New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting
autoevolution.com
autoevolution.com
A good friend ordered a new Model S in 2015. It arrived with a "squeak" that turned out to be due to missing welds in structural components of the chassis. They wanted him to sign an NDA to get a replacement vehicle (which he refused to do, both on principle, and because he'd talked to friends about it already). So he was forced to keep his vehicle, which was then repaired under warranty for what they initially said was not a warrantable defect. To quote him "They took a huge proponent and turned them into someone who will never, ever, recommend them"
And this is how they treated their early adopters that were paying $100K in 2015 for their higher end cars.
Are NDAs like that actually enforceable?
I say this as a person who very much wanted to sue Tesla and backed down on the advice of my lawyer friend -- I was most likely only increasing my net loss and severely stressing myself out
It (and the blue check), just isn't worth it.
source?
Most states can't / won't enforce Non-Competes, but NDAs often have teeth.
Most states also have warranty and lemon laws, often specifically aimed at cars, so you could fight the NDA or ignore it and push for a warranty violation or lemon law case.
Wow that would be awesome. Someone I know here in the EU had a leaking sun roof on their Toyota and after so many fixes and replacements that did nothing (and she had to pay for) the dealer basically said "we can't fix it, the parts are made by another company bla bla ...".
Normally I try to support stores over Amazon in a "use it or lose it" sense but that particular retailer is the exception.
I never heard of a US lemon law equivalent for the EU, but the EU has pretty good general consumer protection. It varies somewhat between countries, but here in Poland if you buy a new item, if it breaks, it gets repaired under warranty and then it breaks again (it doesn't have to be the same component) the consumer has a choice of asking for a replacement, lowering of the price, or even withdrawing from the purchase altogether. Most people are not aware of this and are getting strung along by unscrupulous sellers. I myself had a situation like this with an induction hob that broke 6 times during the warranty. They then replaced it for a new one and that too broke a month later. I didn't even call them, I threw the damn thing out and I bought a different brand. It has been 3 years and that one has been working fine. Had I known I can withdraw from the purchase back then I'd definitely do it.
If that was a new car recently bought from that dealer, that’s their problem. In the EU (for sales to consumers), it’s the seller that’s responsible for delivering a product that’s fit for purpose. This dealer can’t hide behind the manufacturer or its suppliers (https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...)
If the car wasn’t bought there or was older than 2 years, the rules only apply to the repair, not to the entire car. I think that means they would either have to fully repair the roof or give you something that’s at least as good as what you brought in for free (things do get murky there for my understanding of the law)
(of course, all that is in theory. In practice, companies will try to avoid having to do that)
And yet it didn't stop anyone from buying Teslas... It's almost as if they knew they could get away with murder.
Instead I waited for companies that actually know how to make cars to work out how to make electric cars.
A MAGAmobile is a lifted truck that rolls coal and has a huge lets go brandon decal
So now, Teslas are cool according to those right fringe folks. Of course, the blue side consumers are not super excited about Tesla anymore, but they are already "stuck" with their models (in general). And the red consumers are a bit more likely (maybe?) to follow a fad.
Eventually, Musk will level out and Tesla Motors will just be a mediocre line of vehicles without too much political pop culture. But for now, he's basically playing with everyone to sway various opinions of himself and his companies (e.g. stroking his ego along the way).
Granted, I'd lease a Hyundai before ever considering buying a Tesla. It's too bad bc I like the tech, but lack of ownership, software telemetry and shoddy service is a deal breaker.
Every single crappy dealer/official service here will give you a replacement car to not mess up your life for just stupid car checks, whatever basic car is fine. Tesla no, fuck off we don't care, wait.
Thus creating a whole new financial burden.
$15k for a refurbished battery from another old broken car. Once fixed, the cars resell value is at about $20k.
And they took my battery back to sell to someone else for $15k.
Definitely feel like a HUGE sucker for supporting them. This thing was $101k new.
The cars weren’t very reliable (even dumb shit like the electric windows would break) and the repairs were notably more expensive than they should have been. One of them explained that he finally understood that someone willing to pay triple the price of a standard car can be charged triple for repairs too.
He sold the luxury car and bought a Prius and said it was 100x better just because of how reliable it was, and it had the same bells and whistles anyway.
Electric windows, sure.
Note, we were in Austin where something like leather seats would be a bad idea.
most have warranty laws, too.
I don't know how serious a crack in the front casting on a Tesla is, but this kind of policy is pretty egregious.
I don't think Tesla would do this unless management consider it very serious.
if electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party fails to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court only upon finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information to use in the litigation may presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party.
> "Do this only orally" is always to hide evidence from a future court discovery.
That is, I've followed enough court cases and news reports to have seen things taken egregiously out of context to agree there could be valid reasons to limit discoverable communications (though not in Tesla's specific case), especially because so few people seem to argue in good faith anymore. For example, lots of times in long email or slack threads people throw out ideas, even if they're not particularly well thought out, because that's part of what being in an open, healthy organization entails. And then I've seen these communications presented as some sort of official corporate position instead of brainstorming.
What you're describing is still fine because a solid defense is to look at someone taking something out of context and going, "would you mind continuing reading?" where someone else follows up shooting down $controversial_thing because liability etc.
The only reason not to create that record in the first place is because you weren't interested in compliance from the get go, and you were banking on the "naive first violation" defense.
Been there, seen it in action, left because of it. Ethical abandonment, no matter how it is gussied up, is ethical abandonment. There is always time for doing what you should to keep your nose clean.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
what sort of context could be added which exonerates that behavior?
if the context exonerates it, why not have a policy of including context?
if it's somehow benign, but cited out of context, why not just provide the context?
and, if such exonerating context doesn't exist, wouldn't society prefer they not get away with patenting something obvious?
> why not just provide the context?
Because lawyers might find ways to dismiss/challenge it?
so, the problem spurring such a policy is that they don't want to be implicated on the record in doing bad things - they want to get away with what society doesn't want them to get away with
that means the policy is bad for society.
(I was the person who provided the ancedote.)
I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
I’m sorry but you might consider patenting your mind reading device.
It seems pretty easy to imagine engineers spending week/months/etc. solving a specific problem the solution to which might seem pretty ‘obvious’ to them when they actually manage to arrive at it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually obvious ..
> wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter
Why take the risk? And even if you end up winning at the end having to prove something like that will still result in additional costs and/or delays.
Your reasoning seems to be based on vague assumptions based on a very vaguely described situation. I find it hard to understand how can someone feel so certain about it with close to zero real context.
indeed, with no detail provided, we're forced to make assumptions, or ask for detail
I chose the latter, that is why I included this in my post:
> I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
I would like a response to that part of the post if you feel up to providing it, please
The quintessential example is an alibi. If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi. Meanwhile, if I hadn't said anything, the witness's claim that I happened to be in the same city on the same day as the murder is nowhere near enough evidence to cause me any problems.
you have an equal need to disprove the claims of a witness regardless of whether you have an alibi
additionally, regardless of whether there's a witness, all you need to do is prove you were in Berkeley to remove yourself as a suspect
so the two things (alibi, witness) seem orthogonal
EDIT: I know there are places where secret recordings are illegal but don't know the expected penalties. Recordings are probably legal in a "one-party consent" state. Be wary; certain kinds of recording may be illegal even if recording is legal in general.
In a lawsuit, you will be required to hand over all relevant records. It is illegal to destroy them or fail to hand them over. The penalties for doing so could be severe.
But even if you get away with it, hiding evidence would be wrong. Don't respond to sleaze with yet more sleaze. Maybe you'll win the fight or maybe you'll lose it, but you will always lose something of yourself.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
Is it wrong, or just illegal some places?
Is it only "sleaze" where it's illegal, or everywhere?
E.g., Germany: StGB 201 § 201 Verletzung der Vertraulichkeit des Wortes https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__201.html
In some places, secret recordings are useless as evidence (e.g., two-party consent states in the United States), while in others even illegal recordings may be admissible anyway (e.g., Sweden).
For example, in Germany, a lot of the privacy culture (and therefore, laws) came about because of how the secret police terrorised the common people, for example, using secret recordings and worse (e.g., secret evidence).
But in other places, sure, I would agree with you.
If a business states that the call may be recorded, then they are already consenting. Therefore your recording would be the 2nd party consenting.
"Determining which jurisdiction’s law controls in cases involving recording devices or parties in multiple states can be complex, so it is likely best to adhere to the strictest applicable law when in doubt, and/or get the clear consent of all parties before recording."
So it doesn't seem to be simple to determine what's legal in any given situation.
These companies know that worker bee call center drones say things all the time that the company doesn't want preserved in a court of law later- mainly promises that the company doesn't want to have to uphold if they were outside policy. They take it very seriously. I suspect any major company with something to lose has a similar policy.
In the US it's either one party (the majority of states) or all party.
What I do is I inform and get consent from hotline agents during the call.
I said it before, musk himself is a big con, so I am not shocked that’s a policy in there.
"Cold shuts occur when two relatively cold streams of molten metal from different gates meet and do not fuse together properly during the casting process. This problem is visible to the naked eye – giving the appearance of a crack separating the two sections."
https://www.haworthcastings.co.uk/news/the-differences-betwe...
Cracks caused by impact have sharp edges and cracks caused by cold shuts have more rounded or sandy looking edges.
Stable process control could eliminate the need, but AOI is relatively cheap insurance.
The importance of the distinction here is that Tesla can't argue the customer caused this...a cold shut can only happen at casting time.
New delivery buyer is digging around under the hood to confirm their brake fluid reservoir cap is in place, as there had been recent reports of missing caps.
Finds the cap is good, but that the cars frame is cracked instead.
The owner of the car should go out and find a lemon law lawyer. When I had to work with one I didn't have to pay a thing.
(I had a Subaru where the GPS / Stereo would reboot while I drove and loose its settings. After a bunch of replacements, the car still had the problem. I had to catch it on video, though. Subaru ended up declaring the car a lemon after trying to fix it multiple times.)
FWIW: I own two Teslas and their service is horrible. Every time I take it in, they never put the car back together and I have to take it back.
Genuinely curious; why did you buy the second one? I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands, but once a brand fails me I’m very reluctant to buy something else from them (a Samsung TV with some silly quality control and firmware issues was enough to make me swear off Samsung, and the Nexus 7 (original one; the one that tended to degrade after about a year) was enough to convince me never to buy hardware from Google again, say). In particular, I would never buy the _same thing_ (most current Tesla cars are ~the same thing) from a company where I’d already bought one defective thing.
It’s an amazing power train glued inside a 90s-era Oldsmobile.
You and I know that the ford is made much better for "less", for obvious reasons But ask yourself, who is going to buy a heavy electric SUV from Ford?
-a typical mustang GT buyer? No way.
-a person who currently has a model S/Y/3? fat chance.
-a new EV buyer? Too expensive and "bland". Does all EV things "middle".
-A ford Fan? I'll gladly take the f150 lightning over mustang.
I want to see the f150 lightning and similar really make a dent/impression.
# of MachEs at local dealer = 3
# of F150s sitting on lot >1 month = 50-100
> -a new EV buyer? Too expensive and "bland". Does all EV things "middle".
It is actually SUV-sized (unlike the likes of the Kona, which you may be comparing it to - it is only shaped like an SUV). It can be cheaper than the Model Y, depending on the sku - and those two are the only budget EV SUVs that I am aware of (the E-Tron and iX are significantly more expensive).
Bland? Who cares. There are people who only care about the utility that a vehicle has to offer.
It is servicing an area of the market that only has one other deeply incompetent (as-per the article) competitor.
I’d bet good money on that.
At your rate, you might run out of brands to buy from ;-)
What does that mean? The car is in 5 pieces? Take it back unfixed? What do you do then to fix it?
When I went back to get the car fixed, they left a bunch of wires disconnected under the back seat.
A few weeks ago I had to go in for a problem with the driver's seat belt. They didn't re-attach the panel with the switches for the power seat correctly, so now it keeps falling off.
I had this same problem and it was solved with a firmware update. I wonder if that came later?
You knew the manufacturer had a reputation of forgetting hard to check parts... and you still bought one.
What else could it be missing that you can't practically check for?
Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality. I feel like they're going a bit overboard on that factor though.
Yeah but the company is run by a hip cool memelord who's gonna get us to mars, and his cars have nice softwares like my iPad. Who cares about the metal parts of the car's rigidity structure? That's just something old boring people think about. Everyone knows EVs are more reliable than ICE so no need to ever look under the hood. $TSLA to the moon! /s
>Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality.
The shit build quality has less to do with being American, and more to do with Tesla chasing higher margins, high margins which in part come from cutting a lot of corners in places where customers aren't looking for, which in a tracic-comedy way is what most American auto-makers did to get to their shit-build quality reputation.
To be fair, many brands have QA issues all the time, but that one from the article is so big and obvious it should never have made it passed inspection.
I'm not suggesting they're shit because they're American. I'm just saying it's nice to see them living up to the existing standard of shitness set by the existing American manufacturers.
I'm sure each American car manufacturer has their own unique and interesting reasons for having reliably shit build quality compared to European or Japanese manufacturers.
Edit:
And naturally aspirated engine.
Shit rolls up-hill. It's not that american factory workers are worse at assembling widgets than chinese factory workers, it's that american factory management is shit.
British Leyland would also traditionally make garbage cars, but when the Japanese came, those same workers were churning out good cars.
Processes, culture, management and leadership makes all the difference.
Which is the most American thing you can do.
Is this...a joke?
We are currently going through inflation caused directly by margin chasing and stock buybacks. If you look into any industry you will see a long race to the bottom to get the most money for the least product imaginable.
It's the #1 function of a capitalist system, to extract the most value for the least work. Margin chasing is all we do. It should be included in our national anthem.
The owner received a car with cracked structural components and is still going to give them another chance. I could understanding asking to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation or public scrutiny, but not whatever this is.
Cracked_Tesla, if you're listening, the correct response is to demand a complete refund or replacement. If refused, take legal action. This could be an ordinary lawsuit in civil court or a complaint filed under the local lemon laws. You are owed tens of thousands of dollars, so hire a lawyer. And then spread the story far and wide, naming the particular Tesla employees involved, because these people tried to kill you.
What if you’re not a tech person at all and you can’t use Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, eBay. You’re screwed, cause the alternatives might as well be wizardry.
Sometimes, you have to make tradeoffs. You may want a Tesla for a variety of reasons, and the reputation for unreliability is not enough to tip the scale for another maker. With that in mind, buying the Tesla and thoroughly checking for known issues may be the most rational thing to do.
Wasn’t that a South Park episode about Priuses?
Edit: it was about Segway - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entity_(South_Park)
That is until I just so happened to make a little extra money on TSLA stock by accident. I then turned around and found a salvage title, dirt cheap, home wall-charger included 2018 Model 3 and sold off some that TSLA profit for a free car for my wife. We've owned it long enough to confirm all "the build quality is crap" rumors. I'm a mechanically inclined person and I'm not idiot so I have taken the car apart enough to verify it is safe and it isn't dangerous (salvage title, total loss vehicle) but once you start taking things apart you see the corners they've cut where other car manufacturers do it differently - things like water drainage and body panels alignment is just too easy to spot if you've owned 15 cars over 30 years.
Long story short, I wouldn't buy a new one. I certainly wouldn't spent my _hard earned_ money on one. But I don't mind gambling a bit on a rebuilt title mass-produced one. That's about the level of trust I have in Elon's ability to build a quality automobile.
They are ok cars but everything you've heard about build quality and defects is absolutely true. I've never attempted to use the autopilot because I value my life.
PO = 破 = rubbish, RS = 二手 (er shou) = second hand, CHE = 车 = vehicle
Here's one instance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9HlIVCsyg
My favorite will always be Toyota: Take Off Your Oversized Tires, Asshole.
https://archive.org/details/king-of-the-hill13seasons/King+o...
Not in the rest of the world they don't.
Anyone who has so much as sat in a mid to top tier car from BMW/Mercedes/etc will instantly come away with an overwhelming sense that a Tesla feels cheap by comparison (because it does). Classic things like the sound and feel of closing a door, gripping a steering wheel, pushing a button, etc.
If you pay attention to detail this can often be experienced from the car externally - famous cases of Tesla tending to have poor tolerances and high variability in things like panel gap, etc.
Unless the user gets in an accident, is there a way to actually prove the frame is structurally defective?
I think the photos do that just fine
Tesla's service center might be willing to say "within spec!" but I suspect they'll have a much harder time finding an engineer willing to put their license on the line in court.
It probably wouldn't get to court, though. The government deals with lemons all the time. Every state has ways to get lemon buyers relief quickly and at minimal expense.
A lawsuit. That is what the legal system is for. But for some reason people seem to look down on this which I find baffling.
Including Lemon Law claims.
In my state, you must start with arbitration but you have zero obligation to accept that decision and can sue regardless of outcome.
If you think that I am wrong, please explain why.
(You are right that you "can sue regardless of outcome," but only in the sense that anyone can sue anyone for anything. If you enter into an agreement to arbitrate disputes, the outcome of that arbitration is generally binding.)
I had a Model 3 LR as a company car and really liked it - even being fine with most of the usual concerns or dislikes people share. I even like the brand (although I dislike most of Musk's other shenanigans over the past few years).
I've since given the car back and am considering purchasing a BEV in the future. I've obviously been considering another Tesla, but my single (small) negative experience with their customer service, plus myriad stories online (including this one) make it a total lottery: you must cross your fingers that your car is perfectly reliable, else be launched into a world of potential frustration and difficulty (not to mention potentially huge cost, if not warrantied) gettings things fixed.
Between that and various automakers starting to produce, it's likely enough that a new 2027 will be cheaper and better than a new 2024.
To be fair, this is typical behavior of any automaker, not just Tesla.
I myself had my ordeal with Honda over a poorly designed auto braking system on a new $40K vehicle that almost got me killed.
The response I got from Honda both the dealer and service was pretty much the same, we checked the computer logs and didn't find anything wrong with the car so it is safe to drive.
I decided to trade it in for a Toyota and take a $10K loss.
A couple of years later there was a class action lawsuit for the same exact problem I had and eventually a settlement, obviously Honda never acknowledged any wrongdoing.
Shortly afterwards my Toyota got recalled for the airbag malfunction after many people got killed or badly injured.
Good thing that this hasn't happened, though.
This shouldn't ever happen if QA is being done properly.
EDIT: which I recognise is "cutting corners" but the point is, any idiot can make one in-spec part. Making them consistently is the challenge.
Given what we have seen from Twitter, cutting corners and ignoring laws and regulations seems to be an Elon thing.
The guy is even skipping rent.
So why not?
https://electrek.co/2021/10/05/tesla-building-model-y-bodies...
> In an auto manufacturing first, Tesla has started building Model Y bodies with two giant single casting pieces for the front and back of the electric SUV.
Tesla is partly empowered to do this because electric vehicles are mechanically simpler than ICEs, and the batteries themselves also are made to be structural components. There's nothing fundamentally unsound about pressed aluminum.
Sadly the reason this bad casting was shipped to a customer is probably because they are not achieving the desired pass rate so they knowingly wave through defective castings.
https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/tesla-m...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-front-megacast-giga-...
It should be impossible to leave the factory like this. Let's say the issue is a substandard batch from a supplier that cracks from stress at some stage of the frame assembly (like when adding the battery pack, welding or adhesive bonding). The car should be inspected after all structural parts are added, at minimum visually but ideally with some kind of spectroscopy.
Also, if this is a whole batch with this issue it should have been noticed when doing QC on the shipment.
One option is that this happened at some stage during shipping (maybe the car rolled off a trailer and fell half a meter). Still, the dealership should be doing an inspection before handing the car over.
All in all, if this really isn't the result of some accident it is a total failure.
Let's not forget that the truck has been delayed for over two years now. In the meantime, a few competitors have been eating Tesla's lunch, and Musk is notorious for pushing unfinished products.
Small bump - got to dismantle the whole car and replace half of it.
Tesla pioneered cast frames as a way of dropping the cost to manufacture the car.
- Tesla
Curious if selling this casting to a customer was an intentional decision, and if so, what the tolerances are for this type of deviation in a factory making cars.
A defect like this absolutely should have been caught by quality control. Even if they only take some sample size of parts for detailed analysis from every run, this would have been readily apparent. If it wasn't visible at time of manufacture (sometimes there can be a thin "skin" that covers underlying defects like this) this would have been evident from other inspection methods - X-ray analysis is commonly used to check for internal porosity or cracks in safety critical applications like this.
Team A focuses on making 1 perfect pot. Specifications, research, process, testing, verification, etc. They get pretty close with their initial pots, but they struggle to scale up.
Team B just starts making pots. As fast they can. Make incremental tiny improvements. Most pots are total losses. But they do manage to start making pretty good pots. And they hit scale.
Which approach is better?
--
Tesla's QA/QC will not improve, stabilize until their rate of change slows down. They are hellbent on scaling up (20m vehicles, build out charging network, etc) while reducing costs (new tech, fewer parts, etc).
A lot of mistakes will be made.
In the future, I'd consider buying a budget (~$25k?) Tesla vehicle. Maybe after they ship a few million.
Hopefully, we'll have many options to choose from (BYD, Kia, etc).
I have a Kia Sorento and overall it's a simple, honest car that's easy to work on and pretty well-built overall. But at 80k miles, the engine burns a quart every 1k miles which is entirely stupid. By comparison, our Mazda 5 (a very cheaply-made car!) engine lasted something like 150k miles and burned no oil with practically no maintenance to the engine.
I think a Toyota is in our near future.
I'd accept a passenger-oriented Ford Transit Express BEV.
A warranty that is now of 10 years/100k miles (or 15 years/150k miles when extended). The value proposition of Kias, when you factor in features included as a standard, has never been greater, and is better than most other manufacturers.
Which could maybe be fine, if Tesla had also adopted the Bezos Amazon obsession with customer satisfaction. Bezos knew that given Amazon's growth there would be a lot of errors (defects). So they built out superior customer service infra, gave CSRs wide autonomy/authority to fix stuff, try to make every customer whole.
And Amazon's customers loved them for it, have high tolerance for mistakes, which would harm most other CPG brands.
Instead, Tesla adopted the Page Google antipathy towards customers. So dumb.
At some point, Musk will have spent all of his goodwill. Then Tesla's brand will suffer accordingly. And that kind of soft equity is wicked hard to rebuild.
These lawsuits are going to hurt Tesla's brand. Celebrity is a two-edged sword. The media that fawned over him for so long will now gleefully tear him to shreds.
{1} IIRC, Tesla's defect rate is %10 vs %3 for other "luxury" auto brands, however that's measured.
{2} Noting that defect rate varies across subsystems. IIRC, Tesla motors and batteries remain best in class; Whereas body, paint, interior, and trim suffer.
Also - one defect means absolutely nothing. They make solid cars, everyone that owns one knows that.
Data seems to disagree with this statement [0]
Tesla is also notorious for glaring QC issues, like missing bits and obvious panel gaps.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2023/02/09/tesla-tank...
The news picks up on the .0001% of problems and those customers are always the loudest (understandably). For ever cracked front casking, there are tens of thousands of solid castings. Austin alone makes 5K Ys per week.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-giga-texas-5000-unit-weekly-....
> If Tesla cars were such POS, they wouldnt be growing 50% Q/o/Q. They have the most popular selling cars in multiple countries (Model Y).
What kind of argument is this? Shake Shack is one of the fastest growing fast food chains, yet they sell crappy, unhealthy food. Xiaomi arguably makes phones that aren't as good as Samsung or Apple, yet they are the fastest growing manufacturer.
See, you lost me there already.
Point is, even if you like it, it is still crappy food. It is just another example of how a product that is objectively bad for its customers, can succeed in the market.
Tesla quality control is quantitatively worse than of more traditional brands like Honda. Finishes in Tesla cars are also quite a bit worse than other cars in the same category.
I’m glad that you are enjoying your Tesla, but reality is what it is.
im not saying that tesla doesnt have some issues with quality control, but most people get nice cars that work fine and look fine. you only hear about the outliers .
I'm pretty confident that Consumer Reports and J.D. Power account for more than just outliers.
Keeping it high is another.
Electrification of human transport is another.
I suspect he wants it all, and having a higher market cap right now is a way to get the other two - TSLA raised a massive amount of capital off of their high valuation.
Anecdotally, a close friend had a Model S Plaid. He took delivery roughly a year after they were announced. Tesla forgot to install weather stripping in the frunk. "Flood" is too strong a word, but yes, during a rain storm water seeped into the frunk. This car is very expensive, but honestly I would expect an entry-level Toyota to have correct weather stripping.
Elon is all about "hardcore." He belittles his own employees and plays classes against one another — claiming information workers should continue to commute on the Bart just like factory workers. But oh, by the way, he takes a private jet from meeting to meeting.
So what baffles me is how Elon Musk continues to say casually that production ramp is "really hard." I have no doubt that it is, but the Model S was released in 2012. It's been, what, 11 years, and you're still delivering like this? Not good enough.
Many Tesla owners have had the experience of waiting forever for replacement parts because of an accident, component failure, etc. A minor fender bender can result in having a damaged (potentially undriveable) Tesla for months whereas for other cars you're reliably back on the road in a week or less.
This is like discovering one roach in your hotel room. Sure, you only have the evidence of the existence of the one roach, and it might be the only one in the entire chain of hotels - but what are the odds?
> Front casting is not an easy technique to pull off
They're obviously not able "pull [it] off" if people are finding dangerous structural problems that Tesla is sweeping under the rug
There is a very good reason (other than "they" want cars to rust) for using steel. Just based on my hobbyist knowledge it's a metal that behaves a lot more predictably.
The real problem is that this structural member with a giant visible crack in it somehow made it through Tesla's QA process. I think I could give Tesla some slack when they were originally ramping up Model 3 production (it was a "succeed or the company goes under" moment), but reports of their sub-par QA keep coming and coming.
Surely they can point some of those cameras at the gigapress output with their AI magic rejecting any parts letting light through where none is expected.
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Is this just one vehicle, or systemic? If there is one instance like this in a space vehicle - wouldnt you immediately go and inspect EVERY SINGLE space vehicle you've ever made that's flying around in space to make sure they don't crash into all the other things flying around in space?
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Also, my Aunt's best friend (can't recall his name) was the designer for the original electrical harness for the very first tesla roadsters... I only met him a few times, at parties at my aunts house, but I do recall him to be 'pretty hacky' (in a good way) and he told me all about it, though I recall very little now, but I am sure a lot of the maverick hacker dna from the original team still exists?
It's the same level of malice as knowingly installing an odd brick of brown putty in the steering wheel instead of an air bag. The worker clearly didn't know C4 doesn't belong in a car.
> NK denied his car was ever involved in any collisions.
And given that the owner took it to an official service center to check the issue I believe the service center would have detected if it was the result of a collision instead of:
> The manager of the service center said multiple times that 'the car is safe to drive' and that he had been assured by 'engineers' that it is 'safe.' However, he will not give me anything in more detail or any official Tesla documentation to confirm that.
A simple video of the whole car would cast all doubts away.
> The Tesla Files episode revealed that the BEV maker instructs its technicians always to provide feedback orally. Internal documents obtained by Handelsblatt stated: "Do not copy the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer."
oh... never mind.
doing so might clear up your misunderstanding which is currently leading you to believe there's some sort of conflict between the quote provided and your personal experience
There would definitely be a conversation in the owner’s service history where he sent them photos of a cracked casting, along with Tesla’s response.
I get that the owner doesn’t want to reveal more about themselves than is necessary, but the reporter could confirm whether or not those messages exist.
so, we know that's true. And I get that elmu and tesla don't want to be accountable for their screwups, but as another poster pointed out, the Tesla policy in question is egregious, and imo loses them the benefit of the doubt here.
as for it contradicting the experience of every tesla owner, I'm not sure that's true. Given that we know the policy is true, and tesla owners aren't all hallucinating, that must mean there isn't actually a contradiction between the two. It seems like perhaps you misunderstood, tesla obviously wouldn't cover up stuff like normal maintenance, we're talking about manufacturing defects, something tesla is notorious for downplaying and covering up.
why won't tesla either release the records showing this issue is bunk, or categorically deny he came in at all? the most likely explanation is that they know the issue is real, and they were instructed by the known policy not to transmit retainable proof of such knowledge, and they don't want to be sued for libel for calling truth-tellers liars. After all, they've previously had no problem sharing information on customer usage when they believed it exonerated them [1].
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo...
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-releases-data-logs-...
Something like that most likely wouldn't be logged as a collision, but I think there would be other signs of that... Of course we're basically getting the best angle of one side of the story and none from the other side in the article.
something like that seems way more likely than the sort of coverup you're suggesting, especially since elmu, not Cracked_Tesla, is the one here who is infamous for coverups
Well, we can understand why we don’t have more of Tesla’s side of the story since what we do have is their written instructions not to put any technical feedback in writing.