Tesla Model 3 Teardown by Engineering Firm Reveals Flaws Like 'A Kia in the 90s' | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Model 3 Teardown by Engineering Firm Reveals Flaws Like 'A Kia in the 90s'

jalopnik.com

63 pointsourmandave7 comments

Most of that seems forgivable but this screams lawsuit: Munro also chides the Model 3's lack of a mechanical door handle in the rear. Up front, there’s a little lever in addition to the electric door-opening switch, but in the rear there’s not. In the case of an emergency that cuts the car’s power, Munro says, you’d have to fold the seats back and exit through the trunk. (Obviously, you could go through the front seats as well).

Someone is going to die because of this.

Considering the price of the other models in Tesla's range, obviously they were going to have to cut some corners to bring the price down sufficiently. Some of these are fairly benign, although the idea of the rear doors not having mechanical releases in an emergency sounds problematic. Also, the idea of pulling two bare wires out of the front and connecting a car battery directly to them is a real hack.

The car is very new on the market, so time will tell if these issues become actual problems.

The critic in addition to criticizing the fit and finish (fair thing to do) chose to criticize aspects of its emergency design --but according to commenters, same critic swooned over BMW i3 which has similar emergency design choices. Maybe the critic has a point, but then should at least criticize EV MFGs equally.

Does anyone ever consider the possibility that the quality of the car reflects the quality of the producer? No, it always has to be some conspiracy

I don't know man Tesla brings out the worst in people.

My take: Tesla is a new car builder running into the same problems as every other new car builder. They're not better or worse. Making good cars at volume is hard.

The conspiracy angle is ridiculous. Tesla is NOT disrupting this industry, not until they make 10 million cars a year at a sub $30000 price. Japanese auto makers in the 70s and 80s were disrupting. Although I do think some car makers are jealous of the good vibe the Tesla brand has.

I think the guy in the article’s comments about it being like a 90’s Kia reinforces your comment, the Kias were known to be of cheap/bad build quality when they first came out but have gotten much better since.

Of course, why assume that complaints about quality of their products must come only from dishonest, stupid or otherwise malicious people? Until recently the default strategy of Musk was to attack or discredit the critic instead of addressing the issue

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