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Comment by NeutronBoy | Hacker News Reader

> With respect to the car that is discussed in the blog post that led to yesterday’s news (more on the blog post below), the suspension ball joint experienced very abnormal rust. We haven’t seen this on any other car, suggesting a very unusual use case. The car had over 70,000 miles on it and its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car. (One to get the car to the highway and one to get it from the highway to the service center.) When we got the car, it was caked in dirt.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this post, but a dirty car has nothing to do with a rusty ball joint. Dirt doesn't cause rust. It means, as they note, the owner lives on a dirt road. The two tow-trucks line is such a red-herring - nothing to do with the issue at hand.

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> Dirt doesn't cause rust.

Dirt can contain salt, iron and other rust-promoting particles. And a caked layer of dirt can hold water against the metal part for extended periods of time.

> The two tow-trucks line is such a red-herring

That depends if the fault ultimately lied with the customer or Tesla. More broadly, it demonstrates the company's willingness to assist, to go beyond what most people would reasonably expect a company to do to help resolve a problem, even when it's possible the problem was caused by the customer.

> Dirt can contain salt, iron and other rust-promoting particles.

When I read the title and the paragraph referencing the rusted ball joint this was the first thing I thought of. The whole post I was waiting for that title reference to be worked in, but was surprised when it was finally used in the metaphorical sense one usually hears.

>> The two tow-trucks line is such a red-herring

It would have made for a great counter example for the range anxious if it wasn't for the suspension failure.

So don't buy a Tesla when you live somewhere where it snows?

A dirt road will work the suspension a lot harder than paved. Combine that with stones pitting the ball and allowing moisture behind the seal, and it all comes down to the S not being an off-road vehicle.

Off a paved road is not exactly off-road. Over here, many roads are not paved - even my home street. Still I would expect to drive any regular car there; if the suspension can't take it, it's faulty.

Your un-paved road isn't the same as all un-paved roads. This Tesla didn't fail on your road.

Yes, but overall dirt roads are no problem for cars. The Tesla blog writes "The car had over 70,000 miles on it and its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car."

That doesn't make sense: what has the length of the dirt road to do with needing two tow trucks? One truck runs out of fuel on this long road?

Tesla may be perfectly right that the car has been used on bad roads, and perhaps in unreasonable ways, but them being long dirt roads can not and must not be an issue. Standard cars will do hundreds of thousands of km on dirt roads.

Speculating: One that can haul the car over a dirt road (off-road tyres / suspension?), and one normal one (road tyres?).

Sure, but that does not have much to do with the length of the dirt road.

But once again, driving on dirt road is not off-road. Dirt roads can be somewhat bumpy, but on the other hand they typically do not have such sharp-edged potholes that paved roads may have.

You say typically, but Tesla has sold over 100k cars and has never seen anything like this before. It hardly sounds like a typical situation.

An influencing factor I can think of is that a dirt road will kick up debris such as small rocks, which will in turn potentially chip any passivation layer (chrome treatment, paint, etc.) on a metal component. This could accelerate corrosion by allowing moisture ingress if subsequently driven through puddles.

Specifically, chipped paint is doubly bad as moisture can ingress and then flow underneath the paint, trapping it in there and not letting it dry out, so it continues to corrorde.

"We haven’t seen this on any other car, suggesting a very unusual use case. The car had over 70,000 miles on it and its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car. (One to get the car to the highway and one to get it from the highway to the service center.) When we got the car, it was caked in dirt."

Which is not nearly as bad as the systematic, repeated adverse conditions testing they did on these cars in development and continued to do into the present.

Right ? Right ?

You mean like most customers in Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland experience several days each winter?

To get to a cabin here in Norway I might have to drive 20km or more on a dirt road covered in snow and ice. When 4x4s first became popular here in Norway they were conspicuous by there absence in the mountains; most of the vehicles I saw at that time were Volvo estates (245) and Mercedes saloons (both rear wheel drive of course).

I don't recall broken suspension or steering joints being an issue here with any brand of car (including Tesla) and the Norwegian roads authority (Statens Vegvesen) puts a lot of salt on the road.

Do people in Norway do some kind of underbody anti-rust spray in their vehicles? like this? http://www.wheels.ca/guides/how-to-protect-your-car-against-...

It's not possible to know without seeing the road. I have relatives that live several miles down a dirt road that gets corrugated as a way of grading the road, and to prevent runoff. It beats the hell out of the suspension. In fact, I should give my family a call to tell them to have their equipment checked.

This is called Washboard Road, and is a result of erosion. It's very common in the desert and the Midwest.

It's also not clear what is meant when the road is being described as a dirt road: often people will describe a gravel road as a dirt road, but I think this is an error. A gravel road of several inches of 21A, properly graded, compacted, and maintained, has little in common with a dirt road.

quite right, i live in a rural area and drive extensively on dirt roads every day and have for decades across maybe a dozen+ vehicles, i have never had a ball joint failure, nor have i heard of one.

I bet that you chose all of your dozen-plus vehicles knowing that you'd be driving extensively on dirt roads every day for the life of the car. I also bet that if you tried it with a $70k luxury sedan it'd have a major mechanical fault within a year traceable directly to it not being an off-road vehicle.

dirt road is not "off road", ive owned minvans, and compact cars that have had no issues with suspension.

And I've seen broken suspension in 4x4 car driven for 3 years on 2km of dirt road, then 20km normal paved roads. One sample is not enough.

You'd lose that bet: people I know who drive a lot on dirt roads use just normal cars. VW Golf or Ford Mondeo or Toyota Yaris or a BMW 5 series, and for those who do most km, a Mercedes E-class.

Thank you for your anecdata.

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