Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.
Unlike traditional automakers, which use independent dealers to sell and repair vehicles, Tesla sells directly to customers and owns and operates a large portion of its service centers. That gives the automaker extraordinarily detailed real-time visibility into parts failures, repairs and warranty claims, which Tesla engineers meticulously tracked and analyzed for years, the company records show.
See, this is where having monopoly control over the sales and repair of Tesla’s own cars could help them improve their product and supplh chain, be truthful and give refunds to people with defective parts, and build good rapport as a brand. Instead they collect all that data just to deny any problems and hide them from customers and regulators.
Makes sense. What does Elron do when he screws something up? Blames everyone but himself.
That’s the issue with these brands that come about acting like they have the best new ideas, do things differently because they don’t have 100 years of baggage and with that do things better because they go forward with a modern mindset.
It’s true to an extent, except that you don’t have the advantage of 100 years of trial and error to figure out what research, default practices and QA you have to do not to have a percentage of your cars have their wheels fall off.
The funniest part is they tend to fail on the things that have already been sorted out in that 100 years of trial and error because they focus on the new hotness. Suspensions and axles breaking is failing automotive basic design.
I’ll take “Things I don’t have to worry about with my Subaru” for $600, Alex.
sounds like the kind of engineering teething problems you have when you dont have decades of vehicle manufacturing and testing under your belt.
just sell the brand to a capable company can get it over with
Not to be steelmaning for Tesla, but… all the major manufacturers of consumer products do this same shit. Pretend known defects don’t exist, fail to honor warranties, blame customers for the mfg’s own failures. That’s just what happens when your society decides collectively that they prefer a system of civil torts to actual regulation.
Automotive manufacturing is held to a different standard. Not that what you’re saying doesn’t happen, just not on this level. Telsa bringing AliExpress levels of quality control and aftersales support is pretty far outside the norms of the modern automotive industry and shouldn’t be allowed to slide on that.
it would be disingenuous to compare a mature auto manufacturer with tesla. apples and rotten oranges
