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.
Thomas Edison wishes he could have been this successful in ruining the name of Nikola Tesla.
I remember looking this up awhile ago but there doesn’t seem to any animosity between the two. This misunderstanding seems to have started from a decades later biography on Tesla that assumed that an unnamed manger Tesla mentioned in his autobiography was Edison. This unnamed manger seems to have hated Tesla but it couldn’t be Edison because during this time period Edison was grieving the death of this wife so he was spending less time at his company and his position was wrong. Also, the dramatization of the current wars seems to have also contributed to this misunderstanding when ultimately it was just two companies, Edison and Westinghouse, competing over a standard. It didn’t really last that long and certain events were also misattributed to the current wars like the electrocutions of Topsy the Elephant. When that event happened about 10 years after the current wars ended. It involved with an animal rights organization that thought hanging Topsy was inhumane way to kill him so they thought electrocution would be the more humane way.
Why kill an elephant in the first place?
Funny enough Defunctland talked about Topsy in his Coney Island episode. Pretty much the new owner, after doing an expensive renovation, couldn’t afford Topsy and probably had trouble selling Topsy because of controversy of the elephant killing a spectator in the past.
RIP Topsy
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.
leadership considers such wise long term investments to be costs on their quarterly forecasts, the benefits of which they wouldnt be personally rewarded for anyway. its a fundamental flaw of modern capitalism.
Tesla is a stock manipulation company first and a car company second.
its a fundamental flaw of modern capitalism
I disagree. It’s a fundamental flaw of the people running Tesla. They’re not going to get away with this - there will be lawsuits and serious consequences which could easily have been avoided while still making both short term and long term profits.
I wouldn’t hold my breath that they are going to be held accountable. That doesn’t usually happen for large companies.
Class action lawsuit! Take Elons wealth by sinking the stock due to a massive class action lawsuit against unregulated and untested software in cars.
The listed failures aren’t software based…
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.
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
I think you mean when a company has absolutely every intention to fight any extra expense that might occur from warranties or recalls.
i think i mean that tesla as a company isnt actually setup to manage, end-to-end, vehicle lifespan or support. so adding to that… quality control is practically non-existent and their engineering is obviously lacking.
the company is in a full scale free fall as their products age out and no one seems to be noticing.
they will lose all market share 'cept righteous conservatives, and someone will buy the failing brand for recognition and patents. its inevitable.
Maybe thay change to a software as a service company, lol
I now and then check Tesla share prices after that kind of bad news - and to my amazement it just keeps going up.
That they’re not really good at the car building part has been well known for quite a while - and by now it should be blatantly obvious even for people not doing software stuff for a living that they’re also not stellar at the software thing (which I assume their valuation is mainly based on, as it doesn’t make much sense). They are better at least with the infotainment software than established car makers - but given how those suck at it that’s really not hard.
I don’t really see them spreading too much in the EU currently - they’re currently trying very hard to piss off the Nordics, and I’d expect to see regulation eventually prohibiting new cards with touch only controls. It already is treated like a mobile device by law here - so touching any settings on your Teslas touch screen while driving can be very expensive, up to a temporary loss of license. Also having an accident while touching the screen will shift more of the blame to you.
To sum up your comment in one word: capitalism.
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
I’ll take “Things I don’t have to worry about with my Subaru” for $600, Alex.
Terrible. Appalling. Disgraceful. Clearly their engineers are stupid and their quality is sh!t.
I’ve never liked nor trusted electric cars and this is yet another reason not to like them. I never want to have an electric car.
Also, people should sue. Long standing manufacturers make sure their engineering and parts are of the required quality because they don’t want to get sued. Tesla needs to learn their lesson by having their pockets emptied, fraud exposed and fines levied.
Maybe then they’ll start to take it seriously.
I appreciate our 20+ year old Toyota Corolla even more now. 20+ years and no issues.
There are electric cars that aren’t made by grifters and that don’t lose their wheels though.
Like none of these failures are inherent to electric cars, just to cheaply made cars with no quality control.This has nothing to do with electric cars and more to do with Tesla just being shit at building cars in general
I’m totally on board with having an EV, so long as it’s from an actual auto maker and not a pump & dump scheme disguised as a tech company
