>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".
A very questionable definition of "reliability".
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
Though you could argue that "I can rely on my vehicle to have a consistently high initial quality, coming from Manufacturer X" is consistent.
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.
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...
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 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.
The Toyota Prius was the first mass produced hybrid vehicle and is notoriously reliable.
I mean cars before that had all the adaptive cruise control stuff anyway which is the same but just a bit better right?
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.
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?