I've been critical of Tesla before for various reasons, "Building throwaway cars" being one, and people keep insisting that, no, really, this year, Tesla has fixed their problems and such.
If you can deliver a car without a brake pad, that speaks to epic quality control failures (EDIT: A comment in the article points out the green "quality control" mark that is obvious on the caliper, which should indicate that everything was assembled properly - so things are seriously broken if it can be assembled wrong and then have a QC mark applied while still being entirely wrong). I cannot imagine Honda or Toyota shipping a car without a brake pad. I can't imagine Ford or GM doing it either. I'd be down into the "Uh... I think I've heard of you once..." non-western car manufacturers before it wouldn't surprise me.
Then, the absolutely horrid service center experience of "Oh, no, you don't know what you're talking about, that's normal, and we can't fix it any time soon anyway" is just absurd.
I know Tesla likes to rag on the horrors of the dealership model, but, seriously, I can't imagine getting this treatment with a legacy automaker. Not that I worry about them forgetting to put pieces in, either.
Cutting corners is how these so called "tech companies" disrupt markets. They remove all the bloat; the bloat being safeguards and processes created through years of experience and evolution. And we flock to them, praising them for "showing the traditional companies how it's done". But sooner or later the cracks start to form. The random driver picking you up from that app turns out to be a rapist. That house you found at that other app turns out to be falling apart and you die. That shiny new car turns out to have had zero quality control and is dangerous to drive.
So they have to make changes. They have to introduce the same safeguards that have been standard in their respective industries for decades. They have to raise prices. And before you know it, the only thing that separates them from the traditional companies is that stupid app.
The app is not always stupid. I can't say I am fond of Uber and its business practices but in Vancouver at least the taxi apps are lacking some vital features Uber have -- despite Uber operating briefly in Vancouver in 2012 so it was clear they will be back and indeed in 2020 Uber/Lyft indeed started. Features include easy changing of pickup point which is quite important in the warren of one way streets where I live -- as I see where the car is approaching from, I can easily walk like 1-2 minutes to the next corner to save like five minutes (seriously) of driving around after pickup. Also it works with GPS coordinates -- when I meet with friends it's often at a beach on the weekend and public transit is a bit lacking so I prefer calling a cab/uber and it's practically impossible with cabs because those want a street address, even the app. And then there's the ability to safely communicate with the driver -- and this only needs wifi which makes airport pickups so much easier because I only need airport wifi. Taxi companies couldn't build these features in eight years. Pound sand.
That's true, the apps are sometimes good and they do make certain things easier and more accessible than traditional solutions. I know I didn't mention it explicitly, but the "stupid app" was actually me venting my anger over the rampant, unnecessary tracking and snooping that these apps do.
> the rampant, unnecessary tracking and snooping that these apps do.
It's none of those, at least to them. It's literally their business model, and how they extract the behavioral surplus to turn into huge profits. And as very few people are aware of how it works, and why they should opt out, it's become the new default way of doing "tech companies." Extract all the stuff, process all the stuff, sell all the predictions from the stuff.
It's not an accident that every new app seems to be trying to collect as much as they possibly can. You're not even the product - you're just the field of raw material they're trying to collect and process.
Unfortunately, the only answer I can come up with to object is to opt out of all those systems, which leaves me a bit lacking in some areas.
Vote for parties willing to push GDPR style regulations and push for enforcement. Turn the data from valuable asset into toxic sludge that contains some valuable nuggets that can be carefully extracted, with the remainder not collected or at least discarded. That's the only long term solution
Bloat also being unionized workers who are incentivized to stay, gain wisdom and skills, and mentor new hires as opposed to the "everyone is fungible, everyone is abusable" worker conditions Elon seems to create.
Also this war on lidar, yet we're seeing these cars crash into trucks and walls, which lidar would have prevented, but lidar costs money, and as such "is bloat." Bloat is anything that keeps Elon and his shareholders from enriching themselves to the maximum degree, and if that means customers have to deal with safety issues, well too bad. The Elon PR machine smooths it over for via marketing efforts and deep ties to corporate media that will sing your song for a price. Life goes on, except for the person killed in the car.
I am not saying you’re wrong in your description of some of the dynamics, but I think it isn’t the only perspective. Another way to look at it is that this fuzzy area where corners are cut or laws are broken is also what makes room for change and innovation and more-efficient markets. Otherwise, the giant barriers to competition (capital requirements, network effects, whatever) become insurmountable and there is no way an entrepreneur can innovate (they would need to find a different country with different laws giving them that space).
The frequency and severity of the issues you call out feels limited to me. Sure these newcomers may end up rediscovering some of those same controls and processes that the old guard companies have in place - but they will still have pulled us forward to a different, better way of doing things in many ways. For example, I certainly prefer hailing an Uber or Lyft over dealing with rude, dangerous taxi drivers. Even if those two companies end up disappearing or putting more controls in place, I will appreciate things like using an app and being able to rate my driver to incentivize the right behavior.
> They have to introduce the same safeguards that have been standard in their respective industries for decades
I'm glad Lyft and Uber have to comply with safety regulations, but I think you're overestimating the quality of old "non-tech companies" and the quality of the services they deliver. The cab companies in my city were frankly terrible and delivered a terrible service for a lot of money.
They made a huge stink about safety, trying to get Lyft and Uber banned from operating here. They trumpeted a whole smorgasbord of safety benefits that they supposedly offered that Lyft and Uber wouldn't, but it's not like their policies and standards actually meant that when you got in a cab you didn't face exactly the same hazards they claimed to protect you against. You still took your chances with poorly maintained cabs, drivers who didn't know or knowingly disregarded traffic laws, frequently a different person driving the cab than on the license, etc. In fact when I got in an argument with a friend about it I only had to do a Google search and, oh yeah, it seems just a few years before there was a cab driver who assaulted multiple women while driving somebody else's cab.
I'm sure everybody in town had at some point heard about that guy who assaulted women while driving a cab, but just a few years afterward, the cab companies were able to use the specter of a rapist driver to argue that we were safer in cabs! It's a cynical exploitation of human psychology. Cabs have been around forever, so we perceive them as safe, yet we're terrified when something new is proposed that has the same risks.
(Cab companies warning about the dangers of Lyft/Uber reminded me of insurance companies warning about the horrors of public health care. Sexual predators picking you up, can't go to the doctor you like, unsafe cars and drivers, massive charges if a drug or procedure you need isn't unauthorized, if you listen to their scare rhetoric, they are both reciting their own known, long-standing flaws.)
Sometimes the result of "years of experience and evolution" is crappy companies and a crappy industry that deserves to be disrupted. I don't know where you live and what kind of cab companies were there before Lyft and Uber, but from my experience you could hardly have picked a worse industry to talk about the risks of disruption.
GM received a single report from a mechanic of a missing brake pad on a rental Chevy Sonic. They investigated, found some kind of root cause, and out of precaution recalled ~5000 Sonics manufactured around the same time for inspection. (and estimated 20-30 vehicles were affected - it'd be interesting to see how many turned up)
Tesla's response thus far is miles apart. Nothing about it gives me confidence in their QC.
So why can't they install the brake pad without keeping the car for close to a month? They are building model 3s on the assembly line right now right? They have brake pads in the factory? Pull one out of there and put it in this messed up car. If that means delaying assembly of an in-manufacturing model 3 til there are more brake pads, then so be it. You need to have enough brake pads to equip all your cars, especially the cars that you have already shipped.
It is quite likely that the caliper will need to be replaced. The hydraulic pressure that would normally activate the brakes has likely pushed the piston out, possibly making contact with the rotor under pressure (or making the seals suspect, having allowed them to travel beyond their design range). That’s the “worrying scraping sound” the owner reported.
Your point about “they must have the parts in the country” is a valid one, but it’s probably not going to be just a forgotten pad that they’ll need to slap in there. As a shade tree mechanic, if I’d somehow put my car back on the road without a brake pad, I’d do more than that. I doubt Tesla’s going to think differently with liability on the line.
If the repair is that intense, they should swap her Tesla for a non defective lemon straight off the line (same color) and fix it if/when they get a chance. Or give her her damn money back and let her buy a different car.
That intense? It’s like having a flat tire and replacing the tire and wheel. Once that’s done, the car is as good as new. There’s no lingering concern.
It's intense enough that Tesla has postponed repairs three times, and still hasn't fixed it. I have no doubt it will be fine once fixed. My point is that Yeala should just replace the brand new car with another one off the line and repair the defective one at their leisure. Or give her her money back like she asked for. At this point, she's owned the car for four weeks, and Tesla has had it for most of that time. And before that, she had a horrible experience.
Yeah, the caliper and rotor seems like more stuff they should have on hand though. And at first it sounded like just a missing pad.
I don't do my own brakes and don't know about the caliper, but rotor replacement is pretty routine, I thought. They usually resurface them whenever they replace pads, and replace them once they get too thin. So having no spares seems a little bit too JIT for a car company.
Pads and rotor are indeed regular wear parts, and even calipers are readily available for most every car (more from rust or crash damage than wear, but still fairly common and on the shelf in a warehouse serving every town of 50K+ people). It’s puzzling that they can’t manage to fix this car; only thing I can think of is no one has the authority to say “pull a kit from the line and fly it out there if you have to!”
I would think it needs a new caliper seal and piston, and possibly a rotor if the old one was gouged beyond the minimum thickness --- otherwise it can be machined smooth again in a brake lathe.
That looks like, aside from the few Tesla results, exactly one model of Chevy was affected, and they decided to recall them. A missing brake pad is pretty damn obvious, and I'm almost willing to bet that, unlike Tesla, they didn't ignore or make excuses to the people who complained about the strange sound. This "assume the user is completely stupid and we're always right" mentality seems to entirely come from the tech industry.
This seems like one of those things where a tech guy thinks he can just come in and "disrupt things" and mistakes are made because they never bothered to look at what the incumbents were doing and why.
The thing you are missing is also the frequency of mistakes, consistency in the vehicles in general, how well they manage the problem to fix it, and the number of defects relative to vehicles on the road. This entire article sounds like Google or Amazon level Don't-Give-A-Shit about the customer applied to cars. And some of their mistakes are mind boggling:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-owner-details-quali...
"The main issue they have is a lack of consistency,” Nelson said. “I could have rejected the delivery for not meeting my own quality standards, but a new car could take weeks or even months and I’d just be throwing the dice again. The next car could be in even worse shape."
Thanks for getting the ball rolling Tesla, but I'll be waiting for the Japanese to perfect it before going electric.
Tesla's problems aren't the drivetrain. They're "Literally every other bit of the car except the drivetrain."
Other OEMs are reasonably good at those bits, and can, at worst, buy a drivetrain from someone good at it - but there's nothing particularly exotic about an electric drivetrain, especially if you've been putting out hybrid drivetrains for a while.
What makes you think Tesla can resolve all their problems and produce a car everyone wants to buy at the right price point before everyone else has time to implement their responses?
There are plenty of drivers like myself that specifically buy reliable vehicles, 2nd hand. Tesla can’t even match the reliability of my current car that cost less than 1/4 of the cheapest new Tesla. The incumbents have plenty of run way. It remains to be seen what happens.
Economy of scale would seem to win the day in the end.
Building an electric car is not fundamentally different than building an ICE one.
Changing the drivetrain does not change the rest of the vehicle that much, other than packaging, and thats pretty easy to figure out, any competent manufacturing engineer can do it.
"General Motors knew about a defect in its ignition switches eight years ago and changed the design of an internal part, but never told federal regulators or the drivers of its cars, according to evidence from a recent lawsuit filed by the parents of a Georgia woman who died in a 2010 GM car crash"
Usually, manufacture or design defects are hidden to the end customer. The car was built to spec, but the spec was wrong; or the part supplier supplied a non-obvious faulty part. It’s not like an obvious safety-related part is entirely missing.
This is a very different kind of problem than leaving out a brake pad. It’d be like delivering a vehicle without a seat belt or airbag.
At any rate, nobody is saying that other car manufacturers don’t screw up. They just typically screw up in non-obvious ways today instead of patently simple ones.
Finally, “what about this other company/person”
arguments aren’t HN-caliber. They’re not logically sound, and are best left at the door.
Nah this was all over the news. I heard about it. Everyone I know heard about it, especially if they're into cars. See also Toyota's infamous sticky accelerator recall, or the Takata airbag recall.
The difference is that Tesla didn't have a near-perfect history of shipping reliable vehicles for decades before screwing up like this the way Toyota did. Tesla's reputation is slowly being formed by failures such as these. I already know several people who have elected to get a Mach-E instead of a Tesla because of concerns about quality. If they don't improve they're going to be seen (rather aptly) like the Lotus of electric cars in a few years: beautiful, powerful shitboxes that nobody wants to have to rely on as a daily driver.
> General Motors is recalling some 4300 units of its 2012 Chevrolet Sonic after finding that some of the Sonics were missing front brake pads.
First line of this story:
> Tesla is oftentimes accused of presenting a shiny veneer to the public and its shareholders, only to show its ugly side to employees and customers.
The GM story is dry, factual. There's no indignation. It's less than a quarter of the length of the Tesla story. Nobody's going to get worked up and spread it around social media.
That's not just about who the companies are, it's about how the media reports the stories.
You were just linked to a google search full of press reports about a missing brake pad recall, and the entire front page was results about GM, and your response is that the press is silent as long as it's not Tesla? Seriously?
>You were just linked to a google search full of press reports about a missing brake pad recall
I disagree with GP that the press is harsh on Tesla.
However mainstream media write about everything but most of it has been deeply buried on their websites and will only be read by a few thousand people.
The actual narratives the media is pushing are the stories you find on their frontpages and being pushed on their social media accounts. These are the stories that will be read by millions of people.
Especially because Tesla is considered some new popular tech company, the media is focusing on them a lot more compared to traditional automakers. There are hundreds of recalls a year[0], and yes, there are articles on most of them, but it's all in an attempt to capture SEO for 'recalls for <year make model>' and thus low-visibility; but any time the 'Apple of Cars' issues a recall, it turns into a reuters article and thus 10 other publications publish a story on it, where it continues to spread like wildfire.
All recalls are warranted, even when done voluntarily for small manufacturing issues, but you can't deny that articles about Teslas having issues are guaranteed to generate more clicks and thus more ad revenue than one about some years-old Ford or GM vehicle.
If Elon Musk wasn’t such an asshole, he probably wouldn’t attract extra attention in the first place. (Yet note that there is no quantitative evidence presented here that Tesla gets more attention than other manufacturers when defects arise.)
People often make their own problems by making outrageous claims in the first place.
The only car recalls with more points on HN than the Tesla ones are Hyundai (regarding South Korea being soft on them; the issue was already a recall in the US) and the VW emissions scandal.
One instance is evidence their process failed at least once. At a minimum they need to identify the process failure and the cars the could have been affected, and issue a recall or TSB to verify none of those cars are missing brake pads.
Did it take going to a third party and paying them to prove that there was an issue with the door, or were they able to go to a dealer? Did BMW refuse to pay for said third party? Did BMW refuse to give her a loaner and instead gave them cab vouchers? Did BMW refuse to accept the car as a return and give your parents their money back? Did BMW, after refusing to give your parents their money back delay at least 3 times to return the fixed car because they don't have insight into their own parts supply line?
Was the BMW produced using automated methods hailed as the future of car manufacture?
Because I doubt any of those are true and those all, especially in total, contribute to why this is on the ground page.
This is just a lie. The Tesla rep said it sounded normal but that they would confirm so when the vehicle was brought in for the appointment. They never said a missing brake pad was normal and expected.
Except it isn't factually correct to say that a grinding sound is normal. Either the rep wasn't honest, made a call they should not have, or isn't trained correctly.
Tesla brake grinding to a certain extend is actually normal or my car is also has a defect. Since I use my brake so rarely. It happens all the time that they rust and I need to brake a bit to have the grinding disappear.
I could imagine the rap thought that was what the owner was hearing.
It's not about the dealership model, it's about taking quality seriously and not just slapping things together and pushing them out the door with minimal QC like a software startup in a tight market. It's clear by now that Elon thinks it's more important to ship more cars than to ship quality cars, and he may be correct, but he also has yet to prove that he is actually capable of the latter.
Dealers usually have to prep a new car on the lot—a quick inspection of lights, brakes, steering, leaks; aligning the headlights; stuff like that. I'd argue the dealership model is relevant here.
Yes but there’s no reason it has to be a dealership doing that. The manufacturer could do that before they deliver the car. The manufacturer could run the dealership themselves. There’s not a ton of great reasons to preserve this institution in law.
>The manufacturer could do that before they deliver the car.
Cars do get jacked up in transit. Like "a large piece of metal road debris pierced the window and seat" bad (personal experience). So, even if it leaves the factory in pristine condition, someone at the end of the line will need to look at it to make sure it's 100%. Tesla has decided that final check responsibility falls on the end user.
Also I suspect it's more efficient for the manufacturer and dealerships to just roll all of that into the end-of-the-line inspection instead of splitting it over two locations.
>The manufacturer could run the dealership themselves.
This would work if there was a way for states to ensure the manufacturers had some serious skin in the game so they'd fear legal action.
The dealer being a legal entity incorporated in the same state you bought the car insures that they operate under state law and makes it far easier for either the state or the individual to seek legal redress when needed.
In addition, the fact that they're separate from the manufacturer means their incentives are also not aligned. They're incentivized to find issues, both pre delivery and during maintenance (especially during the warranty period)
how are their incentives not aligned? both are there to make money by moving as many vehicles as possible. if a problem is found with a vehicle they have on their lot then it’s out of inventory until it’s fixed or replaced. the incentives look exactly the same to me.
Elon’s job isn’t to make sure that the cars actually have brake pads. Elon’s job is to ensure he’s hiring leaders who won’t repeatedly use racial slurs for the people whose jobs are to make sure the cars actually have brake pads.
The only reason why Tesla hates dealerships is because they don't want to pay them, full stop. All those horrors can also happen without dealerships, see above.
Tesla wants people to pay the sticker price without being able to haggle and wants to keep all the profits for itself.
VW can deliver EVs for a similar price even with a dealership network. Although, they also started to block haggling by demanding customers to place their orders online via their car configurator. As long as you sell it as innovation, people will jump on it, even if this innovation is costing them more money.
Because clearly all the people working at a dealership plus all the capital tied up in a dealership has no economic downsides.
It turns out dealerships don’t extract equivalent money from every customer. It’s not about haggling skills it’s simply a question of leverage on the part of a dealership. If they both have plenty of inventory and know you’re happy to walk somewhere else then they will take their thin slice of the transaction and move on. If however inventory is tight or your unlikely to walk then prepared to get screwed.
It’s not even about credit or haggling skills, plenty of seriously up market dealerships for exotics financially screw their customers on a regular basis.
The dealership system is to provide assurance to the buyer that a corporate entity under the authority of the state's regulators and law enforcement officers but also available to sell parts, perform warranty service, and repair the vehicle.
A dealer being willing to sell a company's cars serves as some assurance that the car manufacturer is stable, reputable, etc.
This all came into being during the big automotive industry boom in the 20's when car frames/powertrains were made by manufacturers and then a "coachworks" company would put a body on that..and both powertrain and coachwork companies were often in business just long enough to get some cars out the door before customers discovered poor workmanship, assemblies not designed to be repaired, non-standard fastener sizes and so on. It was common for people to buy a car, drive it home several states away (in an age where there was no interstate highway system!) and discover that their car was falling apart.
Oh hey, what does Tesla have problems with? Poor parts availability, warranty issues, long waits for repairs...
I wish I were exaggerating when I say Tesla was telling Model S owners that water getting inside the main drive unit (which contains not just the electric motor but the motor's power electronics) because of a faulty seal on a speed sensor was the customer's fault because they drove the car in heavy rain.
There is little distinguishing Elon Musk from the shysters in the 1920's that all these pesky regulations were written to address.
Any reference materials / history on car dealerships and how they’re part of the ecosystem?
When I was writing software for dealership stocking (19 years ago now), it was pretty clear to me that there’s no good reason dealerships exist, as states could also make laws that covered the manufacturer.
It made sense when manufacturers didn’t know how to scale out end consumer services, like marketing, financing, repair, etc. But now in the 2000s and 2020s, all the manufacturers have their own distribution and financing arm as well.
It turns out that people want to buy from manufacturers: “it’s a Ford dealership”, “it’s a Toyota dealership” as opposed to “it’s bfung’s cars”. The extra indirection and separation of legal entities actually make a worse user experience.
In addition, to be able to use the manufacturer’s brand, the dealerships new car pricing are all subject to the manufacturer, so no arbitrage opportunities can be made, except for getting suckers. The incentives of the dealership has skewed toward pushing services and used cars as that’s where they make money now.
A jurisdiction with sufficient desire (political will) and market power will say “if you want to sell cars in this state, you need to follow my rules.”
There are federal laws and Supreme Court cases specifically and exclusively applying to collecting sales tax that require online retail to do so. There is no legal framework to apply, for example, car lemon laws to those same online retailers.
I suppose if you change US law then it might be possible. But if so I would anticipate a major shakeup and secondary effects you wouldn't expect.
The Supreme Court changed it’s mind independent of any changing federal laws and has removed physical presence from the requirements for the commerce clause.
“[e]ach year, the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality”
That ruling is therefore not inherently limited to sales taxes and opens the door to lemon laws etc. At least assuming the purchaser is in their home state when the transaction takes place.
The ruling specified that it was a reasonable cost for SD to impose on Wayfair (the third part of a three part test) because of a 2005 federal setting up an interstate sales tax clearing system SD opted into.
Meanwhile, all credit card companies operate out of SD to avoid the usury laws limiting interest in the various other states. It's a very narrow opinion. Or, to put it another way, ground your argument in finance laws not in sales tax.
At the moment it's hard enough to get hold of a car even if you walk in with the money to pay for it. As such, haggling is unlikely to work. At other times when the dealers are desperate to make a specific quota a good deal is more likely.
If that's the case, why should auto makers now demand you pay sticker price? Public companies don't do anything in your favor, ever. It's always because they think that they can now extract even more money from you.
VW is a bad example because their EV lineup is full of horribly inefficient cars with pathological infotainment systems. And, from the looks of them, it seems like the bespoke EV platform is a vague rehash of an existing ICE platform given how the extra space an EV platform could allow for isn't being utilized.
Have no illusions though, I wouldn't buy a tesla either.
Engineering explained has a good video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2txPzRP5DM it also addresses some of the user experience in aspects in a quantitative way. The vehicle efficiency is a factor, since it mean needing less energy. But really Tesla is far and above the other companies with the user experience in regards to charging. You can just plunk in your destination in the onboard navigation and be reasonably sure that everything will go smooth. Tesla monitors their chargers, tries to steer you to where you will get service and the chargers will perform very well charging your vehicle. It's a good experience.
Mach-e using Electrify America is probably the next best. But has issues.
Porsche/VW don't really have a good experience, and the others are even worse.
Tesla figured out early on that they have to sell an entire system, not just a car. Depending on 3rd parties to make that happen is foolish when it affects the core viability of your product. As the legacy OEMs are finding out.
I'll gladly eat my own words. I had seen some video reviews of the ID.4 and the ID.3 on youtube complaining about getting far less range than what was advertised, but seemingly the advertised range and stated battery capacities seem to indicate that the VW EVs are just as efficient as Teslas are.
I agree that this is emblematic of Tesla's terrible QC, but your second point about how traditional auto dealerships would mitigate it strikes me as questionable.
Being sold a "lemon" has been possible for years, even with the traditional dealership model; that's why so many US states have "lemon laws" specifically to deal with that scenario.
Yes, but a lemon is a car that is unreliable due to intermittent issues, not a missing part in a safety critical system that should have resulted in a 'stop the line, we have an excess brake pad at the end of our shift', followed by an inspection of all vehicles built on that shift and a serious upgrade of QA processes. Really, this stinks.
This is why Toyota's Five Whys is so genius. Not only do you find out why there's an extra brake pad at the end of the shift, but you discover why you didn't catch it during the manufacturing process, and how it happened in the first place.
> Yes, but a lemon is a car that is unreliable due to intermittent issues
Actually it's a term of some precision, and that's not it. "Lemon" laws define the problem as a car with an inherent defect that can't be fixed by the manufacturer or dealer within some reasonable amount of time (often "three attempts", depending on statute). The purpose of the law is that consumers shouldn't be on the hook for expensive but faulty products.
This isn't a lemon by any of those laws. They fixed the brakes and the car is fine now. It's fine to make pronouncements about Quality Culture or whatever, but lemon statutes aren't really at issue here.
In a disk brake setup (which is what this Tesla has) there is a caliper with slots for two brake pads on each wheel. So with 4 wheels that would be 8 break pads. The caliper squeezes the pads on both sides of the rotor (which is turns with the wheel) in order to slow down. This is why having one left over (or just an odd number left over) is a red flag. You can’t put two many in, there is no reasonable way to make that mistake, but you could leave one out, so it makes sense to check for that mistake.
Dealerships are both a completely separate legal entity from the manufacturer and they have a very strong interest in not handing over a defective car to the customer because they're closes to the customer.
They are also required to conduct what's called a PDI - Pre Delivery Inspection - before the customer sees or touches the car.
The car is prepped for sale, and this includes a number of things. Sometimes cars have spacers installed in the suspension. Someone plugs in a diagnostic tool and tells the car's control modules that the car is no longer being stored/shipped, so it can enable all the stuff slowly drains the battery like memory settings, keyless ignition RF transmission, alarm sensors, etc. There's also a cosmetic inspection, where any defects in the paint are taken care of by the dealer's in-house detailing/car prep staff.
A big part of the PDI is going over everything safety related and making sure that nothing happened to the car as part of it being shipped. That includes a test-drive. Usually half an hour or so at a variety of speeds, where the test-driver makes sure every single part works.
I assure you, the person doing the PDI would notice a missing brake pad, even if the dealership mechanic who does the mechanical PDI somehow missed "there's a brake pad completely missing."
Me and my partner bought our first brand new car (2017 Highlander for the curious) a few years ago after being a used car family for so long. Had a lot of mediocre service with used cars, but nothing to write a nasty online review about or anything.
Gotta say, with the new car and its full warranty, we have felt like kings in comparison to past experience. Anytime we need any amount of maintenance we get an appointment and then whatever it is is fixed free of charge.
Maybe we got lucky, but the dealership has definitely delivered on its promise of complete warranty coverage.
I know many consider buying a new car some kind of financial cardinal sin, but I’m sold on it now.
This is why I love Toyota! I feel that buying things that last longer is as important for the environment and humanity as reducing emissions. Building things has a huge carbon footprint, and often a human rights ones as overseas mines often don’t take as good care of their staff as they should.
Out of curiosity (and fear), I looked up used 2007 Highlander this morning on SFBay Craigslist, and there was plenty of inventory and they looked like a reasonable bargain, around $6-10k for one with relatively low miles considering they are 16 years old.
Maybe prices at dealerships are way up? Or people want newer cars and those are crazy expensive?
I am certain my friend who just paid way too much for a newer used Toyota is a moron in such matters.
Yes, I think you're looking at cars so far back that the prices, while still elevated, aren't quite as bad as more recent used cars. I just ordered a new car for myself (my old car was recently totaled by a deer strike) and had to pay MSRP, because nobody is offering any discounts. That probably means I paid $1500-$2000 more than I would have a few years ago when I could negotiate a deal. Alternatively, on my wife's 2018 car that was coming off lease, I just bought it out for $27K, while on the open market the car is currently worth about $40K. So we're looking at $13K overpriced on the used car vs $2K overpriced on the new one. Still doesn't quite make up the "drive off the lot depreciation" of a new car, but it gets pretty close.
A very similar thing happened to me. Any used car or on-the-lot new car (in whatever apportionment a dealer will get) is hiked up to astronomically levels for impatient folks. This means when things eventually correct in price, there will be a lot of salty bagholders.
By ordering and taking the bus for a few months, buying a car from the factory was the best deal.
I usually buy used cars and maintain them myself to a good degree, but that's only on the premise that you really don't lose much value on them from years ~5-10. If the price halves over that time, I might as well lose a similar amount from years 0-5 from regular depreciation and have warranty coverage.
> I usually buy used cars and maintain them myself to a good degree
I used to maintain my cars myself, including doing belt services and such when due, and even a couple engine and gearbox rebuilds. But the older I get, the more I can't get up the motivation. It's so nice to just take the car in to a trusted mechanic and have them do it. Recently started using a vacuum oil evacuator to do oil changes through the top though and boy is that quick and easy. Best $100 I've spent in a while.
Yes it's good to have rules on how far one wants to go down the maintenance rabbithole. I usually set the limit at whether I'll have to buy an expensive tool just to do the service (e.g. one of those tools to clean the valves on these GDI engines) or whether the job requires removing more than N things (where N = 2 or so); if I have to disconnect a bunch of ancillary stuff just to replace a starter (or the back spark plugs in a lot of transversely-mounted V6 engines), then to the pro mechanic it goes!
It’s possible things have changed in the last few months but I ended up going with a new hybrid recently (October in the Bay Area) when I couldn’t find anything reasonably priced in the 2-5 year old market I would normally play in. I wasn’t looking over a decade old but the prices you describe still sound higher than what models like that were going for pre-pandemic.
It's the chip shortage. The demand for new cars is greater than the supply because of supply constraints, so it spills over to the used car market. Prices in the used market go up until supply and demand are balanced again.
Definitely not a sin - you know that past you maintained the car at safe levels and you didn’t choose to cut corners. You didn’t let yourself spill coffee and soda all over the car. And you can keep it running well over 100,000 miles. And this might be the first car your future children drive!
In the UK at least, most manufacturers let you buy an extended warranty for a few hundred pounds a year even if you bought the car second hand, so long as it's no more than 3-5 years old.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "lemon" vehicles which are vehicles that run into ongoing or repeated problems. This is one single issue that any mechanic worth his overalls can (and frequently does) solve in a 2 hour job (and that's assuming something goes wrong).
Inability to supply and fit a part that is literally designed to wear out is unacceptable.
These cars are new enough that they haven't likely needed new brake pads. With regenerative braking, the pads don't get much use and they last a lot longer than you're used to. That would explain why the pads aren't an in-stock item.
"sabotage, such as breaking windshields, breaking off rear‐view mirrors, slashing upholstery, bending signal levers, putting washers in carburetors and breaking off ignition keys."
In the last four weeks a lot that holds about 2,000 cars has often been filled with Vegas that had to be taken back into the plant for repair work before they could be shipped to dealers.
That sentence from the article alone demonstrates the huge difference between that and Tesla's response. GM actually cared about these problems and tried to fix them, instead of just letting faulty products reach customers and attempting to deny responsibility.
Yes, am a Tesla owner, this incident is inexcusable and the fact that it happened 50 years ago (or even 10 years ago in the case of the Sonic incident) does not matter. This is a 2022 model! None of this should have happened!
Well, a few of my friends worked at Mercedes plants during summer time. Also on stations doing brakes. From the stories they tell, at least in Germany, I can absolutely imagine cars being delivered like that as well.
I had a small accident with a Range Rover some years ago that made the side airbag in the driver seat go off. I had it repaired at an official Land Rover dealer. When I got it back I only noticed at home that the seat leather is not well in place so I removed it to adjust it. To my surprise i find the new Airbag held ok pace with with multiple rounds of strong duct tape.
So far I trust Tesla more than the legacy automakers.
That quality control sticker could have been for the assembly of the caliper itself rather than the final installation of the brakes to the vehicle, which is when the pads would go in. Still obviously utterly inexcusable QA though. (Not to mention it takes them weeks to simply procure a new rotor, caliper and pads, which as the article mentions they need for every new car they build!)
As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
The throwaway effect can an does happen to any ICE vehicle easily, when the engine is not economic to repair. We should have laws covering all types and brands of vehicles to make them more repairable, but ultimately this should be easier with electric (recycling batteries in bulk is cheaper than mining more lithium)
> As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
It's just that the rest of the car is poor quality. That's fine if it's cheap and easy to fix, but it's not. You can't get the parts, you can't install the parts if you can get them because they have to be paired with the car, and, in general, they're like a lot of modern ICEs that fall apart around a running drivetrain. Except worse, because they're luxury cars and you can't even do the repair work yourself.
It's interesting reading your blog post, as there's essentially a lot of projection as to what life would be like for Tesla drivers post-warranty. It's now over four years since you wrote that post, it would be neat to see how it's turned out.
Unfortunately, I no longer work with enough Tesla owners to have a reasonable sample, and I've lost my tolerance for the Tesla corners of the internet years ago. Someone should talk to owners and do that, but it's hard to get straight out of Tesla owners since so many are personally invested in Tesla succeeding. "Yeah, it's been 100% reliable, they've replaced my drive unit twice, battery once, six door handles, a LCD screen, but it's all under good will NDA care, so... er, sorry, I can't actually tell you any of this."
Isn't that a function of being an EV rather than an ICE? I'd expect an EV from any of the traditional automakers to also require comparatively little maintenance.
That's why the auto industry is anticipating that leasing will eventually be the standard model. Nobody is going to want to pay half a new car's price just to have a new battery installed.
> As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
> One Tesla Model S Has Gone Nearly 1 Million Miles And Needed Some Major Repairs
> The owner, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg says the car is on at least its third battery. The first was replaced under warranty at about 180,000 miles. The second was replaced after about 93,000 additional miles before the third battery was installed. So far, the Model S has done more than 621,000 miles on that third battery.
>That isn’t all. The car also needed four drive motors to reach over 900,000 miles. The P85 has only one drive motor on the real axle. That means three different drive motors have failed.
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An out of warranty battery replacement is 20k or so and drive motor replacement is about 10k, so I think it's safe to say we're talking about the equivalent cost in drivetrain replacements to what? 4 engines or 5 engines in an ICE? Assuming a rather expensive engine since the Model S is technically a luxury car?
Technically you can drag most modern ICEs (or any vehicle for that matter) along to a million miles, but different cars are more or less likely to make it without major issues.
Tesla is not who I'm expecting to make the most million mile worthy EV. EVs are not some magical land compared to every other product in existence: Chasing new hotness so ruthlessly you consider model years an undue burden is not a recipe for a long-term reliable car.
The EVs that will do 1 million miles without major work (at the very least not needing entire drive units) will come from "boring" companies with "boring" designs.
That's a heavy-duty diesel in a transit bus. Very different use-case, and 1M miles is not at all surprising there. For tractor-trailers and other heavy truck engines, a few million miles is a common lifetime.
I could point out how an ICE Bus vs an EV Taxi is not a dramatically different use-case, could point out how ridiculous it is acting like an M11 in a rust belt public transit bus hitting a million miles without an overhaul is "w/e"...
But I don't think your reply is meant to further the conversation, but rather to present a distraction: whether for self-satisfaction of stating the obvious or to divert the conversation from the actual point... why else would you just conveniently ignore the bulk of the comment?
> Of the vehicles that have been reported to the Plug In America Model S owner survey, 32% of the 2012 model year cars have had their drive unit replaced at least once, 27% of 2013's, and 18% of 2014's and so far none of the very few 2015's reported. As you can see, the older cars have higher numbers. Is that because Tesla has improved the newer cars or because the newer cars haven't been on the road long enough for them to see the issues yet? To answer that question, one has to analyze the data using methods from reliability engineering. That's what the folks a Green Car Reports did; see page two of their article for more details.
Recalls are one thing, imagine there are mass production sedans from the last decade where 32% of owners needed a new engine? We're not talking about a F1 cars here, run of the mill sedans.
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Oh yeah, and you get into gems like this, where they're having so many failures that now they won't replace parts that are functionally broken because they're not broken enough...
Imagine taking an ICE with a rod knock to the dealer and being told "that rod knock is not loud enough and you can still drive so we're going to let it go"
(For reference a dealer would take apart the engine and find what's wrong under warranty, Tesla will send you off until it fails I guess)
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Sorry if I come off as stand off-ish, it's just such a boringly plain conclusion that I can't believe it even has to be said in so many words.
I think this is a great example of how generalizations based on guesses are almost always wrong. If you want to guess and be right, question generalizations.
"GM is recalling 4,296 U.S.-market Chevy Sonic models—all assembled at the automaker’s Orion Township, Michigan plant, for a possible assembly issue that leaves the subcompact lacking either an inner or outer front disc brake pad."
what I don't understand is how even high profile tech people don't seem to be able to see through these lies. Reading the Wikipedia article "Criticism of Tesla, Inc." [0] is openly shocking (accounting fraud, insider trading, pressuring whistleblowers, endless lies and missed predictions among many others).
Just today another crazy investigative article was published in the Wall Street Journal [1]. Sam Altman and others rally to defend Tesla [2]. Elon Musk is lionized and can do no harm. Criticizing Musk is like criticizing technology itself - a blasphemous act; the believers are undeterred.
> Elon Musk is lionized and can do no harm. Criticizing Musk is like criticizing technology itself - a blasphemous act; the believers are undeterred.
You must be delusional. Look at this thread, or any thread reporting on Tesla problems on Hacker News or Reddit's car forums. More than 95% of comments are critical of Tesla, many nearly hysterical in their criticism.
Any defense, or even doubt of the overwhelmingly negative narrative, is met with accusations of being a "fanboy."
Yes, there are forums that are vehemently pro-Tesla, but you're not on one right now. Stop pretending that you're in an area where "Elon Musk can do no harm."
on Twitter, Seeking Alpha, Youtube and the vast majority of traditional media reporting and in analyst reports of the large banks, I see overwhelming praise and support for Musk. It helps to weigh by views/clicks, I like Hacker News but assume that it's quite small in the greater scheme of publication platforms. The CNBC Cybertruck video has 32m+ hits, I invite you to go through the comment section [0]
The stock price also tells a story about what most people think.
I do concede that the tone has shifted recently, but I still don't feel that the full picture of Musk's deeds are known to most people. In my perception, he has achieved a religious status
I'm also bothered by the unavailability of a replacement brake pad. Why are brake pads not interchangeable between cars anyway? I understand there are different sizes and stuff, but a few standard types like there are for tires, windshield wiper blades, and other consumables should be enough. Tesla looks pretty stupid in this story.
Tesla is known for its NIH syndrome, but I think the reason for better parts availability with other brands is also because they have far more models and an appreciation for working at that scale, so tend to use no bespoke parts unless absolutely necessary.
I agree that these well-known wear parts parts should be standardised. There's no need for each model of car to have slightly different brake pads.
There are also entire companies like Bendix which specialise in braking systems (and may be most known for the vacuum boosters for a ton of vehicles).
(I made the same comment here but got downvoted too. Maybe by some designer who thinks they need to be "unique".)
yeah, this is within Tesla's normal QC parameters. they've had roofs fall off, they've had cars catch fire while parked, they even had a car which caught fire while self-driving in the middle of the night with nobody in it.
just goofy bullshit. the discussion in this thread will end up on Elon sooner or later, but the thing to realize is that Tesla the company needs it that way.
electric vehicles will definitely replace the ICE, but Tesla's not going to be Google when that happens. it'll be Alta Vista or even Minitel. buying one of these cars is just a much bigger QC gamble than it shoild be.
> they even had a car which caught fire while self-driving in the middle of the night with nobody in it.
You realize that turned out to be a stunt, right? The car was a brand new plaid owned by a hedge fund manager who turned out to be heavily short TSLA. It was seized by his lawyers and never inspected for what the fault might have been. And the "driving itself on fire" story changed several times over the first 24 hours.
One of the weirdest things about buying one of these things and suddenly finding myself in the culture/counterculture war over the brand is how suspect so much of the coverage is.
Most of the coverage is from Whole Mars. So if you're going to call out some hedge fund manager as being "short Tesla", with the implication of ulterior motives, then it's equally worth mentioning that Whole Mars is extremely bearish, unapologetically very pro-Tesla cheerleading, too.
Make your own decisions. But (especially since it happened just weeks after the refreshed S's started shipping and that we haven't heard squat in the six months since) that just smells off to me. Certainly it wasn't "driving itself around on fire", no further report on the fire exists (contra the Texas crash where the NTSB had lots of interesting things to say) and all the actual witnesses went silent (we don't even have confirmation of who was driving!)...
Just be realistic. It's almost certainly a setup.
Something very similar happened when FSD beta was released. Not two weeks in the NHTSA had a weird-sounding report leaked to the media claiming behavior (that the steering couldn't be overpowered) that the hardware can't produce. Then the next release, we all had an annoying waiver where we had to allow Tesla to save and upload non-anonymized data for any safety-related incidents. And... no more weird reports!
This company just drives people completely bananas, and I genuinely don't know why. The actual cars are fantastic.
the model Y had a spate of qc problems a while ago and it's still recommended that you do an extensive inspection before accepting delivery. I thought it was really funny that I'd have to drive over to Fremont and spend a couple hours inspecting a car for major problems like that (and cancelled my order). Instead, I went to a Toyota dealership, bought a car on the spot, and will drive it, without quality problems, for at least a decade if I want to.
> I can't imagine getting this treatment with a legacy automaker.
I can. My friend drives a 2016 VW Touareg which he got used - I was present during the purchase and the previous owner told us that the coolant needs to be topped off from time to time - nothing big, but he said that the authorized service center shrugged this off as something they won't bother fixing.
There's a difference between "half a cup or so ever few months" and "I have to carry coolant around with me." The reserve tank will comfortably make up the first in any reasonable driving situation, the second is a problem.
Water pumps not weeping a tiny bit is a rather new innovation in cars. They typically use coolant to lubricate the seal, and some will get through.
I don't know of a single car made in the last 10 years where it's normal to lose "half a cup over every few months." Every car I or my family have owned in the last thirty years has never needed coolant added to it over years of ownership.
Water pumps "weeping" coolant is a sign of failed seal, not by design.
The GP commenter's buddy was sold a car by someone who was trying to pass off a needed repair; likely a leaking radiator or failing head gasket if they were unlucky. If they were lucky: a bad radiator cap or a failing coolant system hose.
If they were really, really unlucky: a failing heater core.
Very very much so. Or poor or plastic welds on the coolant manifolds, as plagued my Jaguar, whose coolant system shit the bed catastrophically several times, and even with a factory tech replacing as much as he could with heavier duty aftermarket parts, was only reduced to "needs a top-up every couple of months"
About a litre every 4-7k km. Was like that from the start according to the previous owner. I found it unusual, because I never had to think about such things in any of my cars, including my old 2000 Corolla.
Also missing brake pad out of factory line is colossally bad QA compared to hard design and metallurgy issues that cause softer piston rings after 100k miles or gaskets that leak coolant after 50k .
Yeah but Tesla fans will defend bad stuff by pointing out not so great stuff from the competitors. In that respect you can say they're just like Apple fans.
A brand new car vs a used car which has been through who knows what kind of stuff between delivery and the factory, a slow coolant leak (which could be anything from a bad clamp, ripped hose or a serious engine problem) vs a missing safety critical component of which there are 8 on every vehicle so having one 'left over' from a build set just shouldn't ever happen.
on the rare occasions we have car shopped, VW was removed from the list (along with e.g. Jeep) because of what appeared to be continually poor QA and reliability. Led us to give up on the idea of trying to go biodiesel (dodged a bullet there...).
But Tesla seems to have a really remarkable problem.
I cannot confirm VWs being unreliable. My family drives 4 18+ year old VWs (3 Golf, 1 Passat), all Diesel with 150,000+ km (2 with 300,000+ km) on them. Not a single rusty part, all on their first clutches (one is pulling trailers regularly), and only a single one needs a cup of oil every 1,000 km.
Maybe the VW plants in America are different but my family in Germany will buy VW (or Skoda/Seat) again when the cars give up eventually. Just this time no Diesel.
Interesting. So, to counter that, I've driven VW for many years in many different models on ridiculous mileage and never had a single issue with them.
This was until about 2008 when I switched to Mercedes, those too were pretty reliable until the last one, which was a recent vintage C class. Now I drive an oldie (25 this january).
German cars have a weird reputation as being unreliable in the US. Which seems strange as a European where they generally have a pretty good reputation, maybe not as good as the Japanese brands but not a million miles away.
I think the difference is likely just that the average backstreet garage knows all the faults on a 2005 VW Jetta and how to fix them, they have the right diagnostic equipment to plug them in and read the fault codes etc.
In the US I suspect they'd be the same with most GM / Ford / Honda cars of the same era but would think twice about touching a VW or Mercedes.
Sure, but if you take it to the garage and they know what the issue is straight away and have it fixed 2 hours later it is not nearly as big of a problem if it takes 2 days to figure out the issue and 2 weeks to order in the parts right?
The first is a minor inconvenience, the second is likely to leave a lasting impression of "this car is unreliable".
Precisely, so the less trips you need to take, the more reliable the vehicle is. It's a single axis. It goes from "inoperable and on fire" on the left to "exists only in far flung sci-fi fantasies" and the more trips to the mechanic you take, the further to the left of that axis your car is.
This is why vehicles that need oil changes every 15,000 mile (~24,000 km) are more reliable than ones from a few generations ago that were essentially constantly being serviced.
Ditto. I have a 2010 Prius that burns oil. The dealer told me it’s a known issue at 100k miles. Offered to sell me a used engine with 70k miles to fix it.. Problem was he admitted there was a pretty good chance at 100k+ miles the oil burn would come back on the replacement.
No recall, just a ‘known’ defect. Oh, and because they know my car has a defect they made it clear that my trade in value would suffer if I wanted to upgrade to their latest and greatest model.
I picked up my model 3 long range in december also and it was also missing parts. Mine was missing USB ports in the center console and the wireless charging pad for the phone. When i questioned them about they tried to lie about it and said that my phone was the problem. I demanded to speak to the manager who admitted right away that the car was indeed missing a part and that they would fix it later. My front bumper was also scratched and missing paint. They fixed that by replacing the entire bumper. Buying from them is a nightmare.
> I demanded to speak to the manager who admitted right away that the car was indeed missing a part and that they would fix it later.
That sounds suspiciously like, "We were aware of that and were hoping you wouldn't notice, but we can't get the parts. If we promise to call you later, will you stop bothering us?"
It wasn't even just that dealership, it was every Model 3 shipped during a certain time period. Back when it was happening, there were posts about it on the Tesla subreddit. Nobody was told their car wasn't going to have the features they paid for, and Tesla blamed it on the chip shortage and said they'd install the missing features once they had the supplies.
You would expect Tesla to make sure customers are well informed about certain features are missing, and being added when they become available. The missing USB was known (due to unavailability).
For missing brake pads, you hope q&a catches that, and some electronic alert shows up if brake pads are missing (or worn beyond being useful).
The missing usb was a post delivery fix for a lot of people due to supply issues. You should have been alerted to this before delivery. It sucks their service people don’t care. I had to argue about my wheels being completely curbed in delivery and they insisted they weren’t. Car sales/service people are all the same it seems.
Heh, ours also got curbed during “contactless” delivery. My wife watched it happen, went out and made the delivery specialist take photos and report it to his manager. We made an appointment and Tesla refinished the wheel. I’ve mentioned this to others who were appalled a mistake could happen and chastised me for not demanding a new wheel. I’ve since stopped mentioning it. shrugs
So what is it about the car that makes them so popular now? I assume you could have refused to take it and they wouldn't be bothered because they could just sell it to the next person to walk in. Is it inherent to Tesla or is it just that all cars are scarce now and hard to keep in stock.
At this point I think the cars are popular because it's considered a cool status symbol, not because it's any good. I've got a co-worker who bought a Tesla and kept having issues with it, but still bought a new Model S a couple of weeks ago. It's already having electrical issues and other false alarms popping up on the phone app. He still gushes about how Tesla's are great cars, and how Musk is a genious that is leading humanity into the future.
It honestly reminds me of when I was in Iraq in the early 2000s, and you'd see police chiefs and mayors with iphones. The phones didn't work on the cell network, but they were still highly sought after because it was an expensive piece of technology that almost nobody there could afford.
The quality isn't good, but the performance and features of the car are. We just got a Model Y Long Range in September, and have found it fantastic as a family vehicle. Handles far better and has considerably more storage than any comparably sized vehicle. Great acceleration even in the long-range. I could go for more physical controls for things like hvac, but the UI is still better than most other vehicles I've owned. Aside from the quality control issues, the cars are legitimately great.
Regarding quality control, we had one interior trim piece that was installed with the wrong pegs and so kept falling out - fixed by a mobile tech. It also had a small ding in the front fender, which Tesla had us take it to a local PDR shop to repair. That got it to about 95% - the spot is still technically possible to find, but you need to know where it was and carefully inspect from close range. Slightly irksome, but definitely wasn't worth trying to get the whole fender replaced.
Edit: For what it's worth I also own a 997.1 911 Turbo and a Honda S2000, so I'm far from just a Tesla/electric fan. In fact I really didn't want to want a Tesla as I'm no fan at all of the company for reasons like the OP. Tested all the competitors. But they're just legitimately good cars.
> In fact I really didn't want to want a Tesla as I'm no fan at all of the company for reasons like the OP. Tested all the competitors. But they're just legitimately good cars.
That's exactly where I am. I want to go electric. I didn't like Tesla/Musk for all the obvious reasons. I test drove every electric car I could get my hands on. I decided to test drive a Tesla just for completeness. They gave me a Model Y overnight. It was amazing. I ordered one. I hope it has all its parts. Seems like a coin flip. We'll see how I feel this time next year.
Yep, exactly the same here. Even more crazy for me actually since I'm on Vancouver Island, so if anything significant does go wrong with the thing it's at least an entire day shot taking it over to the mainland to be serviced. Can't believe I ended up ordering one, but I really like it! Fingers crossed.
They're very different experiences. My 911 does 0-60 in around 3.2s, whereas the Y is about 4.2s now that it has the optional acceleration boost. So the 911 still feels considerably faster when it's at the peak of the power curve with the turbos fully spooled. It's a lot more work to extract the power though: you've got to be high in the rev range, get the turbos spooled up, shift the gears yourself (it's a manual), etc. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: extracting the performance like that is fun.
But it's also fun to just mat the throttle at any moment and have the vehicle leap forward, which is the electric thing. Even with the long range, it feels like you can go from a near stop to significant speed instantaneously. (Although one downside of that is that it starts to feel slower in comparison as you build speed, whereas the 911 Turbo is the opposite.) Also the traction control system is fantastic. It doesn't have the handling of the 911 (or the S2000), but it does start and stop on a dime, even in the wet. So you can extract a lot of performance out of it, but you need to drive it differently to do so.
I've autocrossed all three cars and tracked the 911 and S2000; each requires a significantly different driving style to get the most out of it. The S is a momentum car with crazy cornering capability, so it's all early apexes and maintaining speed. The Model Y is the exact opposite. You basically want to drive in straight lines, shortest path. Brake hard in a straight line to bring the weight to the front, short, tight corner, then hammer the throttle and straighten out, and let the traction control send the torque where it can go. If you try to carry speed through the corner it'll just push (understeer). The Turbo is somewhere in-between. On a big track it's the fastest of the three, but on an autocross course the S2000 and probably even the Y, if the course is tight or it's wet, have it beat.
Thanks for the thoughtful overview from a real driver’s point of view.
Is Porsche electrifying their cars? Would you get an all electric 911? Do you think electric is the future or some hybrid approach with instant electric torque replacing turbo spooling downsides?
Porsche is planning to electrify all their models, yes. I expect the next generation 911 will be hybrid. Not sure if this is what you were saying, but hybrid powertrains can work well with turbos because the electric motors can fill in the torque gap while the turbos are spooling up.
In the short to medium term I definitely think we'll see a mix of hybrid and full electric in sports/super cars, because full electric still comes with a significant weight penalty, and the charging makes track driving difficult. I expect most standard passenger cars to go full electric pretty quickly though, and eventually all but low volume and special purpose vehicles will probably get there.
Actually, the comparison to early 2010s iPhones is quite apt...you have the staunch iPhone evangelist who pressures all their family and friends into getting one, the one who waits in the lines for product launches etc. And on the other end of the spectrum you have the Android or otherwise user who cannot possibly comprehend why a smartphone, especially one as [locked down / hard to repair / expensive / etc] would be a good purchase choice in anyone's eyes.
10 years later the iPhone is still around but its competitors have more or less died out or left the smartphone game. The only flagship Android manufacturers that compete at the same price points are Samsung and Google, and pretty much nobody else is making a smartphone that doesn't run Android.
yo, no offense, but how is this comparison even relevant, let alone apt? it made sense in the parent comment, but the way you’ve extended it seems to imply BMW went out of business or something. where are you going with this?
also, again no offense, but do you mean “pretty much nobody else is making a smartphone that doesn’t run Android”? because you started by talking about iPhones.
the first paragraph made sense, maybe you just need to clarify.
Forgetting the brands, the battle right now seems to be between ICE cars versus EV cars. I'm implying that EVs will win in the end regardless of any existing drawbacks.
> do you mean “pretty much nobody else"
Yes, thanks for catching that. That omission does make my sentence rather confusing, lol. I was trying to refer to all the other manufacturers with proprietary operating systems like Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone, etc. that are no longer around.
And sure, none of these are as dangerous as a self driving car making the wrong move, but we can separate the context of what a phone or laptop is supposed to be good at vs. a car. For example, this brake pad issue is the Tesla equivalent to Antennagate, since nobody would expect to buy a new phone that sucks at making calls, just like nobody would expect to buy a new car that sucks at slowing down.
I'm still waiting for some scandal at the Watergate Hotel again, to see how many journalists demonstrate their total and complete ignorance of the history of their profession by referring to "Watergategate."
Teslas are wonderful powertrains strapped to extremely underwhelming cars. Everything other than the battery tech that makes it a car is severely lacking for the price. Outside of the EV realm the Model S might as well be a Camry when compared to other full sized cars in its price range like the S class or 7 Series.
> So what is it about the car that makes them so popular now?
They're very popular with the type of person who genuinely believes that their Tesla vehicle will receive updates that will turn it into a robotaxi any day now, just like Musk has been promising for years.
>So what is it about the car that makes them so popular now?
Because the buying process is super simple and easy, you pick what you want, buy it, no haggling. They get it ready, you pick it up.
The cars are rated the safest on the road, have the fewest accidents per mile, practically no maintenance ever needing to be done, maybe change the brake pads every 5-10 years, battery will last 500k KM or more, autopilot is amazing, pre-warm up the car in a closed garage, and more.
I've never once had a problem in the past 3 years of owning it, it's just a joy to have and drive.
I even got an OTA update that tweaked the motors a bit and gave me faster acceleration and increased range compared to when I first picked it up, for free.
> I even got an OTA update that tweaked the motors a bit and gave me faster acceleration and increased range compared to when I first picked it up, for free
Wait, are you bragging about your car being intentionally nerfed which was then reversed “for free”?!
Cannot imagine purchasing a car that can be nerf’d OTA or features added or removed at the whimsy of a car manufacturer. An example would be purchasing a second hand wrecked Tesla, fixing it, and having features removed because you do not subscribe to them or did not pay the premium.
I have one and I'm happy with it. No manufacturing issues. Sometimes I think I overpaid but I pass more than one $5.99 premium gas station and that puts me at ease. I charge at work, even. Hard to not be satisfied with that.
Pretty much. If you refuse delivery, they'll just shrug and put you back in the queue. And then try to offload it on someone else, without disclosing why a previous buyer refused delivery.
>
So what is it about the car that makes them so popular now?
Marketing.
> Is it inherent to Tesla or is it just that all cars are scarce now and hard to keep in stock.
Are you going to break a deal you invested so much into over a missing USB port, phone charger, and a fucked up bumper? Most people won't. They just want all that shit to be over with, so that they can drive their car home.
It does less traditional ads-on-search-results-and-television marketing, it does its marketing through submarine articles in a favorable press, and social media.
Elon Musk is also fundamentally incapable of staying quiet for more than five minutes, and for various reasons, has a large following of groupies, that do his marketing for him.
My experience buying from them was a dream. Everything is done online and no haggling. The one time I did go in for service was also simple and took a couple hours.
I know somebody who had the exact same experience with their usb ports on a different model Tesla. This is either a recurring QA issue or a way to “deliver” cars despite supply chain issues.
Gillmore recorded the above video to send to her Tesla service advisor, who claims multiple technicians listened to the video, only to declare "the brakes sounded normal for a performance Model 3."
Watch the video. It's incomprehensible how could anyone who has some experience with cars say that such sound, while breaking, is normal. If I was Elon, I would seriously question whoever at Tesla had said so. And by that, I mean, literally just fire them, because, damn, how can one be so ignorant when it comes something so crucial to safety?
Seriously. That's insanely obviously metal on metal, which shouldn't be a sound you find in the brake system, especially under what's clearly mild low speed braking.
The next obvious question: If multiple people think that's "normal for a performance Model 3," how many others are being delivered without brake pads?
Yeah, on top of that, as someone pointed out in the comment section on the page linked:
"See that green dot on the top of the right picture? That is an assembly inspection mark that someone put there at the factory to indicate the caliper was 100% correct and inspected.
Guess that person is bad at their job."
That's two people bad at their job. Both the person that assembled it and the person that checked it.
When you build a car you do it from very precisely controlled sets of inventory, there is no way that you could build a car and have leftover parts and not know which car they belonged to at any build step.
> When you build a car you do it from very precisely controlled sets of inventory...
You should do it from...
Remember, Tesla's shtick for a while was to claim that the legacy automakers were dumb dinosaurs who didn't know code, and therefore Tesla would show them by building sonic velocity lights out dreadnaught factories where there weren't any tolerances at all, and... currently builds cars on a line that's basically indistinguishable from what everyone else uses.
In throwing out everything the "dinosaurs" did, it's entirely possible they threw out a range of useful things as well like "The number of parts delivered equals the number of vehicles to be built."
Fair enough, they might be building them from large chunks of stock. Still, that would be a monumentally stupid move, you could easily forget something even more crucial like that, for instance a circlip on the steering housing. That would be a real surprise, better hope you have paid for self driving if that ever happens ;)
> they might be building them from large chunks of stock.
That's not how it works, though. Pretty much every single item in a car, except maybe for some screws (which would be identified by a batch number, though), has a unique S/N, and they know which car is built with which part, so that they know which owners to ask to a service center if there's a recall. It's not like they just tak a part from a pile and don't precisely track what they have left.
Source: used to develop a MES for an automotive plant that manufactured brakes, airbags and seatbelts.
If you will take some time to read up on Tesla you'll see that they have their own unique processes. What I describe is apparently how Tesla works, I'm aware that in normal car manufacturing plants that is not how it works.
I would assume that bunch of these processes are mandated by the regulatory bodies – at least in EU. So while they may have some unique processes, it is unlikely that they can avoid the requirement for traceability.
I'm not sure about the performance model 3 and it's brake pads but you can get performance break pads that sound like that. Even ones that sqeak at low speed.
Ferodo DS2500 if you want a set for yourself. Drive to the track, track and home again without issues.
I ran DS2500s for years on my first STI. They would resonate and make a squeal, but it wasn't at all the same as metal-on-metal grinding from a worn out or missing brake pad.
Also, I don't recommend DS2500s on a street car. They're intended to be a compromise pad that works on the street and the track both, but the performance is significantly worse when they're not heated up, so the first stop of the day on a cool morning can be surprising. Better to get real street pads and real track pads and swap them. It's super easy on fixed caliper brakes.
I ran the DS2500s for a couple years before shopping around a bit to see what was out there. I settled on custom made pads using a Mintex material which pn escapes me now.
I used some pretty decent brands and pads and found the Forodos were the only ones that I couldn't get to fade in the hills. Their friction coefficient starts at 50c so it's definitely not unreasonable like actual race pads that can start in the 125c+ range.
I only ever found them a little suprising when they had been hot hot and then the next morning it would take a bit more of a press on the peddal to pull up and the stop lights. I still always had confidence that if I stood on it they would pull up in time.
As for running propper race pads at the track, that's fine and I had the same brembos you would've but replacing the rotors I was using wasn't something I wanted to shell out for every few track days. The Forodos never had any fade issues on track and I have a picture with the back wheels almost lifting as I brake from speed cut.
That's because they're doing the same things to the rotor at low temperatures that a caliper does - just abrading away rotor material to slow the car. Track pads are great when hot, not so amazing when cold. Yes, I know there are plenty that claim to be able to do everything, but your rotor life will suffer.
However, it's not something one should expect from a factory vehicle - and if you've installed higher performance track pads yourself, you should be able to determine if it's normal. Also, they'll sound the same from all four corners - this sound just came from one corner.
> I'm not sure about the performance model 3 and it's brake pads but you can get performance break pads that sound like that. Even ones that sqeak at low speed.
No. If you don't know anything about cars please feel free not to comment. Performance brakes can absolutely be noisy but they ABSOLUTELY do not sound like metal scraping metal. I have heard all kinds of performance brakes - carbon brakes, high end drilled rotors with the hardest pads you can imagine, everything. The most alarming sound you'll hear from performance brakes is a nasty squeal. They DO NOT sound like this. You are spreading misinformation.
I used to get custom made pads for my car that I would drive on the street and track. So yea thanks for your concern.
Sintered metal pads definitely sound like metal metal contact at low speed and even more so when they've recently been hot.
Watch the video. It doesn't sound that bad and I can understand the engineers but probably wouldn't expect that much from a "performance model"
Remember my BMW Martin, that ran pads that would make horrible sounds. However the Integra and it's brembos that used to take a beating a Ruapuna often sounded like something you would want to pull over and check out. ;)
> If I was Elon, I would seriously question whoever at Tesla had said so. And by that, I mean, literally just fire them, because, damn, how can one be so ignorant when it comes something so crucial to safety?
Elon is first one to blame for it. Sloppy quality and disregard for safety issues that creates comes all the way down from Elon. This problem is deeply rooted in the organization, that’s only optimizing for growth, at all costs. It’s well known Silicon Valley playbook. But it’s not that great when you apply it to the cars, not some random app.
As a former owner of a Model 3 Performance, I can almost understand the comment -- as long as they didn't really listen to the video. The brakes on the P3D will develop an unholy squeal after a couple weeks of driving around normally using regen for braking. I developed my own routine of goosing it on the last major road before my neighborhood so that I could really use the friction brakes significantly, or I'd eventually find myself waking up the neighbors when backing out of my driveway.
I figured it was probably because the P3D gets fixed instead of floating calipers, and fixed caliper brakes typically have some quirks. Noises being the most obvious one.
I do much the same with our Volt - I have to slow down on a downhill to get in our driveway, and when I've got the car with nobody else in it, and nobody behind me, I build up some speed then really get on the friction brakes hard to keep them free and clean. If you never use the friction brakes, they'll also tend to seize up after a while.
Quick tip, you can do this much easier by shifting the Volt into neutral and then braking. In D and L, the volt actually produces very significant braking via regen via the brake pedal, so much so that you'll have to really brake hard to get any friction braking action. In neutral, regen is turned off and all brake pedal travel is actually physical brakes. You'll be able to clean off your brakes once in a while with just casual easy braking if done in N. Even if you keep your same procedure you use today, you'll get more effect doing it in N.
I actually do it in N, because, yes, you're absolutely right - it's wonderfully regen heavy. I cannot express just how nice coming down a mountain grade is with the Volt - put it in L, set cruise control to the recommended speed, and... keep it in the lane. It just sits at at the set speed and regens down without any drama whatsoever.
Various states have assorted laws about being in neutral on a public roadway, and while I don't feel it's a safety issue in the Volt, it wasn't something I was going to casually mention either. However, since it was brought up...
I owned it 18 months. I sold it last year after it was clear that I'd never be commuting again, it was sitting unused for about 25 out of every 30 days. I now share a family car with my wife, and bought myself a Porsche as my fun car.
I'd assume the SA was trained to never admit a problem no matter what, and was just trying to lie their way out of the predicament, and there was no "multiple technicians". TBH most service centers probably won't trains people for "we forgot to put brakes into your car" scenario - if only because most automakers wouldn't forget to put brakes into your car. But people seem to still love Tesla cars, so who am I to tell them they shouldn't?
Given that Tesla's default strategy when confronted with defects is to deny and deflect, why would they want to pay their software developers to build systems that reliably collect evidence of defects?
> would they want to pay their software developers to build systems that reliably collect evidence of defects?
The point was this would be picked up by the regular KPIs collected, not something that would specifically curate to failures. Think: temperature of each wheel, deceleration rate (of each wheel, again), the ESP feedback (the car would inevitably shift when breaking and so ESP would continuously kick-in to compensate), and so on. This is probably very easily detectable by the software without having to specifically design it for it.
GM issues 2012 Chevy Sonic recall for missing brake pads
The new brake pad recall for the 2012 Chevrolet Sonic affects 4,296 vehicles sold in the United States while another 577 were sold in Canada, with all of the vehicles included in this recall built between June 2nd, 2011 and November 21st, 2011 at GM’s Orion Township Assembly Plant just north of Detroit. On these recalled 2012 Sonic hatchbacks and sedans, General Motors believes that the vehicle could be missing either an inner or outer brake pad on the front end.
> ...but luckily, GM has caught the problem and is recalling them right away…thus removing the safety risk and the cost of repairing the problem from the owners.
Quite different from the way Tesla is handling this.
The Sonic is also the car that had defective ignition switches that led to numerous deaths because the engine would suddenly shut off while driving, disabling the electric power steering...and even worse, the airbag system would get disabled and not work in an ensuing crash.
In a civil suit a family's attorney found GM's supplier dramatically changed the ignition switch, and GM claimed that they had no idea why or that it even happened (which is ludicrous to anyone even proximate to the auto industry. Any time a part is revised, even slightly, it tends to get a part number suffix.)
Sonic's product manager claimed he had no knowledge of ignition switch changes. "I put my own son in a Sonic" etc etc.
Eventually the whole mess blew up to the point that Congress got involved, subpoaenaed a battleship's worth of documents from GM and...lo and behold, what comes out? Lots of emails from the same Sonic product manager about the ignition switch.
There was an NPR/APM/etc show episode about it...wish I could remember which one.
I guess it's good to know that Tesla isn't the only manufacturer to mess this up, but as a 2022 Tesla owner I really don't want my car to be associated with GM fuckups a decade ago!
When my WRX started making an odd ticking sound guess what Subaru told me to do? "Bring it in right now." Ended up being a bearing in the engine, but Subaru sourced and replaced the entire engine quicker than Tesla has a rotor, caliper, and pad.
I can't believe how people tolerate replacement parts taking so long for Teslas. Tesla is the only supplier. They are choosing to make more new mostly working cars instead of fixing the ones missing things like brake pads. They could just allocate more parts to repairs.
That is the crux of the matter. It's more important to Tesla to put those parts on the line, so they can tout quarterly delivery numbers.
And now they're also seeing the downsides of incremental improvement. It's great in some ways, but for repair and maintenance not so much. At least with the "legacy" manufacturers you have parts separated by model year. With Tesla, they might have cycled through a few part models a year. That adds to the complexity of part sourcing, even before the delivery number issue.
That's got to be a first. I've never, ever heard of a critical safety component not installed on a car while supposedly passing QA. The first time you brake with that car you'll know something is off, so even if it wasn't detected in the factory (which should be the case) it should have been detected by the shipping process.
Hm. Ok, point in Tesla's favor: who knows what dealers find in terms of missing bits and pieces on cars they pass to customers. But with direct-to-consumer there is no such middle man who has their own reputation to uphold.
I regularly frequent https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/ (I'm a grease monkey at heart before I switched to SWE), cars coming out without oil, break fluid, breaks or similar are not uncommon. HOWEVER, as others have commented. The one part that concerns is the lack of accountability shown by Tesla here.
It's not a matter of being cool. It's a matter of going next-level with "no comment."
Tesla has some bad PR, the press can't get anything out of Tesla so the story is dead out the door, and Telsa's PR team comes up with some stupid stunt to get social media trending on the stunt...problem solved. "Oh, you see that thing about Tesla?" is about their cars blinking their headlights to Christmas music, and not, say, the feds ramping up their investigation into Teslas slamming into roadside emergency vehicles.
Standard corporate "disaster management" is essentially "hide everyone, don't say a fucking word, wait to get out of the news cycle."
They do have a way of creating distractions to bury the stories that they don't like. The Cyberwhistle was launched just around the time of the whistle blower stories that were coming out. Kind of smart and I did not realize the connection until after a while.
> Standard corporate "disaster management" is essentially "hide everyone, don't say a fucking word, wait to get out of the news cycle."
Usually, they throw in a lightweight apology. Saying something like: "we deeply regret the experience this particular customer had."
Before they go to "no comment".
I guess Elon innovated by simply saving "apology" part :)
Elon is clearly on some galactic brain game theory with this move because, despite firing all his PR people, people like you still think they have a PR department and not only that but their PR department runs the entire company and their product / software update release cycle! And they're apparently proactive enough to have the right card to pull for any given corporate disaster they may find themselves in!
Why pay for a PR department when people still think you have one even without one?
0.02 - I don't think it's great that Tesla got rid of their media relations department, but I also don't think that they have people cracking the whip on holiday update deadlines so they can cover up NHTSA investigations or whatever. You don't get cool on social media by forcing it. Now, the Cyberwhistle is a different story...
Whether you liked tesla or not, they been on a constant attack by traditional media. Every single miss do of tesla is amplified 1000 times, like their stocks.
BMW recalled almost 1 millions cars due to risk of fire? Put on youtube "BMW on Fire" they still catching on fire. My friend jumped out of the BMW car in 3 rd lane of 6 lane highway, almost died. Did you see any bad press about it?
So basically tesla had two ways, try to buy more of this media, or don't feed the troll.
I think it's smart to just ignore corruption.
I’ve had a Model 3 for one year. Two months in, parts of the front suspension had to be replaced. Couple months later, same thing on the passenger front side. Eight months in I started hearing wind noise that sounded like there was a hole in the windscreen. Turns out the skuttle board or some such, a plastic part under the windscreen, often pops out of place. First fix Tesla tried was to replace the windscreen. After that time I got the car back with the frunk half disassembled and the wind noise still appearing and the plastic skuttle board still out of place. Now they want to replace the interior plastic moulding to the frunk. They think it is distorted. If so, this must have been from factory.
All the time I have to push hard to get any attempted fix.
I’ve bought several cars, Mercedes’ and Audis from new in the past and I’ve never had any issue that required remedial work. (Or any issue at all.)
Now that there are good alternative electric cars I no longer recommend Tesla when anyone asks.
This is also a point against online ordering cars - if I can walk into a car dealership, inspect and test drive the car before committing to buying it, that helps everyone - I can have peace of mind, dealership or manufacturer can fix identified defects before putting the car out again and the process works - manufacturer has incentives to ship as perfect a product as they can considering the dealer is putting their money on the line, Dealers can address minor defects in the pre delivery inspection etc.
None of that is possible with Tesla's model - they basically have to get a car looking thing out the door as fast as they can, there's no dealership to cross check and the customer is left with the pieces or the option of waiting in the hope that next one will be better.
I did not buy my car from the dealership lot. They had to put in an order and I waited 3 months for it to be finally available for me to pick up. I could track everything happening with the car. The car was sitting in the container port for an usually long time (2 weeks) so when I asked my dealer he tracked it down and said there was curb damage to the wheel and they had to wait for replacement.
Now, I don't expect this kind of service from Tesla but my point is it doesn't matter if you are able to test drive it or not from the dealership and inspect for defects; the manufacturer should have a rigorous quality process that doesn't let these kind of slip ups to happen and if it does happen make it right by the customer.
> so when I asked my dealer he tracked it down and said there was curb damage to the wheel and they had to wait for replacement.
So having a Dealer deal with it helped? As in they did the inspection for you and got it fixed? It's practically equivalent to buying off a lot if you think about it without the extra step of you doing another inspection to catch what the dealer might have missed.
With Tesla it's between you ordering and the factory shipping. No additional independent QC like the Dealership and no chance to pre-inspect.
This doesn't really mirror my experience. I scheduled a test drive for a Model Y online. I drove to the nearest Tesla location in Alpharetta, Georgia (about 1.5 hours away). And then later placed an order online.
A couple weeks later, I went back to Alpharetta to pick up my vehicle. This wasn't at the Tesla store, but the service center down the road.
During that time, I had ample time to inspect the vehicle and drive it. In fact, the Tesla rep went out of his way to do a thorough walk-through and inspection of the vehicle. I noticed a small smudge on the front, and they took care of it on the spot.
From reading forums, it's pretty common knowledge that if you notice any issues, so long as you note it upon pick-up (or in the first days or so), Tesla will happily take care of it free of charge.
I haven't used it, but the mobile app also makes it trivial to schedule service if needed (along with other options like roadside assistance).
So you're driving 3 hours for a test drive. Then you order a different made for you car online. They ship one to a nearer service center, you inspect it - in your case it just happens to be a smudge that the service center can fix without parts. If not then you're either stuck driving a car that needs fixing or reject delivery (not sure if that's possible) and wait another 3 months.
Contrast that with normal day GM/Toyota/Honda car dealership - you walk in after maybe a 20 min drive, you inspect and test drive any car on the lot and buy the one you like the most. End of story. If the one color you like had QA issues the dealer can't fix in short time you can go to another dealer nearby. In fact that's exactly what I did recently during shortage - was still able to buy a car I like that I could inspect in a day's time.
But prior to the shortages I would not need to wait to find a different car if I inspected one and found it had issues. I could just go to another Dealer lot and get one. I think there are still limitations to online ordering cars and the issues become worse when you can't do decent QA _and_ fulfill orders in decent time frame.
(For instance if I ordered a Model 3 now - my estimated delivery time frame is March. If I refuse that one for having issues, I am looking at June to get a new car.)
It's very common to not have the options available on the lot. For popular or new cars you often have to order them from the factory or do a swap with another deal that has the color and options you want.
It may be more of a problem now but it's not a new thing.
Shit can happen (this is a bad one though), how it is managed makes quite a difference.
9 years ago my father bought a new Mercedes B-class.
Having been a truck driver for decades, he knows how to look at details. When he got the car he discovered front wheels brakes where different, on each wheel there was a different type of brake(I don't exactly recall the issue). Obviously he didn't accepted the car, Mercedes gave him a temporary car and repaired the new B-class at no cost.
Nobody is wondering that it apparently takes Tesla three weeks to fix a brake?
When I had to take my car to the shop, and they needed to order a part, they get it the next day! I've never had to go without my car for more than a day.
I used to own a Jaguar, that I recently sold because yeah, it was unreliable (cooling system mainly). It did have an entertainment system issue, and the whole thing needed to be replaced. Oh boy, I thought, when I heard they needed to order a new entertainment system, how long will that take?
"Oh, overnight. Second day if we have to overnight it from the UK."
If other manufacturers adopt the direct to consumer model, they need to take note of how bad TSLA has executed. What a terrible customer experience. Then TSLA reps have the gall to gaslight this person saying it’s normal.
TSLA as a speculative instrument for trading is fine. But I am avoiding them as a consumer.
Besides the ridiculous failure of QA and the "not a problem" attitude, I'm also surprised at the lack of parts availability; are Tesla brake pads yet another proprietary design? I think standardisation of wear parts would be a good thing across the industry, and provide more aftermarket opportunities (not that there isn't plenty already), but of course manufacturers like Tesla would be against that.
(I do brake jobs myself. It's not hard, and having "skin in the game", you'll definitely make sure to do it right.)
A friend if mine who is a huge Tesla fan became furious when I pointed out that his car is essentially coal powered, since he charges it at home, and the electricity in our area is primarily derived from coal as of currently.
Note that he did not become curious or refuted the facts. He simply became furious that I pointed this out.
I’ve found a lot of Tesla people are like that. Rather than being comfortable with some of the facts, it seems like they don’t like it when facts don’t match the narrative.
Own a Tesla in a high-nonrenewable-mix area. Yes, you could claim my car is coal or natural gas powered, but I've also been curious about this and I found that it's still better than a regular gas car because the production source is centralized. A 1% efficiency gain for a power plant in my area translates to 1% cleaner power for every EV powered by that power plant. Likewise, if a new solar or wind farm comes online and starts powering my area, my car automatically becomes cleaner, and I didn't have to do anything.
An ICE car will never gain MPG over time. Engines produced decades ago, like my last car from 2005, will never become more efficient or produce less pollutants than they did off the assembly line. Trying to make a fleet of ICE cars cleaner is like trying to overhaul one million tiny power plants at once; it is a much, much easier job to do when there's only a handful of power plants to operate on.
Anyways, sorry about your friend, unfortunately not everyone can control their emotions when they buy expensive toys and get told off for it. I imagine he would've had the same reaction if he bought a Lamborghini and you asked him if it carried the same amount of groceries as a Rav4 or something.
Regardless, am happy to have a productive debate with you if you want to discuss EV ownership in more detail. One thing I will put out there: I don't care if you buy a Tesla, and I hate Tesla owners who consistently put down EVs from other manufacturers without even watching a review or reading the spec sheet. I just want more people to buy EVs, it doesn't matter what badge they carry.
While you can’t gain MPG over time with an older car, you may see improvement to declined from original MPG with some fuel detergent (seafoam, etc) and new tires made for highway driving.
> I imagine he would've had the same reaction if he bought a Lamborghini and you asked him if it carried the same amount of groceries as a Rav4 or something.
In that case most people would say yes or no. There would be no reason to get angry unless they were insecure about their purchase.
Many modern brake pads have a simple circuit of a wire connected to the computer. The wires are designed to break when the pad is worn out so the car computer detect a voltage return of zero in that electric circuit and will trigger a warning immediately.
Hypothese 1. If the maker forgot to install the brake pad. Then we have to assume that neither the second employee nor the car computer noticed that something was wrong, and this is very strange because the computer at least -must- know it.
Hypothese 2. The pad was installed but was loose or fell later. The seller or one of the seller employees had some fun driving the car before, hit a bump or something and the pad was dislodged and fell. They didn't noticed it or tried to hide the problem.
Does not explain why the owner didn't noticed a warning in the dashboard from the minute 0.
Hypothese 3. The owner hit a bump and lost the brake pad in the first days of driving the car. Maybe without being aware of that. So nobody see the warning light because there was not a warning light to be seen. Not until later. (we could also suspect that the structure that keeps the brake pad in place maybe is fragile in this car).
There are other possibilities, but they are much less probable
I work on my cars as a hobby (not a mechanic). All the brakepad sensors I’ve seen were only on one pad (usually the inner one, as that wears off first). As for your 2 and 3, there is simply not a chance that a bump will make a pad fall off, unless the whole brake system has major damage.
The explanation is usually the simplest, they forgot to install it.
Once you understand that Tesla exists to sell EV tax credits and hold a massively overinflated stock valuation based on ...apparently nothing... and so therefore making cars is actually far down their list of priorities stuff like this should not come as a surprise.
These vehicles are objectively bad: Poor design and even poorer manufacturing. Every one I've seen up close in person has numerous exterior fit and finish problems. The interiors feel very very cheap for a vehicle in their price range. They catch fire. They don't work well in extreme weather. Bumpers fall off randomly. If you think these sorts of problems don't extend to the mechanical and software components, well, I've got a Tesla to sell you.
Have you tried asking car owners if they want a car with expensive interiors? Or cars that don't catch fire? Or cars that work well in extreme weather? Or bumpers that don't fall off?
Maybe they'd tell you they do. But wallets, and recent sales trends, speak differently. The market clearly does not value these things as much as you think it does, at least in comparison to the other features Tesla promises.
Tesla is on my naughty list after the horrendous UI update, but I think the scrutiny around them (while deserved) is often blown way out of proportion.
While that might be the joke for a lot of car dealers and companies, you're supposed to pretend to give a shit about the quality of the car before you hand a multi-ton machine with a bunch of lithium to a customer.
Freaking brake pads and rotors had to be ordered at the Tesla dealer service center? And you're telling me it takes over two weeks? What the hell. I can go to Firestone or literally anywhere and pads and rotors are just in stock
It's outsourced to the customers themselves. Their QC is so bad every Tesla forum recommends customers perform delivery inspection using comprehensive checklists (example [1]) and either reject delivery or make follow up service appointments to fix them.
And it's time limited, typically to 20 or 30 minutes. And anecdotally, depending on where you are picking it up, may or may not allow driving of the vehicle, and only visual inspection.
I see a lot of "whataboutism" in the comments, mostly from people who (for some reason) feel the need to defend Tesla. What's the purpose of this? Criticizing a company or calling out their mistake does not detract from it, it pushes them to get better in fact. You can love something/someone and still recognize their shortcomings.
Other car manufacturers making a mistake does not justify Tesla's mistake or their handling of the situation. We are supposed to hold all car manufacturers to the highest standards instead of justifying Tesla's mistake with someone else's.
It comes across as pretty ridiculous for this to be a popular news article. It's only noteworthy because it's Tesla and news outlets know it generates hate clicks. Cars having problems on delivery, regardless of brand, happens all the time. People love to hyper scrutinize Tesla though
- windshields that are actually mounted to the vehicle
- no suspension failures
- no heavy shaking at 35-40mph
- all brake pads to be present
- a dash that doesn't creak or sag when I put my hand on it
- panels that aren't so misaligned that they leak into the body, or motors, leading to motors dying and Tesla saying "it was driven in rain that was too heavy"
I'm not sure the high expectations you talk of. The Tesla, to steal from someone else in this thread, is an amazing state-of-the-art powertrain coupled to a distinctly subpar vehicle.
The drama isn't because of a parts shortage, it's that Tesla forgot to install brakes on this car. If you don't have break pads, don't deliver the car back to the owner.
The three-week waiting period to install a break pad once the issue was identified is a parts shortage. It hearkens back to Soviet auto manufacturers.
For obvious reasons, Soviet central planners wanted to get cars into the hands of consumers. For obvious reasons, Soviet auto manufacturers were driven to get as many cars into the hands of consumers as they could.
The obvious outcome of this incentive was that the manufacturers had zero interest in shipping any spare/repair parts for any of their vehicles. Why ship parts, when you can ship cars instead? Nobody at the politburo is going to give you a pat on the head for supporting aftermarket auto repairs...
Not really sure I'm getting your point, or at least, I don't follow how this is super relevant to the GP comment about how they don't get the "drama" around this issue.
If Tesla took a month or two to install new brake pads, that would be pretty bad. But they forgot/cut corners and failed to install brake pads entirely, which raises this to outrageous.
How much are you invested in Tesla, so that you're willing to vigorously argue for and justify delivering a car that is missing brakes in multiple comments. Elon fanboyism doesn't make sense in this case.
> So much drama from a missing part due to covid. Almost every car manufacture is facing it.
It's not the wait time for a part that's the most ridiculous thing here. It's that they sold the car with a key component of the brake system missing. And then when the customer complained they made things 10x worse by claiming it was all normal. No other car maker did this.
They didn't claim it's normal. They diagnose it with first video incorrectly. Not many car brands even diagnose you via submitted video record. I'm a tesla owner. With regen brakes the motor do the breaking 99% of the time. So due to that tesla quite often doing a noise that makes people think something wrong with the car, simply because this breaks are not heavily used. It's probably among top 5 false complains to service center , when car is totally fine but people are worried. So SC person did realize its not a false positive signal. As simple as that.
They do, you just don't read about one bad car incident. 1 millions BMW recalled with a risk of fire, youtube "BMW on fire". Is catching on fire is a basic safety part?
To be honest Tesla is not a luxury brand. The old roadster based on a lotus is far from the luxury world and while a model s or x are very premium, it’s not luxury level where being overpriced is a feature.
hm, luxury car simply splits into 2 categories performance and comfort.
Many brands lives exactly in this paradigm. Entire Audi, BMW, Porche, Ferrari etc. sells you performance with some degree of comfort. Model S Plaid beats any of this cars.
If you pick top 10 cars that can do 0-60 in 2.2 seconds, tesla will be also the most comfortable. Yet you have this sweet combo in a fraction of the price. You have a car that outrun any bugatti in the world, yet it's a decent family car.
So I'm not sure how is it overprices? Just because it decided not to do a real leather options?
"Tesla Model 3 owner claims car was delivered missing a brake pad"
...because the only evidence we've seen so far comes from the owner, and Tesla has not yet had a chance to investigate what happened and provide the media with an official response. All messages, photos, and videos I've seen are from the owner.
If this is Tesla's fault, shame on the company. But we don't know for sure yet, and given how much hatred is directed at the company (and Musk, in particular) we have to consider the possibility that this could be: (a) a rare case involving unusual circumstances for a single vehicle out of a few million sold to date, or (b) a malicious hit job.
I, for one, will keep an open mind, waiting to pass judgment until there's more information about what actually happened here.
Tesla intentionally doesn't have any sort of PR department, so IMO it's an ineffective strategy to give them the benefit of the doubt until there is an official response- they don't do official responses, because they feel like it legitimizes their detractors (whether the criticisms are warranted or not)
Either way, it shouldn't take Tesla more than 3 working days to remedy this situation. Breakpads are a common vehicle consumable that should be available at every dealership. The rotor and a caliper should also be common enough that they could be overnighted or second day shipped. The work itself is simple enough that any shop tech could accomplish in under 2 hours (even the new guys that just change oil).
If you can deliver a car without a brake pad, that speaks to epic quality control failures (EDIT: A comment in the article points out the green "quality control" mark that is obvious on the caliper, which should indicate that everything was assembled properly - so things are seriously broken if it can be assembled wrong and then have a QC mark applied while still being entirely wrong). I cannot imagine Honda or Toyota shipping a car without a brake pad. I can't imagine Ford or GM doing it either. I'd be down into the "Uh... I think I've heard of you once..." non-western car manufacturers before it wouldn't surprise me.
Then, the absolutely horrid service center experience of "Oh, no, you don't know what you're talking about, that's normal, and we can't fix it any time soon anyway" is just absurd.
I know Tesla likes to rag on the horrors of the dealership model, but, seriously, I can't imagine getting this treatment with a legacy automaker. Not that I worry about them forgetting to put pieces in, either.