Hacker News Reader

Comment by top_sigrid | Hacker News Reader

As I was asking myself, what the comparative value is for other cars, from the article: For "Other electric cars inspected" the rate was 9%, for the Tesla Model 3 2020 model it was 23%. This indeed sound very significant.

"The popular model has defects in particular in the brakes, lights, wheels and steering, according to inspection data" also does not create trust.

View on HN

The bad build quality of at least the US built models is a meme by now. The Chinese and German built models are supposedly way better though. Not that I'd buy a Tesla at this point.

When I pointed out that rushing teslas trough a tent was suboptimal I got down voted to hell, guess the reality of manufacturing caught up

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437073

The Musk narrative on hn back then was that he’s a god like genius who cannot be criticised back then. Those who dared to question it got downvoted.

Probably due to a lot of the site holding Tesla stock.

He earned a lot, I mean a lot of respect for building his empires from 0, sometimes despite what others were saying to him. Huge, successful, novel businesses. Plus he understands underlying tech, which is rare for CEOs. We devs, 'hackers' like and admire that.

But he is a terrible person, unstable, has many mental issues, pretty terrible father (which goes directly to terrible husband). Petty, childish, vengeful, has no issue lying to whole world with straight face.

At the end it doesn't matter what pros one have even up to this level, such set of cons overwhelms overall rating of given person very firmly into POS territory for me. Happy to see it unfolding now, and not decades after his death once cult of his worshippers slowly dissipates.

But I think he can still redeem himself, he has tremendous potential for good, maybe more than any other human being right now. I don't mean some Mars pipe dream, that feels rather like a great endeavor for 22nd century, but plenty of crap here back on Earth that needs some stronger push into better direction.

> He earned a lot, I mean a lot of respect for building his empires from 0

Why do people fall for that? He didn't start from 0, he literally had financial backing from his family.

He carpetbagged every company he is associated with.

Now is is carpetbagging the US government.

> he literally had financial backing from his family

I think it's because the amount he got from his family was tiny in relation to his level of success, and the success being from providing real things people bought/used, and from the real things being things that had never been done before.

The truth is that he lied about almost everything.

He was in the US illegally, didn’t have the qualifications he claimed to (no degree and he was never in a Stanford PHD program, never matriculated there and simply has a letter from a professor he claims is proof he was accepted as a candidate - which it absolutely is not). He failed out of 4 universities. He stole the idea for zip2. He likely sold gems illegally in both Canada and the US - there are huge gaps in his story.

All of this is fairly easy to check up on and people have done the work. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-musk-fro...

He has cheated and failed up to an unprecedented degree. Fueled by a venture capital industry who realized that backing a conman selling dreams and lying is more reliable than backing an honest entrepreneur who could fail on merit.

He move to politics is the final act. The wheels have come off his cons, Tesla is failing and has no future evidenced by the total lack of a roadmap of new vehicles.

He intends to exit by making his illegal actions legal thanks to Trump.

It’s shameful how instrumental this community has been in propping up a man who history will remember as one of the greatest conmen of all time.

> But I think he can still redeem himself

We’re way past that.

I can think of one thing specifically he could do

While it states "Other electric cars inspected", it does not appear to specify if that means simply all other electric cars, or other electric cars with the model year 2020. The latter is the only group that should be compared with the 23% figure.

I couldn't be sure from my awkward autotranslation into English. But I would have thought that if the 9% includes cars from other years that makes it worse, not better for Tesla: The article is making the point that this is the first time Tesla has been included in the figures, so it would only be newer Teslas being compared to older, other electric cars.

Quite possible. However it's also unclear if this includes hybrids. I'm certainly not a Tesla apologist, but I think journalistic misuse of or ambiguity around statistics should always be called out.

A hybrid is an electric car with extra parts so I'm not sure why including them would be unfair to Tesla either?

(Weight is a factor but lots of electric cars are similar weight to lots of hybrid cars so it's something to keep in mind no matter what and not a particular reason to exclude hybrids.)

The only point I'm trying to make is you need to compare apples to apples, and if you don't that contributes to misinformation. People run with figures from articles and press releases as if they are gold standard info, but often they are not. It's irrelevant to my point whether that is more or less fair to Tesla.

It's not misinformation if a criticism understates things a bit. The direction matters.

If misuse of statistics gets a pass due to the direction of travel that doesn't help anyone decipher future misuse of information.

I would not usually call it misuse when someone uses an overly generic statistic that somewhat weakens their point. It's closer to giving benefit of the doubt.

It also doesn't mention if the cars have comparable horsepower. Question is how relevant all that is if the reported issues are related to brakes, lights, wheels and steering...

Hybrids (including plug-in hybrids) aren't usually grouped under electric cars in Danish media.

Hybrids are also a lot more complex so i would think much less reliable. Even Volvo Polestar hybrids are pretty cursed on second hand market.

While you're right in principle, having Toyota's massive fleet of hybrids included in the dataset could indeed mask trouble with other electric cars - because Toyotas are extremely popular here, and they are pretty much bomb proof.

Which is not surprising, since Toyota now has almost three decades worth of experience with the Hybrid Synergy Drive system, and double that experience in building reliable cars in general.

I would hope that with the significantly decreased complexity of electric cars, comparing a tesla against hybrids would be rather favorable, no? It should be an easier win for the electric car than for the hybrid car.

From the wording, they are comparing against all electric vehicles, no specific model year, called to a routine inspection (~MOT).

There is a small note explaining that the Model 3 was introduced in Denmark in 2019 (MY 2020), and therefore 2024 is the first time the M3 has been called to the routine inspection (periodiske bilsyn), hence the specific focus on that model year for this article.

All other cars would be model year 2020 or older (since inspection becomes mandatory at the four year mark). So best case, this is compared to cars of the same age, and if not, even older cars, which does not make the Model 3 look any better.

It would be 2020 and older; only cars which are subject to this check.

One should pay special attention when making comparisons like this, like adjusting for mileage and car segment. It known this segment of cars with more complex suspension systems is known to be hard on the bushings (but this is not unique to Tesla). Also the brake system.

Take away is: Take your car for inspection before the warranty expires (which for Tesla is 4 years or 80.000km in Europe)

How many mass produced electric cars were sold there in the same class in 2020? I see some potential bias in this statistic because Tesla is probably the only one who sold a significant number of cars back then, but I don't speak Danish.

May I introduce you to the concept of percentage ?

You might wanna start by learning about the law of large numbers.

Does it matter if its electric when it has problems with "brakes, lights, wheels and steering"?

I'd love to know the answer to this. It sounds like a very complicated question. Do electric cars go harder on their brakes because of regenerative braking perhaps?

It's the opposite, EVs tend to rarely need disc or pad replacements because of the regen brakes.

If used in California.

Mix in wetter conditions, and salted roads in winter, and you have a recipe for disaster - the components experience all of the weather, but none of the "cleaning" force of actual braking. Anecdotal evidence, every single electric car owner I personally know has complained about brake rust here in Latvia. Even those with small 50km range plug-in hybrids, when used mainly for daily commuting within electrical range.

Only holds true in dry regions of the world.

EVs use their brakes less which ironically leads to more problems because of rust

Brakes are not used as much because of regenerative braking and that somehow seems to impair the braking system.

I was also interested in what is meant by "steering" - here it seems that the main culprit is the weight of the batteries that are putting a lot of stress on the suspension system.

Market share of battery electric vehicles in Denmark is currently 51.5%: https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...

How does sales volume bias long term per-car quality and reliability?

It doesn't but low numbers can skew some results for others (in case you want to compare). Then again, it doesn't look to be the case anyway due to the massive amount of BEVs driving around.

If the entire electric car category outside of Tesla was less than 50, that type of statistical anomsly might be possible for other electric cars. Otherwise it's not happening.

But the Tesla number would still be way too high.

That could be said if same defects and similar results hadn't been found by yet another test from TÜV (Germany).

https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2025/

I can't say about Denmark but my observation is that the electric car landscape in europe might be slightly more diversified than say in the USA.

Mostly because our number one car is not a truck and thus the competition had to react and build EVs to compete against Tesla.

Here are the numbers I found for 2020:

1 Renault Zoe: 99,261

2 Tesla Model 3: 85,713

3 Volkswagen ID 3: 56,118

4 Hyundai Kona: 47,796

5 Volkswagen eGolf: 33,650

6 Peugeot e208: 31,287

7 Kia eNiro: 31,019

8 Nissan Leaf: 30,916

9 Audi E-tron: 26,454

10 BMW i3: 23,113

So there are many more EV cars from other brands sold in 2020 than there were Tesla Model 3. The Tesla Model 3 represented at the very least less than 18.5% of cars as I only counted the top 10.

source: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/renault-zoe-ecli...

Tesla Model 3 was the most sold electric car sales in Denmark in 2020 at around 1/3 of electric cars sold:

1 Tesla Model 3: 4,277

2 Volkswagen ID.3: 1,722

3 Hyundai Kona: 1,160

4 Kia Niro: 834

5 Renault Zoe: 704

6 Volkswagen Golf: 625

7 Nissan Leaf: 566

8 Audi E-tron: 493

9 Volkswagen Up!: 369

10 Porsche Taycan: 327

Source: https://www.bn.dk/bilmagasin/her-er-aarets-mest-solgte-biler...

So the Danish electric car market was somewhat diversified, but the Tesla brand was very strong back then. Still, you're absolutely correct that there were enough other electric cars sold back than that the comparison with the Model 3 is fair.

> Mostly because our number one car is not a truck and thus the competition had to react and build EVs to compete against Tesla.

I mean, it wasn't even really reactive; the Leaf and Zoe came out at about the same time as the Tesla Model S, and weren't competing with it (they were well under half the price). They were quite old news by the time the Model 3 launched. The VW eGolf and BMW i3 also predate affordable (sub-100k) Tesla cars being available, at least in Europe.

True. I think even before that the Mitsubishi iMiev and its peugeot/citroën counterparts predated the Model S and outsold it in the early years.

> Tesla is probably the only one who sold a significant number of cars back then

About 40% of the electric cars sold in Denmark in (edit: september) 2020 were Teslas:

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Q1H9W/ (the source for this is https://web.archive.org/web/20201119015250/https://www.bilim... only available on Archive.org anymore apparently)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com