When they start putting in, as you say, refurbed parts that already had 70,000 miles on them, will they really be as good as new?
Tesla most likely will charge something that makes Detroit look bad. A Tesla drivetrain has a fraction of the complexity and parts a gas or diesel vehicle has.
Also, the Model S drivetrain is somewhat the first of it's kind. There have been single speed transmissions made before in cars (in and out of electric vehicles), there have been high torque transmissions made (for vehicles much larger than a Model S), but nothing quite like the unique problem the Model S presents.
The oldest Model Ses are now on their 4th year of warranty. Presumably, most failures so far have been in the first production revision of the product, and given the highly iterative nature of Tesla's product workflow, they have improved the product based on real world feedback.
I don't want to know what the first generation drivetrain failure rate is, as they will be covered under the 8 year/unlimited miles warranty, and replaced with the newest revisions. I want to know what today's drivetrains will look like in 4 to 8 years.
Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
Tesla's bet is that massively reducing the number of parts and complexity of said parts will dramatically cut down on failure. This is a long term bet, and early analysis of the first generation of Model Ses only paints half the picture. The whole picture seems to illustrate that Tesla is very good at iterative design, something Detroit does not value as a skill.
Edit: As a side note, I live in Maine. Maybe we're just especially hard on vehicles up here.
This is BS. The average vehicle age in the US is 11.4 years [1] and has been steadily increasing every year. At 12k miles a year, that would make ~140k roughly the average mileage for a vehicle in the US.
[1] http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
That's sounds crazy. Where I live (Europe), a car with 100k miles is maybe at 40% of it's lifetime. My car has almost 100k in it, and it is completely fine (it's a French (!) car), it has two small scratches on it and everything works as expected (no, it's not babied if you don't consider a 2 yo baby sitting in it).
This is anecdata of course, but really, 100k miles is nothing. My father drives a Skoda with 420k miles in it at the moment -- it definitely doesn't look like new but it works.
> That's sounds crazy.
That is crazy. Unless you like having car payments, or that "new car" smell, you can get 200k miles from most cars without a lot of "babying". This means regular oil changes and such. And you need to pay attention. Noises, loss of oil, and such indicate problems that don't just fix themselves.
What really harms a car's lifetime is the willingness of the owner to take care of it. And rust (at least in the parts of the world that get snow).
It is 20 years old and things are still improving but rust as a limiting factor on lifetimes in the winter.
Not only that, European models of cars seem to be much higher quality than typical US ones, partly due to the tastes of European culture, partly due to EU regulation.
Top Gear over the years has had at least one segment about this from a British/European point of view, but I quick Google isn't telling me which episode.