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.
I hoping a class action lawsuit more than covers these peoples’ expenses.
Tesla's target demographics often skew towards those that are well to do financially, a good subset of which are not native. This is an easier to abuse subset of the population as they are not clued into how to use their state Attorney General to push Tesla to make it right, or use the other legal avenues available.
A bit like Nigerian spammers and phishers having sloppy writing, which is (either by design or not) a filter so only the less mentally able readers would fall into their net by responding.
This though is simply Tesla abusing customers.
Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
Sure we do. Here it is: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
To quote the Reuters report:
> The suspension collapse in Jain’s car fortunately occurred at low speed. It was nonetheless shocking in a car he had owned for less than 24 hours. The automaker told him the suspension collapse was caused by the separation of a lower control arm from the steering knuckle, which connects to the wheel assembly. Jain expected Tesla to cover the damage.
A Tesla Service representative had texted Jain that an initial inspection found “no evidence of any external damage” that caused the incident and implied Tesla would pay for the repairs, according to a copy of the text Jain provided to Reuters.
About a week later, Tesla sent Jain a letter denying responsibility, saying it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
Jain said he was the only driver of the car during the one day he owned it and hadn’t had an accident before the suspension failure. “I was like, ‘Bloody hell, how can metal just snap like that when I know for sure the car has not hit anything?’” he said.
The repair took about three months. Jain paid a deductible of about $1,250 to have the work covered by his insurance company, which after the claim hiked his rates sharply on another car he owned, he said.
Fed up with the ordeal, Jain sold the repaired Tesla – for about $10,000 less than the $55,000 he paid for it.
> [Tesla said] it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
And then Jain ended up paying the bill. That is a critically important data point which _suggests that he had reason to believe_ his actions caused the damage. I repeat: Whether the owner’s actions actually did exceed a reasonable expectation of durability isn’t something we can speculate on here because we don’t have the information.
It's possible that Jain didn't damage the car. But it's also possible that he did, and this damage was immediately apparent the moment that a technician lifted the car for a proper inspection. We don't know anything about the initial inspection which led to the interim diagnosis of manufacturing defect. It might have been a guess by someone who didn't even lay eyes on the car.
The point is — We. Don't. Know.
No, all it suggests is that he didn't know how to stand up for himself. He went along with allowing his insurance to pay for it.
To quote the Reuters report again:
> Jain is one of tens of thousands of Tesla owners who have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts, according to a Reuters review of thousands of Tesla documents. The chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe, according to the records and interviews with more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians.
People struggle to integrate what's true. Take you, for example. You can't get your mind around the idea that Tesla is in fact a grubby company that lies routinely. Tesla keeps lying because it can rely on people like you who simply refuse to believe that Tesla lies.
Tesla lies about full self-driving. Look, in 2016 Tesla said "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie : https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
1 million robotaxis were promised for 2020. That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Tesla's timeline of full self-driving lies: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
Tesla even lies about things as trivial quarter mile times: https://insideevs.com/news/699260/tesla-cybertruck-porsche-r...
Lying is built into Tesla's DNA as a company. The fish does indeed rot from the head.
> We. Don't. Know.
We do. You just don't want to Believe it.
Have a read about how it works: https://www.morganclark.co.uk/loss-adjusters-your-questions-...
12K claim on a car that was allegedy sold as new 24 hours ago? Super unlikely a loss adjuster wasn't sent and came to the same conclusion as Tesla.
You can damage a car in a few minutes of driving.
>Jain didn't damage the car
You know that how?
Jain did damage that car.
> Tesla initially agreed Jain didn't damage the car. Then Tesla changed its tune and claimed Jain damaged the car.
They did an initial assessment and a more thorough assessment in the shop showed it was external damage.
I have no idea about what actually happened here. But the part of the story which makes me slightly more inclined to believe the Tesla service technician is that they did initially class it as a manufacturing defect prior to proper inspection. This demonstrates a willingness to accept blame. It was only after a proper inspection that it was re-classed as customer caused. If blaming customers for manufacturing defects was company policy, that's not how it would have played out.
Your Beliefs don't matter.
To quote the Reuters article yet again:
> The control-arm problem continued for years, across Tesla’s model lineup. The automaker replaced front upper control arms on about 120,000 cars globally from January 2021 through March 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of repair records included in the Tesla documents. Most of the replacements came on the Model 3, Tesla’s least expensive vehicle. Many of the customer complaints were for noise.
And:
> Former service managers and technicians in Norway, the country with the most Teslas per capita, said in interviews that they were inundated with angry customers complaining of early control-arm failures. They said that tension increased as the automaker, starting in 2017, told service employees to push the cost of the frequent and repeated failures onto customers to cut warranty and goodwill repair costs.
One manager said he was forced out after resisting the company’s push to blame customers for the failures of faulty control arms. “I said: ‘Now, we have to quit talking bullshit,’” he recalled. A service technician said he started in 2018 and quit a year later over the issue. “I wasn’t doing anything else than just constantly changing those control arms,” he said.
And on half shaft failures:
> One repair analysis showed the company replaced nearly 66,000 half shafts between January 2021 and March 2022. Customers paid for about 10% of those repairs.
> More than one engineer made a point of saying the issue had nothing to do with damage caused by customers. Engineer Anastasia Skolariki, who was troubleshooting repair problems and customer complaints for Tesla in Europe, wrote in May 2020 to other engineers and technicians that the problem was a design issue “and not abusive behavior from the customer side.” The company needed to cover repairs for cars under warranty, she said, “no matter how many times the vehicle comes to Service with the same issue.”
And here's an exciting half shaft failure:
> In 2019, a Tesla engineer in Shanghai flagged a failure on a brand-new Model S with 160 kilometers (99 miles) on it. The car’s rear left half shaft had broken into three pieces when the owner stepped on the accelerator; one of the pieces pierced the electric-drive unit that powers the car.
You should have a proper read of the Reuters article:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
You're clearly not taking it in.
Said another way, Tesla paid for about 90% of those repairs. Again, consistent with not blaming customers for manufacturing defects. Is it your contention that 100% of half-shaft failures were identical and resulting from the same underlying cause? That Tesla was just selecting 10% of customers at random to pay for their repairs? That 0.00% of Tesla customers abused their cars?
By the numbers you quote, that is indeed a lot of half-shaft failures, but still only represents around 2% of Tesla's sold at the time. This would be consistent with a failure in quality control, not a consistently poor part. The notion that 0.2% of any car maker's customers abused their vehicles seems well within the bounds of plausibility to me.
Is it possible that some instances were misdiagnosed? Yes. It's very possible that some customers got a free repair when the cause was abuse. It's very possible that some customers paid for a repair they shouldn't have. This is the reality with every automaker, not just Tesla.
After all, nobody has anything bad to say about car dealerships. No other automaker has ever made a lemon. This is a Tesla problem. Tesla are special. They're bad. They're evil. And it's all Elon's fault. :eyeroll:
> You're clearly not taking it in.
:eyeroll:
To repeat: More than one engineer made a point of saying the issue had nothing to do with damage caused by customers.
You're hysterical over the say-so of two engineers out of how many globally, maybe two thousand? How does that 1:1000 ratio compare to the statistical likelihood of incompetence? The statistical likelihood of being a liar or scumbag? The statistical likelihood of having an unrelated workplace dispute?
If these allegations were true, I'd expect DRAMATICALLY more whistleblowers to come forward.
You're the one stating high confidence. You have a pattern of believing any claim unfavourable to Tesla on face value. Let's be real here, I'm not taking Tesla's side. I'm saying that I don't think this minuscule amount of hearsay is sufficient to come to any conclusions. You don't like that? Fine. Just be aware of what you're actually doing.
You're letting Tesla make a fool of you. There's no value in that.
Technology Review covered this back in 2016 after a driver falsely claimed their Model X crashed into a wall on its own.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/08/70845/tesla-know...
Last month, a court in China ordered an owner to publicly apologize and pay damages after falsely claiming her Model 3 had a brake failure.
https://pandaily.com/a-tesla-owner-ordered-by-court-to-apolo...
see also:
EDIT: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...
I don't know the right in england, but in the US what happens is that the driver (who is not responsible) can file a claim against his own insurance company. They will fix it for their customer, then subrogate against the responsible party to recover the money (if they feel it makes financial sense)