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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note the difference in communication styles when company PR teams respond to requests for comments. Fiat Chrysler and Chevy both responded in predictable marketroid speak, complete with extensive use of passive voice and grand, hand-wavey platitudes "We care committed to blah blah blah" "Quality is of the greatest importance blah blah blah" "blah blah above industry average blah blah blah" "blah blah launching with excellence".

And then there's Tesla: "We fixed issue XYZ, which affected people in exactly this particular way." "We proactively send bulletins and over-the-air fixes." "This particular issue was for this particular year, and has long since been fixed."

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Words are cheap.

They’re under investigation for possibly hiding recall and issuing OTA instead that surprised people with sudden range loss (https://www.businessinsider.com/nhtsa-investigating-tesla-up...)

They force customers to go over arbitration to fix yellowing entertainment screen on cars as young as few months. They tell people it’s normal wear and tear due to using cat in the sun (https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/yellow-screen-force-...)

Their service centers are over the capacity for years and cars can be stuck waiting for repairs and parts for months.

Perhaps the grandparent comment was actually talking about the quality of Tesla’s Public Relations department.

Otherwise it would strike me as odd that someone would boost a vehicle manufacturer that doesn’t sell spare parts, in a thread on vehicle reliability.

Edited a few words to better express my point.

The difference is, the other automakers have decades of experience tailoring public pronouncements so as not to provide fodder for trial lawyers. Hence the vaporous noncommunication. Tesla hasn't been sued as much yet, but they'll get there eventually.

The PR department may have learned the wrong lesson from their environment.

Unless their PR and legal department are exclusively staffed by recent graduates with zero work or real-world experience, it shouldn't matter whether or not they have been sued. It's not like every corporation starts figuring everything out by trial and error, never referring to literature or hiring experienced professionals.

Yeah, I would've thought the same thing about their manufacturing & labor relations depts., and yet...here we are.

Buy all the spare parts you want here: https://epc.tesla.com

Or just walk into a service center. Tesla now undercuts all third party prices on parts.

That sounds like a change for the better.

Has anyone tried this? Are parts delivered in a reasonable time frame?

Parts was my number one issue - and epc.tesla.com does not solve this (yet) as there is no pricing and contacting tesla was recently a total pain with lots of dropped balls.

Anyone with current info? If they got a parts catalog with Amazon style fulfillment they'd be in business.

Have you actually tried this?

The last time I saw that site, every single part down to the simplest screw said "Contact Tesla for pricing" and instead of adding to a cart, it too had a button "Contact Tesla for sales"...

... almost like they were trying to barely scrape by a state mandate on spare parts being available for sale.

GM knew of an issue with ignition key switches that killed 124 people and required a recall of over 30 million vehicles. Tesla definitely has fault, but legacy automakers have faired far worse in safety standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...

Ford has had to recall over a million trucks due to engine block heaters that would cause your engine block to catch fire.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+engine+block+recall

Disclaimer: TSLA investor and owner, opted out of arbitration and have yellow banding on my MCU screens. Compromise is inevitable.

And TSLA (16 years old) is already well on their way to accumulating a similar track record as GM (111 years old) or Ford (116 years old).

I don't think anyone is arguing that they're the absolute worst carmaker. A comparison to Toyota or Honda would have been a better choice.

I don't want a power plant that is advertised as "more earthquake resistant than Fukushima" in my backyard.

Can you compare Tesla to a manufacturer who innovates very little (Toyota or Honda) and simply churns out the same internal combustion engine 10 million times a year? I don't think so.

All depends on what you're optimizing for. I can't get an EV from Toyota or Honda (at least not one that competes with our S and X), so I deal with some fit and finish and reliability issues. Powertrain has been rock solid. Charging network has been rock solid (having driven coast to coast in the US in both of our Teslas).

Toyota and Honda brought the first two mass-market hybrids to market (the Prius in 1997 and Insight in 1999, respectively). I don't think it's fair to say they innovate very little or that they churn out the same internal combustion engine 10 million times a year. A bunch of my friends have plug-in Priuses (Prii?) that are effectively EVs, since if you're commuting you never need to run off gas.

Still no pure BEV from them, only hybrids and fuel cell. No charging network either. Owned two Toyotas and a Lexus before we sold them all for Teslas, really a shame as I liked the reliability of the brand, but buying EVs was more important to us. Personally, I want to support innovation, not the status quo.

I thought the Toyota hybrid engines were very innovative.

Innovative in 1997 (first Prius model year), not so much 22 years later. They're coasting on that tech at this point.

Tesla was incorporated in 2003, and has existed for only 16 years. What's Toyota's (an 80 year old manufacturing and logistics behemoth) excuse? Rhetorical. Entrenched interests (both internally and at dealers) and a lack of courage.

Excuse for what? I don’t even understand the rhetorical question.

For not building a non-internal combustion vehicle.

There’s no sensible use case for one that isn’t more effectively satisfied with a plug-in hybrid?

Plug in hybrid is double the complexity (combustion and EV powertrains) when having a charging network negates the need for the combustion component.

Until a fire results in the power grid going down...

Gas pumps stop working too when utility power is out. Can charge your electric car at home from solar if you have it (and in California, solar is mandatory on new residential roofs of new construction starting in January of next year).

> Gas pumps stop working too when utility power is out.

And gas pumps can be powered by diesel generators. Especially because they happen to be built on top of giant-tanks of diesel.

I mean, the Tesla Supercharger at Nuburgring was a diesel generator for this very reason. Diesel (and gasoline) takes up very little space or weight, while giving a significant amount of energy storage. So its ideal for storage, transport, and distribution.

https://www.motor1.com/news/371593/tesla-diesel-generator-nu...

I haven't done the math, but natural gas might be able to serve the same purpose, is usually ran in parallel with electrical infrastructure, and can have its own distribution infrastructure powered by the same gas the system is pumping.

Diesel is of course a fine solution for isolated locations that require energy for whatever reason when utility or renewables are down, if you have to transport it a great distance, or you absolutely need a store of energy on site because you're concerned that natural gas would be down at the same time utility mains were.

This is false. Gas pumps utilize utility electric as their primary source of power, but are required by law (in CA at least) to have backup sources of power, like diesel, in the event that a natural disaster (like an earthquake) knocks out power lines.

And solar charging only works if you live in suburbia or rural neighborhoods. If you live in a city, you're SOL.

Hybrid drivetrains can be simpler than ICE drivetrains.

Having a charging network doesn't solve all the problems of going >50 miles from home.

Toyota has been experimenting with and selling non ICE vehicles since before Tesla existed. They created the market for green cars. They were Tesla's first big contact back when Tesla was still unprotected l unproven.

Without Toyota, Tesla wouldn't exist.

Tesla can’t be that innovative: they still don’t support CarPlay.

One person has died from radiation from the Fukushima accident. The possible range for casualties ranges from zero to hundreds. The evacuation killed over 2,000 people. This for an earthquake ~10 times greater than the tolerance it was designed for. I’d rather live within a km of Fukushima now than 10km of a coal power plant.

I felt the opposite. Tesla's answer came across the worst to me, and reads to me with the over-specificity of a student making excuses for why their paper isn't done on time.

> "It was a supplier-related issue".

Passing the buck is really not a great look to start with. It makes the rest of the response seem like a series of excuses.

Tesla chose the supplier. Tesla built and inspected and sold and shipped the car with those parts. This is a Tesla-related issue. The only time Tesla should mention a supplier issue is in response to, "why can't you sell me a car?"

> "[It] did not pose any threat to vehicle safety".

That's good, but this isn't the safety survey.

> "[T]here was a[...] false service alert [... that was fixed] within two weeks of being reported".

I'm not even sure how to react to this one. Bringing my car in to be told "false alarm" is really not reassuring. And two weeks to fix a false alert doesn't help me - I've probably already brought it in for service.

> "This proactive approach to improved reliability is one of the reasons why Tesla is the highest rated car brand among consumers, according to Consumer Reports." (Paraphrased:) Our cars are the safest and best performing, and Model S is #1 in satisfaction.

To me, blaming a supplier for the issues is a terrible way to start, and this is likewise a terrible closing.

"You just fell in the rankings to come in 3rd to last in our reliability survey. Any comments?" "Our cars are the safest and fastest and we have always ranked #1 on your customer satisfaction survey."

Those stats are undeniably good. They also make me think those are the stats the company cares about a lot more than reliability.

>Tesla chose the supplier. Tesla built and inspected and sold and shipped the car with those parts. This is a Tesla-related issue.

They are new at mass manufacturing and no doubt learned a lesson from this incident. And that is the whole point of their response, unlike the other American manufacturers they are successfully working away at rapidly improving quality and reliability. And you are angry at them for that.

But Tesla didn't say "we're new at this and we learned from it". They said it was a "supplier-related issue" that has been "addressed for cars in the field" and "resolved [...] with fundamental design improvements".

Nothing in the statement tells me that there won't be another "supplier-related issue" down the line. There should be controls in place for this.

Tesla is new at producing cars in large quantities, and it has greatly improved their quality and reliability. There is no way this could have happened unless they were learning from their mistakes, and that includes controls on suppliers. Do you really disagree?

If I had to choose, I would choose specifics over platitudes.

Especially specifics backed by OTA fixes.

Yes, but the others don't say anything. That Tesla does this makes them look bad (e.g. your comment) but it's more information for the customer, and that's a good thing.

I found this part very interesting: "In fact, the quality of brand-new Model X vehicles today is 3.5 times better than the quality of brand new Model X cars from 2015.".

(I have no idea what "quality" means here, and how you can put a number on that, that rises 3.5x, but that's beside the point).

With one sentence, Tesla is telling 2015 customers that they got screwed over, and future customers that they should wait 4 years after a new model comes out before buying it, because they need that time to figure out all the quality issues.

Isn’t that somewhat standard practice in tech? It’s an industry that experienced exponential growth for decades.

That rule applies to pretty much any car though - having bought a completely new model of BMW when it first came out I would never do that again, mind you I would never buy a BMW again! Personally I'd wait at least a year before buying any new model of car.

I bought one of the first BMW 328 convertibles off the line. I drove it 20 years with over 500,000 miles with minimal repairs - even the soft top was still working fine and looked "ok" when I finally hit a large pothole and totaled it.

The quality can be measured by cost of maintenance or more likely by the costs associated with warranty repairs (and product returns) incurred by the company.

in this case quality just means how likely is a customer to experience issues covered by warranty in the first x days. That's usually called "initial quality" in the industry jargon. Model X was particularly bad off the gates, it had tons of issues especially with the stupid vertical doors that broke all the time.

> "This particular issue was for this particular year, and has long since been fixed."

On the other hand, you don't have to fix a problem you haven't created.

Most of Tesla problems are self inflicted.

Moreover "Model X vehicles today is 3.5 times better than the quality of brand new Model X cars from 2015."

According to which metric?

It sounds a lot like "this is the fastest Mac ever built, 2.5x faster than the previous generation"[1] but on the market cheaper or faster options (or both) were already available.

[1] in small writings "according to bench X and taking the best result. On average the improvement is about +0.3%"

According to an article I read recently[1], they measure quality in rate of defects per car produced. According to this, we can get an idea of the scope of the improvements.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/customers-rave-about-mo...

Thanks for adding the metrics.

As much as I think they are doing a great job and deserve to be there, I've also never seen a car in the $40k range (more 50-60k euros on this side of the ocean) not being "a pleasure to drive" or not having a good customer service.

For the same price I can buy this

https://www.audi.it/it/web/it/modelli/a6/a6.html

"We fixed one issue" isn't really any more informative than "we're committed to quality" with respect to overall reliability. One issue out of how many? How many customers are affected by those others, and how severely? How long are fixes taking on average? Tesla's response might resonate better in a community notorious for confusing specificity with truth, but it's still just spin.

Oh definately, I wonder why these giants cannot replicate the Tesla PR?

This is probably Tesla's strongest point, having a problem with the product you paind for and not having personalized response makes you feel powerless while response from someone who seems to understand the problem and the issues it creates is a such a huge difference even if the issue is not resolved. I always forgive companies that did sloppy job but cared enough to appologise and explain why it happend. You don't have to have a celebrity CEO to do that.

It has proven effectively impossible to sustainably project an incorrect image of a company. It’s not that they can’t do PR, their entire culture looks like that

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