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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

> By all accounts they seem to be quite reliable

Consumer Reports ranks Tesla #27 out of 29 manufacturers on reliability, and removed its recommendations for their cars. Several other surveys have similarly put Tesla's reliability dead last or nearly there.

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Part of that ranking is due to the baked-in assumptions: for instance you don't lose points for needing an oil change every year. That's just "normal". The fact that a Tesla doesn't need an oil change, somehow, doesn't give it more points with reliability, but if you think from first principles, it should.

It does need a $400 annual service though, which you can pay for up front.

Not needed anymore: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1122251_tesla-eliminate...

This appears to be at least in part a reaction to the backlogs at service centers described in the original article:

With hundreds of thousands more Teslas hitting the road, all those service visits—along with repair work—have reportedly backed up the company's service centers. Now the company has reportedly put an end to those extended service plans and is hoping instead to highlight electric cars' inherent reliability—and hopefully reduce the wait times at those service centers.

Not sure if that logic, we are not able to maintain our cars fast enough so we get rid of scheduled maintenance, flies.

The word “reliability” makes me think of unexpected maintenance as opposed to expected maintenance. Reliability for me has more to do with being able to start the car at any time and drive away without something randomly going wrong due to cheap parts or construction errors.

The reliability rankings are based on the rate of breakdowns reported by surveys of Consumer Reports subscribers. It doesn't appear to be an index or functional scheme in the way you're hinting at (100 points to Gryffindor for not needing an oil change!)

> But reliability has been a weak spot for Tesla. According to our survey results, problems with the suspension, especially with the 2017 model year, have been an issue for the Model S luxury sedan, while hardware problems—especially concerning its unique falcon-wing doors—have plagued the Model X SUV (neither is currently recommended by CR). And now our latest survey data has surfaced numerous problems reported by Model 3 owners as well, which is why CR has removed its recommendation for the vehicle.

And as it happens, CR do recognise that engine and powertrain problems are much rarer:

> By contrast, CR members have reported few problems with Tesla’s unique electric powertrains, which may be due in part to their relative simplicity when compared with traditional internal-combustion engines

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...

You also don’t lose points for having to carefully plan long trips around supercharger availability.

Reliability doesn’t measure maintenance. A Toyota Prius is more reliable than a Chrysler 200 because of the quality of engineering, assembly and components.

And if your Toyota breaks, there will be a million howtos in fixing it, colour matched tear offs and spares made for the next eleventy decades.

I worked on a Toyota issue and was amazed at how quickly a broad could-be-anything code became « when you get that, 99% of the time it’s X ».

Reliability is part of RAMT (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Testability), with the overall aim being Availability. Whether you get this by short maintenance and repair times, long stretches between maintenance and repairs or a combination doesn't matter that much.

If you add up to 5 weeks to your repair time due to logistics that is a big issue. And again one coming from the supply chain domain, as do production hell and distribution hell. And al of that has nothing whatsoever to do with Tesla's being EVs.

Roughly, reliability is measured in mean Time between failure. Oil changes are part of routine maintenance and are such part of Maintainability. The overall metric that matters is Availability which, ultimately, also takes things like logistical delays into account. If you oil change takes half a day the impact is marginal compared to waiting weeks for spare parts. Not the least because you run a while on old oil without issues.

Links? I'm aware of the one survey on the model 3 (it was a survey of car models, not manufacturers). Not sure where the several others are, but would be curious to check.

I don't have everything bookmarked, but here are a few supporting links from a quick Google search:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/24/tesla-...

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...

https://www.businessinsider.com/survey-uk-drivers-say-tesla-...

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