Tesla worst for reliability in American driver survey | Hacker News Reader

Tesla worst for reliability in American driver survey

driving.co.uk

211 pointsTekMol222 comments

This survey is garbage. Survey design is an art. And unfortunately, this survey does not differentiate between a big problem like "brakes are shot" and a small one like "My spotify playlist doesn't show up like I want". Dig a bit deeper, for Tesla,

> Infotainment is the source of more than a quarter of all problems

Another thing to point out is that J.D. Power’s IQS does not differentiate between a problem that is the result of a physical fault or a design issue in which everything works as intended but the learning curve might be too steep.

No doubt Tesla has production issues like any other car maker in the world. But to truly compare them, a more credible source of information is necessary.

And for several other manufacturers, the infotainment system is also the single largest source of problems, not "faulty brakes" or similar, so it's not like Tesla is being singled out here.

> design issue in which everything works as intended but the learning curve might be too steep.

It could be entirely argued that a design with a too steep learning curve, _especially when intended to be used in a moving vehicle_ is in actual fact a "design issue".

Though when you stuff everything except the engine and brakes into the infotainment system, it does put you in a worse spot when your infotainment system locks up.

How many other cars do you need to learn a button combination on the steering wheel to reboot the infotainment screen when it crashes while driving, and then while it reboots your turn signals stop making sounds and you don't have a speedometer?

Yep. As a new Model 3 owner, this is definitely an issue and a huge drawback of them not having a smaller dashboard screen for critical functionality like the speedo. The "black screen" issue is very real and affects lots of people. I've already experienced it twice within the first month of driving, if it happens a few more times it's off to the service centre with it.

All in all I'm extremely happy with the car, it's an amazing drive, but the centre screen is definitely an issue.

I still don't get night driving + rural.

In the city, there is a lot of light. It's not really ever truly dark. In rural areas, on a dark night, especially with no moon, your eyes can adjust to the darkness...

I tend to turn all light off inside my car when driving rural at night.

That won't work though, if you have a massive, huge LCD with backlight constantly throwing white light at your eyes. Worse is if it 'shuts off', then you do something (change radio channel/interact) and blinding light smashes into your eyes.

An OLED would help. A 'red only' theme would be even better. Smaller displays better beyond that.

I get that Tesla rethought auto design. That's cool. But it seems like it only rethought from a very urban, perfect-eyesight, 20 something perspective.

I've done rural night driving in my Tesla Model 3. Yes, the display can be dimmed down well below the headlight reflection luminosity. The display also switches into night-mode automatically at sunset, where the colors become grey-on-black instead of black-on-white.

You're right about the red theme, it would be welcome.

I still don't like any internal light, and a white blacklight seems... silly. Even if dimmed down, it's still there.

(I have owned cars with LCDs before, and it's annoying if I can't completely shut them off).

OLED would at least have no backlight.

Well if you like driving with NO internal light, you CAN turn off the screen. I also enjoy occasionally driving with no instruments.

But then I "do something", and the screen comes blasting to life, blinding me, destroying my night vision.

And what about my dometers? Speed, o? In a traditional car, my eyes adjust, and I can read them without additional light.

At least an oled could maybe be themed to have tiny, red dometers... and being oled, no backlight...

It still leaves the issue that one has to turn their head to see it... but, better than nothing....

If you really must have an OLED then you might have to wait until Tesla or someone releases a car with an OLED. But this issue of being blinded by the screen has not at all been a problem for my use of my Model 3. Also I am quite sensitive to darkness, so I ought to know... I am a pilot, and I am very aware of the need to keep your night vision sharp. The Tesla Model 3 controls have worked for me. They're not perfect, but I've rarely had the screen blast to life and shred my night vision. Maybe one time, but that was only when getting in the car while it sat unused through sunset, and it fixed itself in under a half second. The cabin controls allow me to totally black out the interior of I want, and the minimum brightness adjustments are well tuned so that at night the very bottom end of the adjustment range is actually effective.

So this might really not be as much of an issue as you suspect. But there's only really one way to find out, and that's go try one out.

A couple of things...

We all have different sensitivities here. All our eyes are different. Mayhap, I'm more sensitive to dim light, more distracted, etc. Whatever the case... I've modified many cars I've bought, to allow me to completely turn off all internal back-lighting on all controls.

I don't want a light glow on my traditional speedometer. My radio analog controls, door lock button, and other controls to have ANY lighting. It's annoying, distracting, and I don't want it.

So considering this, imagine how annoying I find a massive LCD with any backlight. Even the dimmest backlight is many times brighter than a turned down analog backlight on classic style car displays, buttons, knobs, etc.

My beef here is threefold.

1) Why on Earth is my speedometer to the right, so I have to turn my head to see it. Why is the speedometer not always there?

2) Why is it on a display that always has glowing light, or I can't see it. NOTE: yes, I can see a traditional car speedometer with only starlight/moonlight. No, I'm not mistaken, yes I can.. so says 32 years of driving.

3) Oh, I wanted to try a Tesla. But where?

Where would I do that? Even when they had dealerships, which they've closed most of, there aren't many in my region.

There's a whole ball of 'Tesla is still in its silly stage', such as not having anyone within 500km who can fix my car, not being able to buy parts, local dealers not being able to fix them, and the absurdity of thinking roving repair shops can fix a car at -40C, in the middle of an ice-bound street, during snow storms...

But beyond that, I actually was in California and thought "Why not make their job easy, I'll test drive one here!"

Nope. Sorry. Was flatly told no, as I didn't have California drivers license. I explained several times that I was on vacation, but the mantra was that "I can't buy local, so I can't test drive local."

Of course, this isn't germane, but you did poke the whole "just try it" into my face.. so I had to respond. ;P

Ok. Tesla is not for you.

On my Volt, the dash lights and screen automatically dim when ambient lighting is dim (aka dusk, night, tunnel). You can further dim them by twisting a small knob on the side of the dash. This should be stander operation.

The screen uses dark mode at night, and the backlight can get pretty dark beyond that.

Some cars are doing a HUD option with driver info in you field of view at the bottom of the windshield, I think that would be a great way for Tesla to maintain the “cool screen” factor while keeping important information available when infotainment breaks.

But then you need the HUD hardware and another little computer to manage it, and since the Model 3’s “everything goes in the infotainment system” is fundamentally a cost-cutting measure, I doubt it will happen. Or if it does, it’ll be a premium trim item.

And since vehicle speed is arguably pretty important for driver safety (if not when flowing with traffic, then when taking a sharply curved exit ramp off the highway) it’s not a good look to put it as a paid upgrade. Tesla wouldn’t want to admit that a second screen is helpful.

Best case would be to make the main screen stop crashing, but if that were easy they’d have done it already.

> if it happens a few more times it's off to the service centre with it.

You still have time to turn it in as a lemon and get a refund.

Last time I drove a rental car I left the airport driving with only one figure on a burning hot steering wheel. There was no switch. It took me pulling over at a rest stop to break out the PAPER manual to learn how to disable to fire, which was a good thing because by that point my backside was also starting to cook. I'd call that a significant design flaw.

Tesla or something else? Every car I've seen with heated seats (admittedly small sample size) had a hardware button with amber indicator LEDs showing you what setting it's on, so I'd certainly agree with not having an obvious switch being problematic. Made even worse by apparently turning it on by default?

Moving everything into hidden modal screens of the infotainment system is not a trend I'm excited about.

Rental Audis with virtual cockpit have caused me to have to pull over in order to figure out how to control features. By comparison, the Teslas I have driven seem fairly straightforward.

Jeep Grand Cherokee.

This is why I'm going to keep buying Mazdas - a hard push away from using a screen to display anything beyond nav/radio stuff. It's hard to beat a nice conventional gauge for at-a-glane readability.

I think one of the questions is gizmo factor. My car doesn't have an infotainment system, so I can't have problems with it.

A premium car with premium luxuries like bluetooth, air conditioning, GPS, self-driving, power windows, heads-up display, that button that open doors on minivans, airbags, and the like will have a lot more failures than a 1950-era Ford F150 truck. Does that make it a worse car? A better car? Or a bad survey?

Tesla has a lot of gizmos. Luxury cars have more gizmos than my car. I think the survey reflects that more than anything else.

> A premium car with premium luxuries like bluetooth, air conditioning, GPS, self-driving, power windows, heads-up display, that button that open doors on minivans, airbags

Of your list, the only thing I'd consider a premium luxury today is a heads-up display (and self-driving, though I'm heavily cynical on the _current state_ of self-driving).

Tesla isn't being compared against 1950s era trucks, it's being compared against 2020 models. Of your list, I'd not consider any of those other items gizmos. I mean, airbags? AC?

... and pneumatic tires.

I'll admit I threw AC, airbags, and power windows in for comedic value, but as for the rest of those, my car definitely does not have them.

It's not just which gizmos, but also the specific gizmos. If your car's audio has two speakers, versus a dozen woofers, tweeters, and what-not, more things can go wrong. If there's split front/rear AC, more things can go wrong. If your car has a motor to move the seats, more things can go wrong. When I sit in a Tesla (or many luxury cars), it has about three or four times as many things to break as my much more basic car. And when they break, they take a lot more to fix.

I don't want that. If someone still sold a VW Bug classic, or an old-school Ford Truck, I'd be driving that.

Or to be fair, the one thing on the list I do want is bluetooth. I'd trade my fancy-schmancy power windows for bluetooth if I could.

Are bluetooth, air conditioning, or airbags really considered 'premium luxuries'?

Word. My 2011 Ford Fiesta had bluetooth, AC, and airbags.

But to the OP/parent's point, my newer car is a luxury model and it has a touchscreen infotainment thing -- and I hate it. 10/10 would rather have nobs that I can feel physically, or even just elevated bumps on the plastic (kinda like braille) so that I know I'm on the "seek station >>" part of the touchscreen.

Yeah, this is a comparison of 2020 models too, so literally all of them have that.

The majority of problems mentioned in the article are not gizmos, but things that exist on every car. Brake pads, seats not fitting, panel gaps causing leaks. Given Tesla's manufacturing process it seems utterly predictable that they would have more issues with build quality than any other automaker.

Tesla has the most complex infotainment system in the industry. More complex software generally has more issues and complaints.

People are going to have more issues and encounter more problems when using Microsoft Word versus Notepad. Word would therefore perform worse in a survey like this. That doesn't mean Notepad is a better piece of software or that Word users would want to switch to Notepad given the option. So what is this survey really telling us?

"Tesla has the most complex infotainment system in the industry."

... which is a major design flaw.

Tesla's fallen into the trap of thinking that minimalism is the same as simplicity, elegance and ease of use.

Does complex imply harder to use? I find Tesla’s system easier to use than most infotainment systems. I would argue more features != harder to use.

I think the point is that people are more likely to get into a collision if they're messing around with an infotainment system when they should be keeping their eyes on the road. A simple radio+CD player with physical buttons for everything is easy to operate without distracting the driver.

It is naive to assume that if a car has a simple radio+CD player with physical buttons that the user will only ever use a simple radio+CD player with physical buttons. Many people will instead use Bluetooth, an aux input, or a radio transmitter to connect their phone to the stereo. Now everything is offloaded from the car's infotainment system to a phone which is even more difficult and dangerous to use while driving.

Don't own a Tesla, but from what I understand most things can be controlled from the steering wheel controls.

It’s true. There are some common controls that are not as easy to access as you would like, but the common stuff is physically interfaced. I do think they took the design principle of avoiding physical controls a little too far, but in general it is the most fun and interesting car we have owned. Anecdotally, it is different enough that my 65 year old mother in law doesn’t drive it because she is not comfortable with it.

I'm stuggling to come up with another meaning of complex that doesn't infer that something would be harder to use.

Seems to me that almost all technology tends to become both more complex and easier to use over time. What's easier to use, a pdp 11 or an iphone? Or a plane from the 1960s vs a modern one that can fly itself? Making things easier to use in these scenarios necessitates additional complexity.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/complex

I was using adjective definition 1. You are assuming adjective definition 2.

That is what I like to explore in UI design. Can you have a large number of features, a complex set of features, that are easy to use? Can you optimize for the common 80% while making the remaining 20% usable? I think of complex pieces of software I use and most of it would not be things I classify as “hard to use”

I am complex but, alas, have found that I am easy to use.

Considering many people are reporting issues, according to that study, it seems to be hard to use.

Anyone I’ve shown my car to has been able to figure it out quite easily. I don’t understand what’s complex if you have used a touchscreen you should understand how to use it. I don’t do a lot of fiddling around with my radio I only skip between a few things so once they are saved as favorites I’m good.

I mean I get how people might not know how to open the glovebox but it was one of the first things I was shown when I picked up my car. Once again I almost never have to open it.

That is 100% a matter of opinion. To use the example from the first comment, the Tesla Spotify integration isn't perfect. That doesn't mean it is a better choice to simply not integrate Spotify into the infotainment system. It also doesn't mean that non-Tesla drivers simply aren't using Spotify. They might be fiddling with the playlists on their phone which is even more dangerous than fiddling with the playlists on the infotainment system.

> But to truly compare them, a more credible source of information is necessary.

Here are some people's direct experiences of Tesla build quality:

- Model Y quality at delivery: https://insideevs.com/features/433821/model-y-video-warns-no...

- Another Model Y quality discussion (they talk about it at the start of the video, don't need to watch the whole thing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMvBIPov67g

- Model 3 versus a puddle of water. The puddle wins: https://insideevs.com/news/433643/video-tesla-model-3-rear-b...

The survey seems to match the reality.

It's also useless in time frame. This is over the first few months of ownership. I've owned two of the cars that rank near the top of this list and it's problems after 5 years that I care about. That's when you start to pay out of pocket and the problems get big. Most cars, now, don't survive ten years, but I want a car that's reliable from year 5 to year 10.

It's not useless, it's just targeted at a specific audience. Some people only keep cars for 5 years and then get a new car. I buy used cars about 3 years old and keep them for 5-6 years, so reliability ratings over later years is more important for me (which is why I generally buy Honda or Toyota for my minivan/car needs), but it might not be for those people.

Consumer reports has traditionally been good about showing reliability over different stages of car lifetime, but it's been a while since I looked.

Consumer Reports relies on elective responses to their reliability survey. Doesn't this make their rankings problematic and statistically invalid?

As opposed to what? JD Powers seems to do the same. If you have a better survey with more rigorous standards that actually has enough data to by useful and comparable across many cars and years, I'm all ears.

Here's what both Consumer Reports[1] and JD Powers say about how they collect their data.

1: https://auto.howstuffworks.com/buying-selling/consumer-repor...

2: https://www.jdpower.com/faq

Amazingly a survey of initial quality measures initial quality.

This still helps you. Unless you expect a car that is constantly in the shop the first five years to magically stop needing work after that. Yes it's possible that some of the top cars switch places in the 5-10 range, but its very unlikely a bottom 5 car is going to eclipse a top 5 car.

Most cars are also far more reliable now than you are thinking. Every big company makes cars now that routinely last 200k-300k miles, that takes more than 10 years of driving for most people.

The average age of cars on the road in the US is 11.8 years. So most cars survive well past 10 years.

And notice that all the "worst performers" are luxury brands. Is this not simply a matter of those who spend a lot also expect a lot?

Could also be attributed to more cutting edge and complicated features expanding the surface area for more issues.

Friend of mine also pointed out that luxury cars are produced in much lower volumes, and thus their production processes are never as fully fine-tuned as a Camry, for example.

I'm a big fan of the old NPR show Car Talk, and one of the major lessons I've gleaned from it is don't buy something like a Maserati unless you have a burning desire to put your mechanic's children through college.

> Infotainment is the source of more than a quarter of all problems

To be honest, all car infotainment systems suck, and have sucked since cars were invented.

The stock systems had good ergonomics, but shitty features.

The aftermarket systems had good features, but suffered from "presales" whizzy RGB design, with crappy button-itis after you got it home.

Now there are basically no aftermarket systems available because of car all-in-one designs.

The problem with Tesla is that their car looks like it has a big iPad in it and people judge it by the same standards. And Telsa probably has 1/10000 the staffing devoted to ios.

That said, Tesla has definitely NOT listened to it's customers when it comes to the USB music system:

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu...

There are over 103 pages of comments on it sucking.

why USB? It's the way to get lossless music playback for the $2.5k high fidelity sound some cars have.

It's also always available and fast. I have not only music, but tons of downloaded podcasts.

Personally, I think they should just put someone good on it and fix it.

While they're at it, add skip-back and skip-forward buttons for spoken audio programs. Losing your place is a nightmare.

JD Power is the most respected survey in the business.

It's pretty undeniable to argue that Tesla has more production issues than just about every other automaker on the planet. Elon's idea to increase Model 3 production, by... making things in a tent? has posed some pretty obviously predictable quality issues.

Well it's dangerous if people are fiddling with their infotainment system while driving and it's poorly designed. How is that any better than having bad brakes?

It's honestly surprising it's legal to play with that while driving, but you can't use your phone.

JD Power is clearly in bed with the traditional Detroit automakers.

If you look at their history of rewards[0], you'll find that many times they choose the big three american companies vehicles over clearly superior import vehicles. They're vehicles on the page show one vehicle from each of the three big automakers in the US, one Chevy, one Ford, and a Dodge. There's also a Volvo in there that I'm sure fought some battles in conference rooms to get there.

I nearly get triggered every time I heard about these awards in commercials. They are not to be trusted.

[0] https://www.jdpower.com/Cars/Ratings

As someone who used to be an automobile engineer working for a big automaker in the a previous life, J.D power rankings are a complete farce.

Their surveys are designed so that a particular automaker will win (overrating certain metrics for no reason) and then make money by charging automakers to use those awards.

They have a vested interest in giving awards to automakers that are more in need of them. (not German or Japanese automakers)

So technically this is a pay-for-play kind of shenanigans?

Yes and No.

What JD power does is make a massive number of categories to give awards in. They then choose metrics for the survey that prioritize certain traits of the vehicle.

The surveys themselves are conducted in a fair manner and awarded companies truly deserve those awards. But, in some sense, them winning it was a foregone conclusion the second the metrics were selected.

It is like conducting a strongest man competition that prioritized height over anything else. Then the competition was conducted and people from Netherlands won handedly. By the metrics, Netherlands has won the competition fair and square. But, using height as the main metric for strength made their victory a foregone conclusion. Same thing.

Their surveys are free. But, they charge automakers money to use the awards in marketing. Honda or Toyota doesn't quite care for JD power awards because they win a lot in other comparisons. But, American manufacturers rely on these awards to look better, because frankly they don't have much going for them.

Yep. If you create enough awards, everyone's a winner. My understanding is that the data itself and the surveying services they offer is actually rather good, and many automakers actually pay for the raw data and that service.

It's the marketing/awards side that's quite literally garbage. And certain automakers will pay for this as well.

Yes. You're absolutely correct

We did used to buy the surveys to understand the results. But the awards themselves weren't worth much.

> What JD power does is make a massive number of categories to give awards in.

This is common joke between friends. "Best in class HD towing" is something you used to hear on Chevy Silverado commercials when they, in fact, had lower tow ratings than F150 or Ram at the time. "HD towing" seemed to be a category that included Silverados only?

The Heavy Duty models of trucks use different engines and have different towing capacities than their non-HD counterparts. Were you comparing the Heavy Duty models?

Does that make their ratings for the chosen categories incorrect?

If you care about a category specifically (like 1st year reliability), it still seems valuable.

JD Power is akin to paid studies like an IDC "Study", or Gartner and Forrester "research". Or even better - Tolly "reports". And finally the complete sham that is NSS Labs. They're all pay for play - and using NSS as an example, they get paid on both sides. First the vendors pay the "lab fee" (source: I worked for a large security vendor and was involved in this process) to be included and for any reruns of the test if you don't like the results. The other half of it is charging customers for the "unbiased" reporting / research. It's a racket. Someone sent me a link to this JD report last month and I just responded with a rolling eye emoji. JD Power has declared GM/Chevy the winner for their entire existence if you watch any of their commercials. Clearly it works to an extent. And their loyal buying base oft references the "quality" represented from personal experience.

However, starting that conversation about the JD link got me looking. I started comparing reliability of Tesla to all other luxury brands in my subscription to Consumer Reports (they, at least, they buy what they test and have no brand influence or conflicting interest). While the Model X seems to fare the worst the Model S doesn't rank lower than comparable BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc for the most part. In a lot of those direct comparisons Tesla has higher reliability, but still relatively poor given the cost of the product.

I fully agree with the parent comment here. Tesla likely told JD to go fly a kite and JD's enterprising sales folks went to Detroit and conjured up a nice fluff piece. Or, maybe this is a sign of Detroit starting sling mud because, too little too late. From my perspective I hope Detroit gets their act together quicker than they have been as I'd like more choice for EV. I don't own any Tesla products, but I likely will in the next 3-5 years if the current landscape of EV options doesn't significantly change. I like the idea of a lot of the concepts Tesla has brought to market, but as a consumer I don't really care what badge is on the vehicle anymore. It's unfortunate those who are competing are often lacking in many ways when compared to the current market leader.

The most awarded brands section backs up your point too. Granted Toyota is number one, but then you have the three big American brands right after that.

Also it's hard to tell, but I believe the Volvo in the picture is the one that is made in South Carolina.

Their awards this year seem to be mostly given to non-US brands, with the exception of awards for trucks.

https://www.jdpower.com/Cars/Ratings/Dependability

I was wondering about that. I owed a Dodge in the 90s and was amazed to see Dodge today at the top of the list. I was ready to consider either that my "never again" philosophy to the brand needed an update or that the survey was a bit suspect.

From your link, Toyota got the most awards this year, with Nissan and Lexus (Lexus is owned by Toyota) getting 2 awards.

I meant if you look at years past. They have links to the rewards for each year.

JD Power seems like the Gartner of automotive.

Yeah - totally biased Study - Toyota and Merecedes on the bottom of the List and Buick at the top? Dodge? Kia? This study is a joke.

To be fair, I can not say Mercedes cars are reliable.

Mercedes drive hundreds of thousands of miles, they're well known for it...

http://www.mercedesmedic.com/many-miles-mercedes-benz-cars-g...

Maybe the old ones, but I do not see myself using a newer ones more than 100-150k kilometers.

I drove a rental Tesla recently. We were parked in a long line waiting to board a ferry and I was playing chess on the main console. When the line started to move, I tried to too and car just wouldn't go or start. People stuck behind me started getting impatient and honking while I was trying to figure out what had happened, turning off and on again, pressing random buttons, accidentally popping the trunk, etc. It took several minutes to realize that the car wouldn't start while you were playing a game on the console, so I had to quit the game, and then drive.

My point with this anecdote is that it seems to me that Tesla has many such features, some of which may change with software updates, and, given the expansive definition of "reliability" used here, perhaps this is a driver of issues.

I wonder what the rates would be if you restricted it to "issues requiring professional repair" or something like that.

Yeah, the biggest problem with Teslas is they don't follow a lot of established conventions in the auto industry. Things like the windshield wiper controls or opening the glove box are not in the standard place. You definitely have to take the time to learn how to use the car.

As a Tesla owner, I think it’s not a great rental car. A lot to learn.

I think it is clearly opposite: media in mazda is insanely hard to learn.

I bet that Mazda is stupidly easy to get into, start, put it in gear and drive though, and I bet it will behave predictably on the road like a normal car would. Everything else is secondary. Teslas definitely have a learning curve if you have never driven one.

No, tesla behaves just like a normal car. Changing gear is the same as Mercedes, default settings makes tesla same as any other car.

If you will change it's settings to something different than it is have to learn something. Chill Mode + No recuperation + no "one pedal driving" and you will get typical Mazda behavior.

The biggest issue with tesla is that it is freaking powerful if you are moving from other car.

> Chill Mode + No recuperation + no "one pedal driving" and you will get typical Mazda behavior.

And how likely are you to get exactly that after receiving a rental that someone else has played with all the settings for? My guess is that the combined effect of rental agencies not taking the time to reset settings (bluetooth pairing is never empty on anything I rent) and people wanting to play with all the extra settings Tesla gives you means you more than likely receive a Tesla rental in a configuration that is not entirely the same as driving other cars.

Also, I don't think that is fully normal car driving.

Does a normal car have a situation where you need to reboot the MCU (media control unit, basically the computer that powers the screen) in order to open the glovebox?

Does a normal car have 2 ways to open the door, one of which damages the trim?

Does a normal car have no obvious way to "lock" the doors when you leave?

I am a _VERY_ happy Tesla owner as I said. There is still a lot to them that I think might be a bit much to throw on someone for a 1 day rental.

This doesn't sound like a normal car to me. I've never driven a car where doing the wrong thing on the infotainment screen would prevent the car from moving.

Typically cars do it the other way around- if you're doing something you're not supposed to while driving, they just freeze or back you out of the infotainment screen but allow the car to move

To be clear, you can drive without the infotainment screen in most cases. You won't be able to see your gear nor your speed, but it should go forward.

Mazda gives you CarPlay / Android Auto and has buttons for things like climate control, I haven't driven one but I imagine it's a lot easier to drive without bothering to learn how the screen works at all.

EDIT: though IIRC Mazda's screen isn't a touchscreen, so you need to figure out how to control CarPlay with the knob. Interaction is more like an old iPod than an iPhone. Perhaps less intuitive as a new user, but better for muscle memory so you can keep your eyes on the road?

Mazda's screen is a touch-screen at least up to 2019; you can use the knob as well (and I exclusively use the knob because finger-prints make the screen unreadable when the sun is behind you).

Looks like they started dropping touchscreens in 2019:

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...

Also, along with dropping the touchscreens, they've gone on a hard bent towards keeping the "driving only" information on physically separate displays from the "infotainment" part. Pure vehicle operation stuff is always straight ahead for the driver, while navigation and music is always on a separate screen a little to the right.

That's interesting. My car (2019MY) must be a transition model because I have the 7-way controller in the center console, but the screen can still be touched.

Ars Technica's 2019 Mazda 3 review also notes that the control dial now only spins and clicks, no more pushing it up/down/left/right. That must have been the first model to get the changes.

To your point about changes with software updates, since I've owned the car, if you attempt to drive while the game is open it will just automatically close the game.

That's a MUCH better solution. It would've saved me some embarrassment.

I drive a Honda and it has this glitch where it will get into a state when it says "Depress brake to start" but what it wants is the opposite: it will NOT turn on if you are depressing the brake. This once caused a great deal of honking, at me, in traffic.

The purpose of my anecdote is that many carmakers are not great at software development.

Personally, I hate when they use the word depress to mean "to press something down", because that's what I think of "press" as meaning, and depress to me immediately makes me think "opposite of press" or "stop pressing". To my eyes, it would be much clearer to say "press the brake" or "activate the brake pedal".

I have the same mental ambivalence about "engage the clutch". Is it engaged when the engine is connected to the transmission? Or when they are disconnected?

But this is English and we have words like "inflammable".

If the car doesn't display a warning along the lines of "Exit game to drive car", then I would consider it poor design.

My car has a little "dot matrix" display that displays warnings like "Door open", I'd expect the many displays of a Tesla to be able to display such warnings...

This was quickly fixed in an update. If you shift into drive now, the entertainment/toybox sections of the display automatically exit.

> the Elon Musk-founded firm

Musk didn't found Tesla. From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

> Tesla was incorporated on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

and that they, with a third employee,

> connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million round of investment in February 2004

Technically speaking his investment came with a retroactive co-founder status according to the company. But yeah no he wasn't there in the beginning.

"Retroactive co-founder" - I wonder if that approach would work in other areas too. Like, how much would it cost to buy the status of an "Original member of the Beatles"?

Ask Ringo?

Like, Pete Best was replaced by Ringo b/c George Martin thought he wasn’t good enough in the initial recording sessions with the band.

Pete Best can claim to be an early member but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Ringo was there from the beginning. The analogy works pretty well with Musk here.

Now, if you’re talking a Destiny’s Child situation where two of the early members were replaced in music videos — for songs they performed on and a record with their faces on the cover, you’d be correct. Michelle Williams can never claim to be an “original” member of the band, but she was part of the band from the time it started to take off, even if she didn’t get to accept a Grammy for the second album with her two band mates (who had to awkwardly go on stage with the girls they replaced).

> but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Ringo was there from the beginning

That's a rather curious bit of revisionist history. They played hundreds of live shows and made several released recordings before they hired Ringo - and that's not even counting the Quarrymen/Johnny and the Moondogs days which represent another 2 years before that.

The retroactive co-founder status came not as a result of the investment, but by a lawsuit settlement with the _actual founders_.

Thus making it absolute garbage. I can spend as much money as I want convincing an organization to falsely call me a founder - that does not make it correct for anyone else to call me so.

Letter of the law vs spirit of the law.

Not really. The money didn't come with that restrictions. Later lawsuits created those.

> A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders

This is one of the more damning articles for me. It includes nuggets I used to say as joke about what would happen if MS made a car including:

“I have tried a reset but the glove compartment will not open after pressing the button…any ideas?” One response asked if the car was in Valet mode. When told it wasn’t, they followed with: “ok. That’s the ‘normal’ cause of random glove locking. Try putting it on and turning it off?”

The fact that it is normal is amazing to me.

I love what Tesla did to the industry in terms of advancing battery tech to force other players to move, but talk about Stockholm syndrome.

This isn't specific to a Tesla though. Some years ago a friend bought a VW Phaeton (the W12 long is an underrated car I think). The boot wouldn't open. VW told him to reboot the car. Didn't work and he had to get a software update to make the boot work again.

"If you put a computer in a fridge you get a computer that can cool things down."

Some might consider it a feature if the glove box needs some known-only-to-the-owner quirk to open as basic security, at least prior to having voice/phone activation as an option. As i understood it, the valet mode is an early preparation for autopilot ride-hailing activity while the owner is working, otherwise known as robo-taxi mode, in order to keep the compartment locked in non-privileged cases. Can any owners confirm this?

Valet mode is a common feature on luxury cars; prior to the fancy infotainment stuff, it was a valet key that wouldn't unlock the glovebox or trunk, but would drive the car.

I traded in my Tesla Model S last December due to its degrading reliability. I ran into numerous issues towards the end such as:

- The touchscreen bubbling and tearing away due to "delamination". - Door handles "not presenting". - The radiator breaking and dumping all its fluid on the garage floor. - The fast wall charger overheating. It got so hot I often needed to use my shirt as a buffer between my hand and charger handle. I was told it was normal behavior for summer time.

Then there were driving issues such as autopilot glitching out and steering out of the lane. It got frequent enough that I had just stopped using that feature altogether. Then there was the time when I was on the I-10 going 75 mph in the HOV lane and the car beeped a warning and quickly slowed down to 15 mph. I had to put on my hazards and weave through rush hour traffic to get off the freeway and park the car. I got out of the car and back in, rebooted the computer and it started worked normally. Rebooting seemed to fix various things.

This isn't to say that my entire Tesla experience was entirely bad. I use to be a big fanboy, and in fact this was my second Tesla Model S, my first being a 2013 P85+. But sadly that era has passed I don't see myself ever buying a Tesla again.

Same anecdotal evidence on my end (S85). Despite the fact that it's technology (less moving parts) could make it the most reliable car, it ended up being the least reliable. Usually one service appointment fixed 3 things and broke 2 other things in the process. Wait time for an appointment was 3 weeks. I was done after 3 years and 40k Miles. Life is too short.

>The J.D. Power US Initial Quality Study, which gauges problems encountered in the first three months of ownership.

A very questionable definition of "reliability".

This video does a good job summarizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkkiK4nplW0

JD Powers get maligned a lot, but they're an industry tool used by manufacturers to measure themselves against others. The survey has incentives to be accurate.

The Initial Quality Survey is basically a measure of how happy a customer is with their new car. I think a luxury brand like Tesla does especially badly because customers are already aware of (and sensitive to) potential issues with paint, body panel alignment & scuffing whereas mainstream brands' customers may not be scrutinizing their cars as much

It's not a good measure of reliability, but it's a good measure of quality control, where Tesla seems to be sorely lacking. I've had two Model 3s, and I love the car. I had one last year that I had to return when I changed jobs, but I loved it so much I immediately ordered another. With that context, the QC is really poor. The first one I got last year had lots of cosmetic issues that I spotted when I picked it up, mostly paintwork. I missed the fact that the cloth on one of the speakers was damaged until it was too late. The Model 3 that I got this year was delivered in March, just before lockdown, so I didn't get much chances to use it at first. I just collected it today from the service center where it had been to have a scary fault fixed. I was driving along when suddenly a loud chime, and regen braking was disabled and the handling changed completely, and the car no longer decelerated when lifting off the accelerator pedal. An alignment issue that was a quick fix (aside from the four week wait for an appointment and the two hour round trips to drop it off, and then collect it). I separately now need to wait for a mobile repair next month to replace a parking sensor. These sort of things should have been caught before the cars left the factory.

Perhaps it should be redefined as build quality, but it is still a decent metric worth analyzing.

Most product failures happen very early on, or very late in the design lifespan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

Also manufacturing problems are usually highly correlated.

AFAIK they lump everything from "I don't like the color of this AC control knob" to "sudden and unpredictable catastrophic engine failure" into this category.

Which may be problematic, but it's not like (as some here imply) that Tesla is being treated any differently to any other manufacturer.

If the headline said "Tesla vehicles have most complaints" it would be more accurate, reliability is a strange choice of words. The study is called "Initial Quality Study" and the axis label on the graph is "Problems per 100 vehicles."

To be clear, there, though - the word reliability is used by The Sunday Times, not by the survey.

Though you could argue that "I can rely on my vehicle to have a consistently high initial quality, coming from Manufacturer X" is consistent.

I don't doubt that Tesla's are less reliable by other definitions, but I agree that this isn't a great measure.

Tesla's have lots of new and untested technology. That's their appeal. If toyota wanted to be less conservative and start using blazing new technologies in their cars, I'm sure we'd see the same issues there.

Teslas are notorious for software bugs that eventually get fixed. What i'm more interested in is whether Teslas end up lasting a long time. Electric motors are a lot simpler and so in a sense, I suspect they have the potential to last for more years with fewer issues.

> Tesla's have lots of new and untested technology. That's their appeal.

This saw gets trotted out whenever Tesla gets dinged for reliability. So let’s dig into it. What untested technologies are Tesla deploying and how does the affect reliability?

Well let’s review. The Model 3’s initial problems were metal panels not being installed correctly. A technology that has been successfully deployed on automobiles for over a century.

Now gaps are fixed, but they shouldn’t have been a problem at all. From what I understand the problem was caused by trying to have robots do final assembly and just lax quality controls, problems “legacy” manufacturers had solved decades ago.

Tesla’s iconic touch screens are delaminating [0] because Elon ordered screens to be installed that aren’t up to automotive grade standards. This is another unforced error.

And we haven’t even touched on the problems with the actual advanced technology, autopilot, which is once again oversold and underdelivers.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

> Now gaps are fixed

Not really. They've improved on the 3, but people still routinely get some really wild tolerances on current Model 3s. And the Y has had an absolutely awful beginning of production, facing many of the same build quality problems that early Model 3s had.

Tesla is relying too much on buyer enthusiasm. As they expand into the mainstream, they need to avoid building a strong reputation of poor quality that will be really hard to shake.

I wouldn’t buy a Tesla. I don’t like the interiors, and like you said they've burned their reputation with me.

I was skeptical of how wide spread the the panel problems were with the 3’s initial rollout, until I examined the 3s in the parking lot at work. Every car was bad, including one that was a shockigly horrible.

> If toyota wanted to be less conservative and start using blazing new technologies in their cars, I'm sure we'd see the same issues there.

The Toyota Prius was the first mass produced hybrid vehicle and is notoriously reliable.

It's also essentially a regular car with a 144v battery and larger starter motor. Otherwise, very conservative.

By the same metric, isn’t Tesla just like a regular car but with a bigger battery, no engine and a really big starter motor?

I mean cars before that had all the adaptive cruise control stuff anyway which is the same but just a bit better right?

No, the interior and it's controls are completely different. The touch screen interface is a huge difference.

Like the touch screen a Prius has, but without the buttons?

I’m just saying if you can trivialise the huge R&D effort that went into the Prius, you can trivialise the Tesla in the same way. I think anyone who appreciates the nuance in engineering knows that it wasn’t just putting in a slightly bigger starter motor, they invented a whole category.

But the iPad is just a big iPhone, and the iPhone was just an N80 but it had a touch screen and you couldn’t install apps.

> Tesla's have lots of new and untested technology.

Tell us about some of these, beyond Autopilot. Because this is a common refrain from Tesla owners, some of whom believe that only Tesla has adaptive blind spot sensors, or that only Tesla will keep you in your lane actively (and not just do the pinball bumper drift sensor), and so on.

What other new and untested technologies is Tesla deploying today?

Seats. Other car makers don't use Tesla seats.

Your comment reminded me of an article I think I read here on HN: https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...

This survey isn't really a "reliability" survey per-se. It's more a measure of how happy people are with their new cars

How is "problems in the first three months of ownership" not a good judge of "Initial Quality"?

It's a great judge of "Initial Quality", but a poor judge of "Reliability". When someone says their car is reliable, they mean it hasn't needed service for a decade.

It's "INITIAL QUALITY STUDY"... reading comprehension is going down even here..

Here's another source (consumer reports) that backs up the idea that Teslas are on the less reliable end:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-makes-big-leap-consume...

My thoughts are that Tesla is a newer company, they are trying things that others aren't, and third, reliability never seemed to be a top goal for them.

I think it's more that reliability only really comes with maturity as a car company. In the same way that the reliability of a code base increases with maturity. A car is like a code base in that no one person ever fully understands the entire thing.

Reliability comes from pretty well known manufacturing principles at this point. Things like six sigma, continuous improvement, and the Toyota Production System are taught at every B-school in the country for a reason. Tesla actively flaunts all of these.

We shouldn't act like producing cars in a tent will end up with anything better than Ukrainian build quality.

I've seen plenty of code bases become less reliable over time. I once took over a project that had been going on for 10+ years. Reliability was terrible. The first thing I did was stop all changes, and only allow critical blockers to be fixed. That eventually made it stable enough to be useful.

Reliability takes more that time. It takes competence and attention to detail.

Mature does not imply old; it means feature-stable, proven and understood.

An example I know, Canon's pro-level cameras are mature on the day that they go on sale to the public because they have been tested around the world for a year or more to verify and debug the design. That's part of their appeal, users know that they're putting $8000 into a mature camera that will get the job done, though with fewer features and baubles than a Sony.

For sure. Old codebases can be but are not necessarily mature.

I've always figured the really crappy Model 3 builds were the tent builds. Mine, apparently, was built inside the building and not in the tend, because it's been pretty great.

Building cars inside a tent proves a lack of commitment to build quality that is going to affect all their cars, not just the tent ones.

Everytime Tesla is mentioned here the deluge of hate is overwhelming. I genuinely don't understand it. Here comes a company that is actually doing something fundamentally transformative and good for the planet and its inhabitants instead just another in the countless line of garbage apps that at best are a solution looking for a problem and at worst actively contributing to the destruction of our species (Facebook). Seperate the man from the accomplishments.

>> Separate the man from the accomplishments.

I think this is mostly good advice. However, the company does intentionally market him as the face of the company -- so it's hard to fault people for disliking the company due to the press he intentionally gets on the company's behalf. His twitter account antics are marketing, too. It's all part of the brand, for better or worse.

Precisely. Tesla has said in SEC filings that @elonmusk is considered an official channel for company information.

I will not argue that Tesla is doing things differently. I have one gripe with the absolute truth suggested by "good for the planet and its inhabitants" that so many EV manufacturers ride on. Are electric cars good for the planet? Nope. Are they less bad than gas cars? Maybe. It's like saying that Diet coke is good for you because it replaces normal coke that is bad for you. That's an erroneous and arguably dangerous dichotomy. Sorry if I'm being facetious but that kind of marketing bothers me and I believe is damaging (to the environment in this case) by making us more inclined to settle for non optimal solutions.

I understand your reasoning but this is a perfect example of the saying "Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good". I agree that there are better solutions in terms of environmental cost for mobility but given the constraints of human behavior and urgent need for massive immediate reduction of carbon emissions, EV's are currently our best shot.

Why? Why isn't more public transit, which in ever study is massively more greenhouse gas efficient than electric cars and is also already an existing and proven technology a better option?

Why aren't plugin hybrids a better option? Battery electric vehicles require massive emissions in assembling a Li+ battery of that size. Given that most trips for people are short distances that wouldn't end up using the fuel tank of a plugin hybrid, why is encouraging their adoption not a better solution.

There seems to be a belief that BEVs are the obvious and accepted solution to the climate crisis that I don't think meets muster.

Also, the idea that "electric cars the solution" is a specious claim. Buses, trains, etc, are still far more efficient in greenhouse emissions standards than a culture that encourages everyone to have a personal car. It's not clear that we should be incentivizing electric car ownership than disincentivizing car ownership at all.

Will your belief be different if knowing that there are those where owning a car is the only option -- where bikes nor public transportation can get us to our destination on a day to day basis?

There is no doubt in my mind that EVs are way better off because of the pushes Tesla has done. It's also very clear that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without Musk.

The same can be said of SpaceX.

But when you mix in the weird shit he says, off kilter predictions about where Tesla will be, petty public bickering with public figures, his stupid stance on COVID, and just general oddity... he's just a difficult figure to appreciate without some cynicism. A lot of people have trouble with successful people in general, but you add in all the weird crap and it's easy to see why Musk is such a divisive person.

There is fact. You don't understand why is it happening... you argue against it. Not a scientific approach.

I would better start with facts and build hypothesis. Like it is about hype and false marketing claims and disillusioned people. Company underdevilers. There is a clean separation of

+ premium first

+ battery tech

± UI

− breaking fast

− autopilot

− support

Strange for you to mention "man", there is not much about him in the thread. His approach has a niche but is generally understood as a liability for a stable company. Megafactory, "production bottlenecks" and "production hell", no one cares.

> fundamentally transformative and good for the planet and its inhabitants instead

I think this is where the fundamental difference lies. A huge number of people see Tesla as wrapping itself in that cloth but not really achieving anything of the sort.

I'd say a number of Tesla's critics are strong environmentalists who feel like Tesla has just turned greenwashing into its product.

It has become extremely popular to "idea bash" anything and everything on the internet and in real life. It's not possible to do anything anymore without a crowd of haters.

People can't stand the idea that an idea they don't understand might actually work, and they get angry when it does.

It seems odd that Dodge has the top score here, with Toyota and Honda significantly below the industry average. This runs counter to my personal experience and general perceptions. I wonder if historically unreliable brands like Dodge are becoming more reliable than Japanese brands, or if this is related to how this survey is conducted?

These surveys are a bit suspect. They tend to fluctuate a lot from year to year which makes little sense because car companies very minorly change their cars from one procution year to another. Major changes to design and construction only come every 5-10 years when a few models are often reintroduced together. Toyota ever ranking below any U.S. brand is almost hilarious but it will probably change on next year's survey. You can use these surveys to get a general idea of who is building more unbreakable cars by looking at them across multiple years.

Tesla though consistently ranks low on these kind of surveys. It's not really a surprise as small design or manufacturing issues take years to work out. There's a reason car companies that are very conservative with change like Toyota often top this list and companies that are pushing new technology into their cars frequently like BMW do not as well.

As an example, around 2000 BMW was one of the first companies to introduce variable valve timing on its whole line of cars. It was new and unsurprisingly VANOS seal failures soon became a frequent issue on higher milage cars. Basically every car has variable valve timing now and it's usually not an issue.

Edit: I use the term unbreakable instead of reliable because the kinds of issues that this survey tracks include things that aren't really about reliability in the traditional sense we think of it. If a company introcudes a particularly flimsy door handle and people are breaking them it comes up in this survey just as much as check engine lights. Minivans for example get docked a lot in surveys like this even though they are often well built because kids are hell on car interiors.

Because it's only problems within the first three months of ownership. Every car from a company can fall apart at the 90 day mark, but as long as they do ok in the first 90 days they get amazing marks. Toyotas and Hondas are known for hundreds of thousands of miles, but they get no points for that because the survey doesn't go far enough.

Cross check the OP ranking of 3 months of ownership against that of Consumer's Reports, which tracks car reliability over a decade. The two orderings differ enormously, likely because:

1) A car with fewer options/features has fewer parts that can fail.

2) Cheap cars are held to a lower standard than expensive cars.

You'll note that the OP's ranking puts cheap featureless cars at the top and expensive complicated cars at the bottom. This says little about brand quality and a lot about the fragility of complex systems.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-how-car-brands-compare-...

Dodge has been making essentially the same models, unchanged, for a decade. They don't use fancy technology, which means less things to break. So despite a lackluster history of long-term reliability, they've had plenty of opportunity to get the initial build quality dialed in pretty well.

Personally, I think this is a measure of the expectations for the brands. Dodge and Kia offer entry-level vehicles at a really good price point.

Most people aren't buying Dodge vehicles for their luxury interiors or refined ride qualities. They're getting cheap kid haulers or affordable muscle cars.

Was going to say maybe more of those cars exist, but that shouldn't affect failure rate as a percentage.

trust surveys over anecdotes anytime

This survey is incredibly suspect ... as the author themself states, there's an inherent bias for non-american brands.

I find it surprising the FCA and GM cars are topping the list, while being notoriously unreliable in the car community.

Also worth noting that both Toyota and Ford have been ranked as worse than industry average.

I'm not saying that Tesla(s) don't have quality issues, but this survey seems pretty meaningless.

It sounds like you are saying that this survey is meaningless because it disagrees with your anecdotal experience. If the survey is conducted in a rigorous and valid way, then it's the perception, not the study, that needs to be suspect. Does J.D. publish their methodology and data? The best I could find was this PDF: https://www.jdpower.com/sites/default/files/file/2020-06/202....

review consumer reports reviews of FCA and GM cars. They are crap. JD Power looks at the first 3 months. That's before the first oil change! The reality is that high-reliability cars require no mechanical repairs in the first 100k miles.

anecdotal evidence: 1989 Honda Civic only needed a/c compressor from 100-180k miles. 1991 Honda Civic only needed a/c compressor from 98-140k miles. 2007 Toyota Camry required a CV joint and a sun visor in the first 100k miles. It needed a Power steering hose at 120k. 2010 Honda Pilot required a Fuel Tank Vacuum Valve in the first 100k miles, and a a/c compressor, power steering pump and rack at 190k. 2012 Chevy Sonic needed a new turbo in first 50k miles. 2003 Chevy Cavalier went through alternators like underpants, and would quit running if you turned off the a/c while stopped.

I won't by GM or FCA vehicles with the exception of Dodge RAM diesels. I do maintenance myself and always use OEM parts when I sub work out.

I don't think it's as black-and-white as you suggest. This link seems to support the narrative that FCA has greatly improved, and it also agrees that Subaru and BMW, in spite of their high quality stereotype, statistically suffer from more than their fair share of issues: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...

Anecdotal evidence is fun, but it's useless for making any kind of informed decision. We happen to have a 2008 Toyota Sienna. The general consensus for that vehicle is that its practically bulletproof. But we've had chronic issues with it since 50,000 miles. AC went out, plastic seals falling off, engine knocking, and many other issues. But I wouldn't hesitate to consider a Toyota when we replace it, because I know our experience has been an outlier.

when has BMW had a high quality sterotype? Fancy pants? sure. but Audi/BMW/MB all suffer from reliability issues, with BMW leading the pack.

Completely agree about anecdotal evidence.

> I find it surprising the FCA and GM cars are topping the list, while being notoriously unreliable in the car community.

I'm convinced that nearly every brand is notoriously unreliable in the car community. Toyota is the only brand that seems to escape that mark. Though, Toyota is generally labelled as "vanilla and reliable" so it doesn't get a lot of attention in the car community.

JD Power has existed for decades and is known and trusted.

"...as the Elon Musk-founded firm reportedly wouldn’t allow its customers to be surveyed in 15 of America’s 50 states..."

Sigh. This again? Tesla has joined the list of producers of quality products like Oracle?

In the other thread, this was phrased as Tesla not allowing those states to release the information of people who bought a car to third-parties because privacy. I'm sure if you wanted to take the survey in one of those states you can just reach out to JD Power yourself, they can't scrape your information though.

That's a privilege reserved for Tesla if you complain about them publicly, or if you do something they don't like, so they can tell the press that you "were warned about hands on the steering wheel", even if that happened 14 minutes before the accident that happened.

Or if you find references to new models or features, so they can lock you out of the car's firmware, after downgrading it, and disable diagnostic ports.

How does Tesla "not allowing those states to release the information of people who bought a car to third-parties"? That's purely between you, the state motor vehicle registration office, and the state's regulations, right?

Other automakers release this information.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23637920

I agree with others that the survey is a bit suspect, but I do believe it is possible that Dodges don't have a lot of problems. Look at the cars they sell! They haven't changed their cars much in at least ten years. That is not a knock on them, Americans like Chargers and Challengers. If you are making the same car for ten years or more I hope you get very good at it.

The Tesla S was introduced eight years ago.

That is a long time, but the Charger (and the Challenger is essentially a two door Charger) was introduced 14 years ago. More to the point, the Tesla S was revolutionary in 2012, the Charger was old fashioned in 2012.

I saw that exact chart discussed elsewhere. The general trend I concluded was this is a measure of how picky a brand's customers are. Since "problems" is left undefined these could be anything from "I don't like this button" to "the engine randomly stops running".

Audi and Volkswagen; Chevy, GMC, and Cadillac; Ford and Lincoln, etc are essentially the same vehicles. I suspect the more luxury you go, the higher the expectations you have for your vehicle. The interesting exception is Lexus and Toyota.

Anecdotally, I'm surprised to see Subaru with such high defects. I know a lot of friends with Subaru's and have only heard one bad thing - the seat springs wore out after several years of daily driving.

It would be really interesting to take brands that have improved dramatically over the years, and do a thorough analysis of what internal processes they changed to achieve that result. You know that there are QA folks within each company doing that kind of analysis.

After doing that analysis, it would then be a fun project to try to apply those manufacturing or design process changes to software development.

I suppose in such a competitive and proprietary industry, such transparency is not likely.

The survey is meaningless if they do not disclose the questions.

You could also argue that Tesla is misleading since it won't allow customers in 15 states to fill out surveys.

Tesla doesn't have the power, legally, to prevent you (the owner of Tesla) from filling out surveys or otherwise talking about the car.

That's because of first amendment in US constitution.

What really happens is: Tesla doesn't release customer information to anyone, including JD Power.

Which is a good thing.

If you bought a Tesla, would you want your contact info to be sold to whoever asks for it, like marketers or spammers?

> You could also argue that Tesla is misleading since it won't allow customers in 15 states to fill out surveys.

What? Can you go into more detail?

In the article it says only customers from 35 states could fill out the survey since Tesla blocks customers in 15 states. So the data on Tesla isn't representative of the 50 states.

I spent a few minutes searching. J.D. Power has no information on the actual questions and I only found one article from the surveyed consumer side.

The Initial Quality Survey page: https://www.jdpower.com/business/automotive/us-initial-quali...

Methodology link: https://www.jdpower.com/ratings-methodology

Cars.com article about receiving a survey: https://www.cars.com/articles/filling-out-a-j-d-power-survey...

The full results are paywalled [1], but the questions are not much of a secret.[1]

The story isn't right, though. This isn't a reliability survey. It's a survey of initial build defects shortly after purchase. Reliability surveys have to be made a year or two later.

Tesla is still learning how to run an auto plant. The first years of Fremont were pretty bad. They botched the automation. They were operating in a tent at one point. Bloomberg: "Paint, panel gaps, scratches, and dents were the biggest problems owners reported." That's routine auto factory quality trouble. Possibly delivery process trouble. The drivetrain and control system seem to be OK.

There's a tradeoff between production volume and quality. Some companies, like Toyota, can do both, but it took Toyota decades to get that worked out. Most of Detroit then figured out how Toyota did it. Tesla isn't there yet.

[1] https://www.jdpower.com/business/automotive/us-initial-quali...

One thing that worries me about Tesla, is all the electronics.

Modern consumer grade electronics, are not known for lasting very long. And by long, I mean on the scale of 20 to 30 years.

Often, circuit boards deteriorate. Either the solder goes bad, or some resistor, or what not fails.

This is one reason why I prefer old style appliances, with minimal electronics. And I refuse to buy a smart refrigerator, because when that circuit board goes bad, then your refrigerator is now a huge paperweight.

With an expensive Tesla Model 3, that can cost upwards of $50,000 USD, then the risk of an expensive paperweight here, is very real. And Elon is not in the business of repairing old Tesla cars, since it does nothing to boost his stock price.

And with all critical instrumentation now being virtual, and displayed to you on the center monitor, then, you now have a very high risk of cascading failures.

A better design, would have been to keep separate, the critical instruments needed to drive the vehicle, like the speedometer, battery charge meter, etc., from the infotainment system used to provide auxiliary support, like the GPS mapping, music, video, internet, browser, Netflix, etc. And especially the AutoPilot program, should definitely be kept separate.

Or maybe, the people who can easily afford to spend $50k to $80k on an experimental car, doesn’t concern themselves with such frivolous things. And they buy themselves a new car every 5 years, so to them, everything I mentioned above is all irrelevant.

And a lot of people who bought the $80k Model S, did so just to drive in the car pool lane. Once that privilege is revoked, then, its importance will diminish.

Since the criteria isn't disclosed I will just have to assume tesla have the least reliable cup holders.

I think this is a bit misleading. The metric is "problems" per 100 cars. That could mean the car's transmission gave out or it could mean there is a software bug or paint issue that is causing the driver problems. In the case of Tesla it could be the case a lot of problems are due to software bugs that can be corrected over the air seamlessly for free. I think classifying each problem into categories with associated weights would help to make the metric more meaningful

Why? Because we're used to software bugs?

What? Just saying a minor software bug (possibly Spotify not integrating correctly) is not the same as a transmission or brake failure. Also, in Tesla's case the minor bugs can be fixed relatively quickly and for free. I don't know what you're talking about being used to software bugs.

JD Power has a number of surveys and it is important to understand the context for each.

IQS is the Initial Quality Survey, and it is basically "What defects did new owners notice". Historically, vehicle models with more years of production since model change/update have done better on the IQS Survey, which is why some unexpected cars score higher. Additionally, simpler cars have fewer things to go wrong.

Disclaimer: I work for General Motors, this post consists solely of my opinions.

Necessary info because poor media are summarizing this incorrectly as "reliability":

> Tesla’s issues are primarily with production and things such as paint imperfections and poor fit of body panels, according to J.D. Power

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/24/tesla-lags-auto-industry-in-...

Tesla cars haven’t been around long enough in a quantity to be able to even determine long term reliability. Short term reliability is obviously a joke assessment. My bet is as time carries on Tesla cars will rank low. No reason other than they are a new comer and you learn and improve reliability through real world experience like Honda. I would never buy a Tesla.

Ive hear the wheel bearings are garbage because they use special ceramic ball bearings, rather than roller or spindle bearings which are like a bajillion times better at handling wheel loads and shocks. Maybe they have changed it in newer versions but I havent heard anything about it since.

I own a model 3. It is a great car, far ahead of the competition. I've had more issues with it than i did with my previous car (honda accord). Eg, blackscreen - many times, and once an unintended acceleration.

Great car with unintended acceleration?

That only happened once.

Manufacturing quality is hard. Tesla, as a SV company, isn’t really interested in manufacturing it seems. Think they could really benefit from merging with Toyota especially at this valuation.

>Think they could really benefit from merging with Toyota especially at this valuation.

Merging them would create a mass of online fanboys so dense that it creates an automotive black hole. It will be impossible for discussion of any other brand to build up enough speed to exit the fanboy-well.

Joking aside, brands that start with T and end with A seem to have a disproportionate number of very loud online fanboys. I can understand why they have the following they do but it doesn't make them any less insufferable.

> Merging them would create a mass of online fanboys so dense that it creates an automotive black hole

Ha! It might not be as bad as you think, there are a lot of Model 3 owners who used to own a Prius, so there's already a lot of commonality there.

> the Elon Musk-founded firm reportedly wouldn’t allow its customers to be surveyed in 15 of America’s 50 states

If this is true, I don't care how reliable Tesla's are, I already know enough to never be a customer.

I thought Mahk made it clear JD Power is garbage

Warning: anecdote.

My boomer parents have a Tesla and complain constantly about its reliability. However, often this is a consequence of their own disinclination to the more "techy" interfaces that Tesla favors. There are several cases where what they see as the car's failures might be seen, by Tesla say, as user error.

There's a good lesson about design and demographics there. If you're selling expensive cars in the United States, consider building interfaces that are generationally appropriate to the only generation that has much disposable income in the U.S.

> There are several cases where what they see as the car's failures might be seen, by Tesla say, as user error.

That includes fatalities at Tesla so this should be no surprise.

> the only generation that has much disposable income in the U.S

I thought the target market for the Model 3 was primarily software engineers...

That's an interesting point, but you're also describing a shrinking demographic.

2014 I got my tesla. I’ve had one issue and one recall... equivalent expensive luxury cars range rover,bmw, Benz of the past... by 2-3 year mark all are thousands in maintenance monthly. Tesla for me at least has been a game changer. Cost aside I don’t think about my car much except for the occasional thread like this...

I don't doubt that your Benz is expensive to maintain but I have a feeling that thousands per month in year 3 is somewhat exaggerated. Edmunds estimates the 5-year maintenance cost of the most expensive Benz I can think of (the E63 AMG) at less than $9000, which is maybe a lot but that's $150/month.

> are thousands in maintenance monthly

Yeah, I'm going to be skeptical (based on my ownership of multiple Audis and a Jaguar) that you were paying "thousands a month" (i.e. at least $24,000/yr) maintaining a two year old premium vehicle.

Electric cars have more "mechanical" reliability due to the inherent simplicity of the electric motor, but this hyperbole just further encourages the perception of the "Tesla Fanboy" / RDF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com