Teslas Have a Minor Issue Where the Wheels Fly Off While Driving, Documents Show

I’m a bit surprised tesla managed to get the guy with 115 miles on the car to pay for the collapsed suspension. Maybe they don’t have lemon laws there?

I hoping a class action lawsuit more than covers these peoples’ expenses.

Why aren’t Tesla sales taking at this point? It’s been two years of continuous bad news against Elon.

Toyota had this problem and they recalled all the vehicles.

> What keeps Tesla from having that knowledge, then, isn't that the company is too young to have acquired it, or that it simply cannot be had except by learning it from scratch. The knowledge can be had in the person of any number of far-less-than-100-years-old engineers Tesla could hire; moreover it can be had by reverse-engineering a frickin' Miata. The reason Tesla hasn't "worked all the bugs out yet" is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn't as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works. You must reinvent, almost literally in this case, the wheel—this time, apparently on the premise of "...and what if it sucked?"

> All the upside-down incentives and warped prerogatives of the startup world are on display here (including a preference for lying and monkeying with data over actually doing good work). They're also, in turn, mere appendages of a deeper and more profound decadence. In 2023, discovery, exploration, and invention are just vibes you rent, by investing in a future-costumed effort to ignore all of what's already been learned and pretend "making a car that works" (or tunnels, or spaceships, or social media) is a new frontier.

Yes.

Washing the cars has been a problem too. From the Reuters report:

> Lundeen said in an interview that a Tesla service manager told him that a power-steering connector had corroded. The manager said the likely cause was a car wash, which he described as a known problem.

Lundeen paid $4,400 to replace the steering rack and a wiring harness.

“This is the only car that I’ve ever heard of where a car wash can damage the wiring,” Lundeen recalled telling the manager.

Lundeen said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”

When I lived in Beijing I saw a poorly modified compact car (maybe a civic or a scion?) have all four of its wheels pop off while speeding down the third ring road. We were in the taxi behind, these things always happen in slow motion so the wheels popped, the sparks flew beneath the car, it hit another car and finally careened to the side of the road, we saw him get out of the car before our taxi just continued on as if nothing happened.

Anyways, I scratched that off my list of things to see.

Maybe it was the Focus groups fault for not reminding Tesla this shouldn’t happen https://youtu.be/8YDpvMYk5jA?si=3pMVgoOHBo8T9_hM

EVs don't need to be any different in suspension parts than conventional vehicles, yet Tesla apparently thought otherwise. Reinventing the wheel, literally.

I'm not an expert but I know that the cast suspension parts they're using won't take overloads as gracefully as traditional stamped steel ones; the latter will bend before breaking and give a lot of early warning of failure, while the former tends to just snap. Combine that with aggressive cost/weight optimisation along with natural manufacturing variance and these failures are not surprising.

> who's had to pay over $10,000 to keep his 2016 Model X on the road

Jeeez, I know this is an exception and not the rule but this is bonkers.

So easy to manipulate people.

My control arms were the bad kind. One side of the car started squeaking after 4.5 years. They switched them out for the latest revision in an afternoon for 200 bucks. Gave me a sweet loaner car in the meantime.

That was the first maintenance I ever had to pay for on my car aside from new tires.

In my now 5 years of ownership my Tesla has been less hassle than any other car I've ever owned. Its "up time" has been spectacular.

How come the market doesn't fix this?

Concerning

As an owner of a 2020 Model 3 in Germany I can say:

The build quality is shockingly bad, and the quality assurance basically non-existing. When I picked up the car, the doors weren't aligned properly and would not close. I had to point this out for them to correct it.

Everything that you take for granted with all car manufactures to work in a middle-class sedan does not work. They did not put in a $3 Bosch rain sensor, so not even the camera-based automatic wipers work correctly. Everything that worked in my 15 years old Chrysler 300C does not work.

It's insane that any of their Autopilot related features are legal. The system is detecting 100% of trash bins next to the road, but maximum 50% of kids crossing the road. If you don't manually disable the various driver assistance systems every time you enter the car, the "emergency lane assist" stuff will happily drive you into opposing traffic for no reasons and will do dangerous phantom emergency braking etc.

Whatever traditional car feature you are looking at - compared to the 15 years old Chrysler everything is worse. Wind noise. Audio system. Comfortable seats.

All the "But it works in my Tesla" fan boys are part of a religious cult and are simply lying. Whenever I checked, the "works for me" replies stopped when I either did a test drive together or asked for a video showing that things like wipers and assistance systems really work.

So, why did I buy this car then and did not return it?

- Their battery technology is mature. When you try to buy a EV from an "established" car manufacturers most of them still don't have a heat pump and battery temperature conditioning.

- You can BUY them. While Germany's big pride, Volkswagen, are announcing to maybe have a competitive EV in 2026, and other manufacturers have waiting lists of 6 months and up, when I wanted to buy the Model 3 I ordered it and was able to pick it up one week later. Actually being able to BUY a real car instead of vaporware is a killer feature.

- All of the nerd humor, Easter eggs etc. It's refreshing to see that they fail on getting basic car software features to work, but that at least they are having fun implementing wacky fun stuff.

Obviously due to Elon Musk meanwhile having turned into a conspiracy-spewing crazy fascist, I would not buy a Tesla car again. But if I'd want to buy a EV in Germany today with proper battery technology and acceptable delivery times, I still would not have any other choice. I would have to buy something far inferior at a higher price "just" for political reasons.

You take the population of vehicles in the field A and multiple it by the probable rate of failure B, then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement C.

A times B times C equals X.

If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.