Certainly, you’ll hear complaints more often than people are satisfied with the vehicles. The sales volume speaks for itself.
Popularity has never been an indication of anything.
Except success I suppose. "But what does HN think?" said no one ever.
You can't simply say "but look at how much it sells" as an argument to Teslas being decent cars or not.
The argument here is that they are not strictly related to quality.
Are you gonna tell me the PT Cruiser, random example, was a quality vehicle because of its astronomical sales for years?
Not understanding why is popularity used as an argument for good sales. It's not. Tesla cars being well made (or not) is not a reason why they sell.
When I shopped around for an EV, I couldn’t find any compelling reason to get one over other models (e.g. Hyundai, BMW, Kia, Ford, etc.). The only two advantages I could find were a) simply the status of owning one, and b) the charging infrastructure. Build quality, features, and price were all better vs. Tesla.
Re: status, I think they’re currently still selling because at one point, you drew a ton of attention for owning one since there were so few on the road.
Nowadays, most anyone can afford one, and they still consider it a status symbol.
But as they become more commonplace and people start to see the build problems, and as EV production starts to ramp up and the gap in price between EVs and ICE vehicles narrows, I feel like Tesla will start to lose ground to the competition that has years of experience in making high quality and reliable vehicles, and the status of owning one will fade.
Re: infrastructure, this is already shifting considerably given the adoption of NACS, and even the Magic Dock being rolled out to allow CCS on Superchargers.
Measure? Why do you think I measured? It was so crooked it was visible from 10 feet away...
I've never ever heard of a wheel falling off before... and I live in a country where probably more than half the cars are bought used.
Toyota had to recall their EVs because the wheels would fall off.[0] Tbh, if even Toyota out of everyone can't get it right I don't know who can at this point.
[0]: https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyotas-fix-bz4x-disconnecti...
Is there any mass-market car that doesn't meet this bar (110k with no work other than basic maintenance)? Sometimes one model year of some random car will have a really bad engineering problem that gets recalled, but this seems like the minimum expected.
FSD beta I use everyday, but it is still not feature complete with what was promised “within a year”
The bottom of the car is literal cardboard, held on by plastic versions of rivnuts. They come out really easy and then the bottom is scraping in the ground. I had to get it replaced after driving through a shallow puddle (<1”) in the rain on the highway which splashed into the undercarriage. It happened a second time back in 2022 and it has since been ‘fixed’ by putting duct tape around the edges and over the plastic bolts. This is a known defect which Tesla corrected on newer models.
My control arm bearing failed at 4-years. As I was sitting at the dealership waiting for it to be failed, two other cars drove past making the same exact noise. Looking it up online it is another known early failure.
All that said, I’ve still spent less on it than maintenance in any other car. The frustration is just being told stupid shit like ‘don’t drive through puddles’.