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.
Google suggests that you should:
https://www.google.com/search?q=missing+brake+pad+recall