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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

I would say you’re selling it not really because of “service” but rather because they simply sold you a crappy car in the first place. No brand new car should have issues that need fixing.

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> No brand new car should have issues that need fixing.

As much as I'd love this to be true (and it should be), I have yet to buy a newly manufactured vehicle that didn't have to go back to the dealership for something at least once... often more than once.

I don't think it's entirely fair to lay that aspect at Tesla's feet. It is fair, however, to expect better and more timely service in getting those repairs made.

But a single something, even if it takes two trips to resolve, is a whole lot less than this list of ~18 problems with ~23 service visits that span from mildly annoying (wrong model listed in software) to serious (steering system grinding, which they had the audacity to pass off as normal).

This has to be close to qualifying for lemon law status?

It wasn't 23 service visits, as I attempted to have multiple problems fixed per visit. So far it has been in service for 14 days spread across 7 services.

California lemon laws require a car to be in service for at least 30 days in the first 18 months.

I’ve done it twice. Out of two new vehicles. YMMV.

Strange. The 3 Honda Civics I’ve owned (brand new when driven off the lots) have all had no “bring back to the dealership” issues except recalls.

Same with my several Camrys, Honda pilot, and Toyota.;)

Yah Honda and Toyota will eat Tesla alive once they get moving with EVs which they have.

Do you think Honda, Toyota and every other car manufacturer would even be offering electric vehicles at this time if Tesla did not exist?

I think they would. Toyota already had very good hybrid cars for years, so plenty of experiences with batteries. Tesla made electric cars sexy, but I was always just a matter of time before electric would go mainstream.

I think the existing investment in tooling, plant and equipment that these companies have accumulated makes it hard to economically justify starting from scratch with new tooling, plant and equipment on a product line that has no competition. Tesla provided that competition, and justified such investment.

Who cares?

I for one. Disruption of complacent industries has defined our age, and been the motivator for countless entrepreneurs. Created more jobs than we can realistically measure, through the emergence of entirely new industries.

The established auto manufacturers have a long standing pattern of paying lip service to electric vehicles. General motors went so far as to reclaim, disable, crush, and/or shred virtually every model of the EV1, the first mass-produced and purpose-designed electric vehicle of the modern era. [1]. The manner in which GM created barriers to entry for electric vehicles with the EV1 program is the stuff of legend. [2]

TSLA has been the most shorted stock in history, with close to $57 billion being lost by short sellers between 2010 and 2021. [3]. That entrenched economic forces want Tesla ended is no secret.

The mass adoption of electric vehicles was Elon's stated goal with Tesla, and it looks like that is well on its way to being accomplished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car

[3] https://qz.com/1979325/tesla-not-gamestop-is-the-most-shorte...

I really don't think just b/c tesla "did it first" we should give a crap. We should only give a crap that companies are bringing cheap EVs to consumers. tesla is not doing that.

> That entrenched economic forces want Tesla ended is no secret.

Literally a conspiracy theory.

> Literally a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy theory to have your stock undermined with unsurpassed short selling? Or for the president to hold an "EV Summit" and not even invite the company with the most US electric-car sales (74% over the past three years) who were recently dubbed the "most American-made"? [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-beats-ford-as-most-ame...

My family has had 4 cars in the last 15 years (I won't mention models, but they were fairly reasonable, middle-of-the-pack vehicles). Three of them had no defects at all. The most recent one, a hybrid with a bunch of fancy electronics, had just a couple of problems, covered under warranty and fixed in less than a day. (And if our dealers flake out, there are independent service and repair shops that can do the same job, or better).

When several of my Tesla-owning cow-orkers reported waiting six months for things like body panels, I resolved not to buy one.

My car made by Toyota never had to go to the shop for anything serious for several years. Sure, I needed to get tires replaced multiple times, but internals took 7-8 years, and I finally sold it off at the 12 year mark, after having replaced the batteries, the alternator, and the brakes.

My BMW took at least a couple of years before I ran into problems.

A new vehicle shouldn't have any problems for at least a couple of years, period.

> No brand new car should have issues that need fixing

“Price, quality, manufacturing at scale. Pick two.”

Ok, that’s a little flippant. But the underlying truth is that quality for software and manufactured goods is one of many variables that can be dialled up or down at the expense of other variables.

Honda and Toyota seem to provide all three just fine.

(Well, maybe not price right now because the entire car market is insane.)

But Mitsubishi does not provide all three, and its prices are lower than Honda and Toyota. See also econoboxes from Eastern Europe.

So my claim is that Honda and Toyota provide high value by balancing a low-ish (but not the lowest) price against high quality.

I recently got a Toyota in the insane market at MSRP! You can have all 3.

Toyota kind of implies otherwise. Besides my impression is that Tesla doesn't really have manufacturing at scale yet. Aren't they still having trouble fulfilling orders?

So Musk is picking fewer than two? Fair.

Toyota is the king of doing all 3, it's a shame US automakers underestimated the Japanese. In terms of lemons, Toyota only has one every ~11.6 Million cars, while the lowest performer is Fiat with one lemon every 76k (Jeep, which is the same company as Fiat, at 131k). This publication didn't track Tesla, as the Model 3 started mass production 2 years after this article.

https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2016/01/toyota-tops-fiat...

Those numbers are far too low, probably by two orders of magnitude or more.

To get a feel for the actual statistics, a very useful trick I came across on a Porsche forum is to look up the model on cargurus.com. E.g.:

https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/inventorylisting/viewDetailsFi...

Note the number of listings (401 nationwide listings for the Taycan at the moment) shown in the 'Filter Results' area. Scroll down to 'Vehicle History' and note the availability of the option to 'Hide vehicles with Lemon History Reported.' Next to that is a number reflecting how many used cars of a given make/model have a lemon title out of the set of cars currently for sale. With a 25:401 ratio, it can be inferred that almost 6% of used Taycans on the market were bought back by Porsche at some point.

I feel that may be biased, as presumably every lemon buyback from Porsche gets resold on the second hand market, but clearly not all cars from a 2020 model will have resold yet.

I'd even go as far to say that the majority of a 1-2 year old car model will still be with the original purchaser.

It's biased, but it's also proof that the numbers are far from the six-nines values the GP was referring to. They sell about 10K Taycans a year in North America, so there are likely around 20K on the road.

I guess all that can be said with any certainty is that the proportion of lemons could be as bad as 6% or as good as 0.1% (if the ones for sale on Carguru at the moment happen to include all of the lemons ever produced.)

Or just pick Kia or Hyundai and get all three.

Or not https://drivingdc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/autoguide-l...

That graphic gives zero information on how that is calculated or where the data came from. I have to assume that it includes historical data over long periods. Kia and Hyundai are totally different companies than they were decades ago and are different than even 5-10 years ago.

There's no way a modern Kia or Hyundai would appear anywhere near the same level as on that list (and definitely not below any American car company or Fiat or Volkswagon).

That is rather weird metric. Mentions per brand mention... In what?

And how could that take in account how often brands are talked about in general.

Tesla has 0/3

That's true, but if they had fixed all the problems in the first couple of weeks, I wouldn't have minded too much. Unfortunately they didn't, and worse, they lie about problems being "normal".

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