted the car for a proper inspection. We don't know anything about the initial inspection which led to the interim diagnosis of manufacturing defect. It might have been a guess by someone who didn't even lay eyes on the car.
The point is — We. Don't. Know.
No, all it suggests is that he didn't know how to stand up for himself. He went along with allowing his insurance to pay for it.
To quote the Reuters report again:
> Jain is one of tens of thousands of Tesla owners who have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts, according to a Reuters review of thousands of Tesla documents. The chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe, according to the records and interviews with more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians.
People struggle to integrate what's true. Take you, for example. You can't get your mind around the idea that Tesla is in fact a grubby company that lies routinely. Tesla keeps lying because it can rely on people like you who simply refuse to believe that Tesla lies.
Tesla lies about full self-driving. Look, in 2016 Tesla said "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie : https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
1 million robotaxis were promised for 2020. That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Tesla's timeline of full self-driving lies: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
Tesla even lies about things as trivial quarter mile times: https://insideevs.com/news/699260/tesla-cybertruck-porsche-r...
Lying is built into Tesla's DNA as a company. The fish does indeed rot from the head.
> We. Don't. Know.
We do. You just don't want to Believe it.
Have a read about how it works: https://www.morganclark.co.uk/loss-adjusters-your-questions-...
12K claim on a car that was allegedy sold as new 24 hours ago? Super unlikely a loss adjuster wasn't sent and came to the same conclusion as Tesla.
You can damage a car in a few minutes of driving.
>Jain didn't damage the car
You know that how?
Jain did damage that car.
> Tesla initially agreed Jain didn't damage the car. Then Tesla changed its tune and claimed Jain damaged the car.
They did an initial assessment and a more thorough assessment in the shop showed it was external damage.
That's your belief. You weren't there.
Look mate, we get it. Believing this fits your preconceptions as Hacker News' most obsessive and prolific hater of Tesla and Musk. In your view, anything bad that happens is Musk's fault. In your view, every single one of the million Tesla customers only ever tell the truth. It's the worst company on the planet exclusively selling cars to the most honest people who ever lived. That's your simple reality of it.
I have no idea about what actually happened here. But the part of the story which makes me slightly more inclined to believe the Tesla service technician is that they did initially class it as a manufacturing defect prior to proper inspection. This demonstrates a willingness to accept blame. It was only after a proper inspection that it was re-classed as customer caused. If blaming customers for manufacturing defects was company policy, that's not how it would have played out.
Your Beliefs don't matter.
To quote the Reuters article yet again:
> The control-arm problem continued for years, across Tesla’s model lineup. The automaker replaced front upper control arms on about 120,000 cars globally from January 2021 through March 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of repair records included in the Tesla documents. Most of the replacements came on the Model 3, Tesla’s least expensive vehicle. Many of the customer complaints were for noise.
And:
> Former service managers and technicians in Norway, the country with the most Teslas per capita, said in interviews that they were inundated with angry customers complaining of early control-arm failures. They said that tension increased as the automaker, starting in 2017, told service employees to push the cost of the frequent and repeated failures onto customers to cut warranty and goodwill repair costs.
One manager said he was forced out after resisting the company’s push to blame customers for the failures of faulty control arms. “I said: ‘Now, we have to quit talking bullshit,’” he recalled. A service technician said he started in 2018 and quit a year later over the issue. “I wasn’t doing anything else than just constantly changing those control arms,” he said.
And on half shaft failures:
> One repair analysis showed the company replaced nearly 66,000 half shafts between January 2021 and March 2022. Customers paid for about 10% of those repairs.
> More than one engineer made a point of saying the issue had nothing to do with damage caused by customers. Engineer Anastasia Skolariki, who was troubleshooting repair problems and customer complaints for Tesla in Europe, wrote in May 2020 to other engineers and technicians that the problem was a design issue “and not abusive behavior from the customer side.” The company needed to cover repairs for cars under warranty, she said, “no matter how many times the vehicle comes to Service with the same issue.”
And here's an exciting half shaft failure:
> In 2019, a Tesla engineer in Shanghai flagged a failure on a brand-new Model S with 160 kilometers (99 miles) on it. The car’s rear left half shaft had broken into three pieces when the owner stepped on the accelerator; one of the pieces pierced the electric-drive unit that powers the car.
You should have a proper read of the Reuters article:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
You're clearly not taking it in.
Said another way, Tesla paid for about 90% of those repairs. Again, consistent with not blaming customers for manufacturing defects. Is it your contention that 100% of half-shaft failures were identical and resulting from the same underlying cause? That Tesla was just selecting 10% of customers at random to pay for their repairs? That 0.00% of Tesla customers abused their cars?
By the numbers you quote, that is indeed a lot of half-shaft failures, but still only represents around 2% of Tesla's sold at the time. This would be consistent with a failure in quality control, not a consistently poor part. The notion that 0.2% of any car maker's customers abused their vehicles seems well within the bounds of plausibility to me.
Is it possible that some instances were misdiagnosed? Yes. It's very possible that some customers got a free repair when the cause was abuse. It's very possible that some customers paid for a repair they shouldn't have. This is the reality with every automaker, not just Tesla.
After all, nobody has anything bad to say about car dealerships. No other automaker has ever made a lemon. This is a Tesla problem. Tesla are special. They're bad. They're evil. And it's all Elon's fault. :eyeroll:
> You're clearly not taking it in.
:eyeroll:
To repeat: More than one engineer made a point of saying the issue had nothing to do with damage caused by customers.
You're hysterical over the say-so of two engineers out of how many globally, maybe two thousand? How does that 1:1000 ratio compare to the statistical likelihood of incompetence? The statistical likelihood of being a liar or scumbag? The statistical likelihood of having an unrelated workplace dispute?
If these allegations were true, I'd expect DRAMATICALLY more whistleblowers to come forward.
You're the one stating high confidence. You have a pattern of believing any claim unfavourable to Tesla on face value. Let's be real here, I'm not taking Tesla's side. I'm saying that I don't think this minuscule amount of hearsay is sufficient to come to any conclusions. You don't like that? Fine. Just be aware of what you're actually doing.
You're letting Tesla make a fool of you. There's no value in that.
Technology Review covered this back in 2016 after a driver falsely claimed their Model X crashed into a wall on its own.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/08/70845/tesla-know...
Last month, a court in China ordered an owner to publicly apologize and pay damages after falsely claiming her Model 3 had a brake failure.
https://pandaily.com/a-tesla-owner-ordered-by-court-to-apolo...
see also:
https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry
EDIT: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
I don't know the right in england, but in the US what happens is that the driver (who is not responsible) can file a claim against his own insurance company. They will fix it for their customer, then subrogate against the responsible party to recover the money (if they feel it makes financial sense)
A times B times C equals X.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
In either system I don’t think I would take resources used for lawsuits into account and get the vehicles fixed (or replaced, until they are safe).
We have the responsibility to care for each-other.
But alas, these are the only possibilities. /s
The study found that people who were interested in insuring a Tesla had a higher accident rate than other people.
These are people many of whom do not even own a Tesla yet.
And have never driven a Tesla.
And did not have an accident in a Tesla. SOME of them did have an accident in a Tesla, but many (an unknown number, the article is not interested in facts) did not.
They did have an accident, probably not in a Tesla, and possibly not even their fault.
So. They have an accident, and for some subset of people, the accident was bad enough that they need to acquire another car. Then some of them think "hmm, what kind of car should I buy." And some of them think "hey, what about Tesla?" And some of them go ask for a quote to see how much insurance would cost. And they just had an accident.
And the study records, for people looking to insure a given brand, who may not even own that brand yet, how many of them had accidents in the past.
The study says less about whether Tesla owners have accidents, and more about what new car people are interested in.
And yet the article distorts this to be "Teslas crash more than any other brand." Wow.
And then people uncritically repost it, and here we are.
There is a reason the media gets criticism, and a reason people are advised to be skeptical.
They buy them for the status that (for now) comes with owning a Tesla.
I'm not an expert but I know that the cast suspension parts they're using won't take overloads as gracefully as traditional stamped steel ones; the latter will bend before breaking and give a lot of early warning of failure, while the former tends to just snap. Combine that with aggressive cost/weight optimisation along with natural manufacturing variance and these failures are not surprising.
This came across HN a few week ago. It seems like there are fundamental reasons why/how EV wheels/suspension can be designed differently than ICE vehicles:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471815
Jeeez, I know this is an exception and not the rule but this is bonkers.
A friend of mine paid more than that on a Volkswagen Passat engine replacement. Another friend of mine received a bill for nearly $10k to rebuild a diesel engine in a Volkswagen Golf (which he didn’t pay, the car was ultimately totaled).
The build quality is shockingly bad, and the quality assurance basically non-existing. When I picked up the car, the doors weren't aligned properly and would not close. I had to point this out for them to correct it.
Everything that you take for granted with all car manufactures to work in a middle-class sedan does not work. They did not put in a $3 Bosch rain sensor, so not even the camera-based automatic wipers work correctly. Everything that worked in my 15 years old Chrysler 300C does not work.
It's insane that any of their Autopilot related features are legal. The system is detecting 100% of trash bins next to the road, but maximum 50% of kids crossing the road. If you don't manually disable the various driver assistance systems every time you enter the car, the "emergency lane assist" stuff will happily drive you into opposing traffic for no reasons and will do dangerous phantom emergency braking etc.
Whatever traditional car feature you are looking at - compared to the 15 years old Chrysler everything is worse. Wind noise. Audio system. Comfortable seats.
All the "But it works in my Tesla" fan boys are part of a religious cult and are simply lying. Whenever I checked, the "works for me" replies stopped when I either did a test drive together or asked for a video showing that things like wipers and assistance systems really work.
So, why did I buy this car then and did not return it?
- Their battery technology is mature. When you try to buy a EV from an "established" car manufacturers most of them still don't have a heat pump and battery temperature conditioning.
- You can BUY them. While Germany's big pride, Volkswagen, are announcing to maybe have a competitive EV in 2026, and other manufacturers have waiting lists of 6 months and up, when I wanted to buy the Model 3 I ordered it and was able to pick it up one week later. Actually being able to BUY a real car instead of vaporware is a killer feature.
- All of the nerd humor, Easter eggs etc. It's refreshing to see that they fail on getting basic car software features to work, but that at least they are having fun implementing wacky fun stuff.
Obviously due to Elon Musk meanwhile having turned into a conspiracy-spewing crazy fascist, I would not buy a Tesla car again. But if I'd want to buy a EV in Germany today with proper battery technology and acceptable delivery times, I still would not have any other choice. I would have to buy something far inferior at a higher price "just" for political reasons.
So all those fanboys are lying, but we should definitely trust your take on this?
Anyways, I scratched that off my list of things to see.
> All the upside-down incentives and warped prerogatives of the startup world are on display here (including a preference for lying and monkeying with data over actually doing good work). They're also, in turn, mere appendages of a deeper and more profound decadence. In 2023, discovery, exploration, and invention are just vibes you rent, by investing in a future-costumed effort to ignore all of what's already been learned and pretend "making a car that works" (or tunnels, or spaceships, or social media) is a new frontier.
Yes.
My control arms were the bad kind. One side of the car started squeaking after 4.5 years. They switched them out for the latest revision in an afternoon for 200 bucks. Gave me a sweet loaner car in the meantime.
That was the first maintenance I ever had to pay for on my car aside from new tires.
In my now 5 years of ownership my Tesla has been less hassle than any other car I've ever owned. Its "up time" has been spectacular.