It's fascinating that the Jobs Reality Distortion Field is alive and well in Tesla.
I don't own one, and each friend I ask tells me the same thing across S, 3, X, and Y: "Great tech! Amazing experience! I mean, sure, fit and finish is a problem, repairs take forever, hard to get parts, you just live with the smallish problems... Well, no, never had this many issues on <any other car brand> but this is the future I'm driving! I'll get even newer stuff in upgrades... Oh, the physical parts? That's a problem... But the savings! Of course, no gas payments! Well my power bill did increase, but it's gotta be cheaper than my gas."
Each person was initially effusive then, when pushed, realistic. Sloppy assembly, broken features, things that we would never accept in a usd$90K car from any other brand... Til Tesla both lowered and raised the bar, depending on your pov.
The power of Brand: the comfort with paying more for an item or service wirh equal or less quality than alternatives in general, but with one (or a small cluster of) perceived unique value prop. Amazing.
And even with all the evidence of the problems, I still want one too...
(A coda: the cutesy naming of tesla sort of sums it up around lots of flash, some amazing function, some tawdry qualities: the models sure are "s3xy".)
I hate Tesla fanboyism as much as the next person, but I bought a Model 3 as a midlife crisis car (joking, I think?) and it’s the best car I’ve ever driven. Probably most of this is the improved acceleration and handling of an electric car in general, meaning that it isn’t Tesla-specific — except that when I tried to buy another brand there was nothing comparable. But elements of the Tesla experience really are light years beyond and other car, electric or not: the supercharger network is ubiquitous and it “just works”. I can’t imagine buying another electric car and having to worry about where I’ll charge on longer trips. The UI and navigation makes other cars (including my friend’s newish BMW) look like a 2009-era Blackberry. Last week I scheduled a computer upgrade, and Tesla showed up at my house yesterday and did it in my driveway. Yes: the interior is more basic and probably it doesn’t have the excellent build quality of a BMW. But I wouldn’t trade back. In fact, I’m never buying another ICE car again, which means other brands had better get their act together and start shipping something that competes.
The TL;DR here is: people who rave about finish are like people who complained about the iPod based on storage capacity. Tesla really is doing something very right, and ignoring that based on the (very real) perception of fanboyism is cutting off your own nose.
Did you ever try a 45k$ sedan car before or are you comparing your tesla M3 to a couple years old Toyota Corolla? I also drove a tesla for a while and it didn't impress me. The acceleration is nice but it's not something you realistically care about in the long term (also acceleration kills your battery)
It seems pretty common that people compare Teslas with the car they had before. It's like comparing an entry dell laptop with a MacBook pro.
I think it's an immature car and most buyers are attracted to the brand appeal, and use it to appear next gen to their neighbors. As usual, no owner will recognize this but it's a well known phenomenon that manufacturers use against us.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a fanboy but I do recognize that there are some things on my MY that are not where I would like them to be. Regardless, the upsides of the car more than outweigh any downside I have experienced.
I feel like most people who say things like "Yea, it's nice, but what about all those problems?" would change their tune if they actually owned one. After the first test drive my view on other vehicles instantly changed to "How do people continue to drive those covered wagons?"
I traded my Prius for a used Fiat 500e, even trade, and it was the best decision I ever made about a car. I love my electric car, and hope to never own a gas-powered vehicle ever again! (After my wife's car eventually dies.)
Sure, for rare longer trips we have to take her car, but all of the benefits you mention for your Tesla are also true for my cheap, limited-range Fiat. The acceleration, the handling, it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever!
The iPod analogy is so perfect. Gotta love how it rhymes with the Jobs reality distortion critique while also striking at the heart of the argument. There is definitely a difference between the value generated by excellent attention to detail and that generated by sweeping an industry with transformative technological dislocations, and the impact of the latter can dominate that of the former.
These days, cars are generally scrapped at about 15 years.
Do you think Tesla has a commitment to that sort of longevity? People are always talking about theoretical reasons why electric cars should be more reliable. But if a Tesla is like a smartphone on wheels, who is using a smartphone from 2006?
It’s not the worst manufactured car I’ve ever owned but it’s not the best either. The service experience varies but doesn’t match the luxury brands. With as many as are on the road people regularly want to talk about my Model S like it’s a Ferrari or something. The rise in my electric bill is a fraction of my old fuel bill but I can’t say it justifies the cost. The model X is particularly ostentatious with its gull wing doors. A couple families at our children’s private school drop their children off in one. The cars get far more attention than the more expensive luxury cars in the drop off line.
So it’s purely an emotional purchase. Something car manufacturers have been using to their advantage for some time now.
It's the interior that does it for me. Model 3 is the one I find the least appealing. I doubt as many buyers would have accepted that if it was from another manufacturer at the same price point.
What kills it for me is that buying a Tesla means tethering yourself to the company for everything. Parts, service, functionality, analytics and telemetry. I don’t want to have a relationship with the manufacturer of the goods I buy—I just want to buy the thing and have the ability to use and fix it without them always up my ass.
I bought my Tesla with 335k of its 340k miles on it. A bit of an experiment.
Not one feature was broken except one USB port, which I was able fix myself. Headlights were replaced once before I bought it (HID, not LED) and the motor was replaced under warranty in its first year. I had the front sway bar link replaced because it made a little clunk. It still has the original brakes on the rear (which I'm about to replace, myself, they're readily available outside Tesla). This is a third year Model S, remember. They've come a long way since.
There are places where the fit of the carpeting could be better; looking at new Model 3s, all such fit and finish issues seem far ahead. Still, mine's better by and large than my 2006 Jeep.
There are plenty of Tesla owners that have problems with their cars, and Tesla's customer service experience varies widely between service centers. But to say that someone else has had more problems with their Tesla than any other brand is just an unlucky Tesla owner. Or one that has never owned an Audi or a Land Rover or a Jeep or a Cadillac or a Jaguar or a first-gen Kia or a lot of other cars.
That Tesla could even make any brand-new car, in America, in the 21st century, is miraculous. The fact that it is a revolutionary car only adds to what you call a distortion field.
(Edit: cutesy naming? It uses [until Model 3] an AC synchronous motor, invented by Nikola Tesla. It couldn't be a more appropriate name, imho.)
Maybe it's too obvious to point out, but Apple, in which Jobs pioneered the Reality Distortion Field, is now among the very most profitable companies in the world.
The term was originally used in either awe or derision depending on the person, but in that case it heralded exceptional success.
I find that when speaking about many cars here in Australia, some people are very strong on their opinion of their cars and brands. Where you will find someone trashing a particular car brand, then another person of the view that they've had little to no issues at all.
I suppose with the Tesla maybe it's the feeling of buying a little ticket of the future and as such you might feel okay with dealing with teething problems when it comes to a car brand that is trying to do better for the environment in a way that car brands snobbed off in the past.
For me, it's the exteriors. The Model S is my favorite looking Tesla that's currently in production, and that's because the proportions are right, and the front bumper isn't one giant expanse of plastic, but is instead broken up by a faux grille. The Model Y and X look like unattractive blobs with poor proportions (in fairness, all crossovers look like this), and the 3, X, and Y all have the front bumper that is just an ugly expanse of plastic that has no visual breakup.
Eh, Apple had profit from the start and was on the path to profit as long as Jobs was in charge. Selling regulatory credits to attain profitability isn't a sustainable business model, nor is it novel in the least.
There are dozens of reasons why Teslas are much better EV’s than competitors have come up with. Most owners (I probably know an order of magnitude more than you) are pretty clear eyed on some of the quality issues, service and especially the buying/delivery experience. Most (not all) owners I know like the mission of the company and really love their cars despite some of those issues.
To the issue at hand here, this is the eMMC endurance issue. Tesla should absolutely replace that for free since it is their software writing too much data that destroyed them.
> Their software now detects the issue before it occurs and adds a notification alerting the driver.
I've never seen this notification on my 2015 Model S, whose MCU (the center console display referred to here) has become increasingly unreliable over the past year. Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive. (its actually even worse than that now, as the car now gets stuck installing a firmware update every night and needs a reboot to get that bit working again)
I honestly can't tell if the issue is eMMC partial failure, corruption, or simply a lack of proper regression testing on Tesla's part. (After all, if all new cars use the new MCU2 then they probably don't care about my MCU1 car unless they have to.)
That being said, I personally care a bit more about long term reliability and responsiveness than being annoying and making them pay. So the moment I qualified for an upgrade to their newer MCU, I just went ahead and scheduled that. Sure, it actually costs me money, but in exchange I get a faster UI, better software support, and hopefully fewer issues. (I plan to keep the car for a while still, and MCU quirks are really my only complaint.)
> Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive
Holy. Shit. If this is true (I no reason to doubt you, yet at least), the market cap of Tesla makes even less sense. Who in their right mind would invest in a car company that can't even build a car that work half of the time you're using it? Especially since all controls are depending on the console as well.
As someone who believes that Tesla will come to strongly dominate this industry, I'm happy that the regulators in charge have done their job, and worry that conceding to this kind of pressure would lead to lax controls on automotive product lifetimes.
Sure, today, it's a generous 8 yr / 100k mile warranty voluntarily extended, but I can easily imagine a scenario where Tesla (or whoever else is large) has bean counters that figure out most of these parts will fail 2 years and a day from now, so throw 2 years as a cheap means to appease owners.
In fact, many auto manufacturers today (and historically) have not covered technical defects in electronics as well as they should, in my opinion. I would argue for greater regulatory enforcement on this front. "Bumper-to-bumper" is not the same as "bumper-to-bumper-but-not-the-silicon-bits", and it can be a meaningful and large difference in the total cost of ownership of a vehicle that is increasingly focused on "the-silicon-bits".
If this stays a purely proactive measure that adds to the Tesla experience, I'm all for it, but I really hope regulators continue to hold their ground without ceding to the industry pressure of "we'll self-regulate because we have the best data on individual component failures and can provide a better customer experience around it than recalls."
It's not like the regs and/or Tesla have fixed the discovered flaw in a new design, and will be replacing the old part with the newly designed part. In that case proactive recall would make sense.
But that's not the case here. Here if you've only used 0.5 of 8Gb, and Tesla is required to make a recall, all Tesla is doing is replacing your old unit with the exact same model but now 8Gb free space instead of 7.5Gb free.
Instead, if a new design is not developed, shouldn't it be treated like a recurring maintenance? like when the memory is 6 or 7Gb full, the user gets a warning to take it to the repair to have the unit replaced, or something.
Also why isn't the memory emptied from time to time? old data should be of no use and should be backed up to Tesla cloud, or user's cloud storage outside the vehicle or something? In which case the whole exercise is moot.
They’re replacing the chip (actually the daughterboard that hold the chip) with a much larger chip (32GB vs 8GB) and allocating half the chip for wear leveling.
This is the same fix a southern Cal company has been performing for a few years, at car owner’s cost.
They are not doing much in the way of preventive replacement, and their “predictive failure” notification is BS afaict. Maybe it’s new, but I’ve not yet seen it when my MCU starts acting up.
It’s currently a $500 non-warranty service, but they won’t do it until the chip fails.
The problem isn’t lack of capacity, it’s that Flash storage(of all kinds, from microSD to NVMe SSD) bears only so many write operations.
Reading is fine but reflashing takes away lifespan like what poisonous metals do to a person, they gets slower and slurred and eventually die.
It’s not a problem had their software been actually tested and finalized before shipping so the cars don’t have to download Chromium patches every few weeks. Tesla being Tesla do that and break cars.
Surely Tesla has reduced the log write frequency in updates after this was discovered.
My understanding is that the parts have decent endurance, it was just that a ton was being written there.
If that's true, replacing the hardware is a long term fix.
Edit: elsewhere in this thread points to 6000 cycle endurance, which means a best case of 42 TB lifetime writes, although write amplification will lower that.
That's enough for 6gb of logs a day over a 20 year lifetime which seems plenty.
Although that's also predicated on a controller that wear levels well.
I think the article uses "capacity" a bit confusingly; the NAND chip is not at its storage limit, it is at its write cycle limit. Presumably there are NAND chips with much higher limits that they swapped it for, as this doesn't affect units after 2018 (according to the article).
eMMC storage devices can provide a plethora of usage information to the eMMC controller such as read/write counters but also number of blocks of flash that have failed so far. After you hit a number of failed blocks the device could then send the notification to the user that failure is nearing. If you are curious this link expands a bit more on how this could work
https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents...
Turns out Automotive grade is a thing for a reason, and using best practices can be important even if you're an agile and new startup with a lot of hype.
> Elon Musk bragged that the Model S's 17 inch screen isn't automotive grade, but now Tesla and its customers are mired in "replacement hell."
"..a bizarre problem that was clearly caused by thermal issues..Tesla appeared to mostly fix this problem with its "cabin overheat protection" feature (which it sold as being to protect dogs and children, despite the fact that it held the temperature at +40C which is about the temperature where a child's organs will start shutting down)"
So they chose to intentionally reduce the car's range when parked in hot weather (e.g. a day hike in a forest where you need the range the most to return home) because they didn't get an automotive grade (Grade 2 instead of Grade 4) screen like every other auto manufacturer? wow..
Cabin overheat was never billed to protect children and dogs, as far as I know (besides Elon's tweet...). Plus, there's actual keep climate on features now that actually can keep it at whatever temperature you want. And you have the ability to turn it off completely if you want. I have to say, coming back to a car that is only 100F inside instead of 140F+ is great.
Does anyone know what happened with the faulty door handles? There was a lawsuit in 2019 but I couldn't find any updates since then.
Two separate accidents in 2018-2019, Model S crashed, fire started, owner (and passenger in the second case) survived the crash but couldn't get out of the car because the flush electronic door handles didn't unlock and present themselves out. The police officer on scene couldn't open it to get them out. Both cases everyone inside the car burnt to death [1][2][3].
In all modern cars, including the Model S [4] the doors are supposed to automatically unlock on a crash or airbag deployment. I haven't heard this happening on any other car (not that many cars use those flush door handles anyway).
The front window is made out of laminate glass so that it won't shatter on a heavy impact (or simply a stone chip) and spray the occupants in the face with glass fragments or shards. Even if you crack it, or manage to make a hole in it, it's pretty difficult to get through it, and certainly difficult to make a hole big enough for a person to fit through.
The side windows are made out of tempered glass, also known as safety glass, which when broken shatters into tiny pieces rather than large shards. However, it's really difficult to break. Blunt force often won't do it: you need quite a lot of force concentrated on a very small area. This is why glass breakers have quite sharp points and are often made of tungsten: it allows the to focus the force so that the glass will break on impact.
It's possible the officers involved simply didn't have anything suitable for breaking the glass, and very likely that the occupants didn't.
(Which reminds me: I've been meaning to put glass breakers in the door pockets of my car for ages. Must do that.)
That's what the lawsuit says. I couldn't find first-hand details of what the police officer put in the report, but there are several theories [1] and videos [2] showing it can be pretty difficult even with blunt object tools. The absence of available time due to the raging fire definitely couldn't have helped either.
This is great news for people who own an aging S or X. I have a 2017 Tesla and the screen started spazzing out on me a while back but I drive pretty often. I willfully purchased an upgrade that solved the problem as the new screen (MCU) doesn't have the same architecture that caused the failure. I'd be nice to be compensated for my willful upgrade but at least other people can stick it to Tesla.
I LOVE the car and will stick to it that it's the best car I've ever owned but it has its flaws and hopefully this recall teaches Tesla a lesson.
It’s mind-blowing to me that a 3-year car is considered aging.
Anecdote time: my parents bought a secondhand 93 Toyota Corolla that I inherited and drove until 2011. They continued using it until 2018, and got rid of it. It was still running. A few plastic internals had failed and the engine was rough, but still going. It easily had another 5ish years on it.
I have a 2004 Land Rover Discovery 3 with 220k miles on it, all of the systems in that car still work, even the ancient screen with all of its functions is still absolutely fine.
Teslas seem to be on the same path as smartphones - even if the original hardware doesn't get any slower as such, the experience gets worse and worse and worse with updates, to a point where a car that's less than 10 years old is now uncomfortable to use. It's a tragedy.
I owned a FIAT Punto for 13 years, did 250-300k kilometers with it and only replaced it because I had two kids and baby seats were a pain in the ass on a 3 doors model.
Still worked like a charm, and it wasn't a particularly fancy model or brand.
I hope GP just used "aging" meaning "not brand new", it would scare me deeply if we started replacing cars the way we do smartphones.
I have a twenty year old Honda and a six year old Toyota and both feel amazing. The Honda doesn't feel new, but it doesn't have any problems. All I have to do is change the oil.
It shouldn't be; depending on source, average length of new car ownership in the US seems to be somewhere in the 7-9 year range, and average length of car ownership (including cars bought used) seems to be ~4 years, and average car lifespan seems to be around 15 years. A car 3-4 years from new shouldn't be “aging”.
To keep the meme bubble Musk's created alive and justify the market cap as well as personal buying decisions, it is neccessary to create a conversation where a Tesla is always the default, the "normal".
Thus: A three year old car is "aging", the steering wheel falling off is no reason to complain [0] and buying a two-ton sportscar is the ultimate pro-environment move.
I'm afraid we have done long ago now. BMW estimates that 90% of buyers won't keep their car for longer than 3 years. They are rolling out a subscription model for features based on that fact - so you buy the car which has all the functions built-in from factory, but then pay an annual fee to unlock them. Fancy heated seats? You get a 7 day free trial, after that it's a paid unlock. Same with adaptive cruise control, adjustible suspension, sport driving modes, etc etc. Tesla might have pioneered this model but BMW is taking it all the way. And they have the gull to say it actually saves their customers money so it's a preferred option.
In the article it states that the memory is burned every time a car is booted up and put in drive, that means if you drive many times each day,it's going to burn up faster than if you say, drive from LA to Vegas once a month. This is according to the Feds research.
eMMC is fine if used appropriately. The problem appears to be that Tesla is (or was) writing frequent log file updates to eMMC, resulting in huge write amplification and a quick exhaustion of wear cycles.
If you buy in enough bulk, demand the emmc provider give you the source code and firmware update procedure for the emmc card. Get them to sign over rights to use that code to update cards you have purchased in the field.
There is no such thing as a failed emmc card - it's simply that the built in firmware has failed to correctly remap data around failing flash sectors. There is always life left in the actual flash provided you're happy to throw enough error correction at it.
My motorbike is required to have the essential warning and information lights in a separate independent panel to the LCD screen. Whereas my Audi e-tron, and presumably the Telsa, doesn't seem to have this requirement, with the regular warning lights on the main screen.
Readit News
I don't own one, and each friend I ask tells me the same thing across S, 3, X, and Y: "Great tech! Amazing experience! I mean, sure, fit and finish is a problem, repairs take forever, hard to get parts, you just live with the smallish problems... Well, no, never had this many issues on <any other car brand> but this is the future I'm driving! I'll get even newer stuff in upgrades... Oh, the physical parts? That's a problem... But the savings! Of course, no gas payments! Well my power bill did increase, but it's gotta be cheaper than my gas."
Each person was initially effusive then, when pushed, realistic. Sloppy assembly, broken features, things that we would never accept in a usd$90K car from any other brand... Til Tesla both lowered and raised the bar, depending on your pov.
The power of Brand: the comfort with paying more for an item or service wirh equal or less quality than alternatives in general, but with one (or a small cluster of) perceived unique value prop. Amazing.
And even with all the evidence of the problems, I still want one too...
(A coda: the cutesy naming of tesla sort of sums it up around lots of flash, some amazing function, some tawdry qualities: the models sure are "s3xy".)
The TL;DR here is: people who rave about finish are like people who complained about the iPod based on storage capacity. Tesla really is doing something very right, and ignoring that based on the (very real) perception of fanboyism is cutting off your own nose.
It seems pretty common that people compare Teslas with the car they had before. It's like comparing an entry dell laptop with a MacBook pro.
I think it's an immature car and most buyers are attracted to the brand appeal, and use it to appear next gen to their neighbors. As usual, no owner will recognize this but it's a well known phenomenon that manufacturers use against us.
I feel like most people who say things like "Yea, it's nice, but what about all those problems?" would change their tune if they actually owned one. After the first test drive my view on other vehicles instantly changed to "How do people continue to drive those covered wagons?"
Sure, for rare longer trips we have to take her car, but all of the benefits you mention for your Tesla are also true for my cheap, limited-range Fiat. The acceleration, the handling, it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever!
Do you think Tesla has a commitment to that sort of longevity? People are always talking about theoretical reasons why electric cars should be more reliable. But if a Tesla is like a smartphone on wheels, who is using a smartphone from 2006?
1. The driving experience (fast acceleration)
2. It’s different and unique
3. Owning one seems to have cachet
It’s not the worst manufactured car I’ve ever owned but it’s not the best either. The service experience varies but doesn’t match the luxury brands. With as many as are on the road people regularly want to talk about my Model S like it’s a Ferrari or something. The rise in my electric bill is a fraction of my old fuel bill but I can’t say it justifies the cost. The model X is particularly ostentatious with its gull wing doors. A couple families at our children’s private school drop their children off in one. The cars get far more attention than the more expensive luxury cars in the drop off line.
So it’s purely an emotional purchase. Something car manufacturers have been using to their advantage for some time now.
Sometimes I think that owning a Tesla would be neat, but I always manage to kill that voice in my head by looking up the prices. Works every time.
https://insideevs.com/news/447593/tesla-suspension-issues-ow...
Not one feature was broken except one USB port, which I was able fix myself. Headlights were replaced once before I bought it (HID, not LED) and the motor was replaced under warranty in its first year. I had the front sway bar link replaced because it made a little clunk. It still has the original brakes on the rear (which I'm about to replace, myself, they're readily available outside Tesla). This is a third year Model S, remember. They've come a long way since.
There are places where the fit of the carpeting could be better; looking at new Model 3s, all such fit and finish issues seem far ahead. Still, mine's better by and large than my 2006 Jeep.
There are plenty of Tesla owners that have problems with their cars, and Tesla's customer service experience varies widely between service centers. But to say that someone else has had more problems with their Tesla than any other brand is just an unlucky Tesla owner. Or one that has never owned an Audi or a Land Rover or a Jeep or a Cadillac or a Jaguar or a first-gen Kia or a lot of other cars.
That Tesla could even make any brand-new car, in America, in the 21st century, is miraculous. The fact that it is a revolutionary car only adds to what you call a distortion field.
(Edit: cutesy naming? It uses [until Model 3] an AC synchronous motor, invented by Nikola Tesla. It couldn't be a more appropriate name, imho.)
The term was originally used in either awe or derision depending on the person, but in that case it heralded exceptional success.
I suppose with the Tesla maybe it's the feeling of buying a little ticket of the future and as such you might feel okay with dealing with teething problems when it comes to a car brand that is trying to do better for the environment in a way that car brands snobbed off in the past.
There are dozens of reasons why Teslas are much better EV’s than competitors have come up with. Most owners (I probably know an order of magnitude more than you) are pretty clear eyed on some of the quality issues, service and especially the buying/delivery experience. Most (not all) owners I know like the mission of the company and really love their cars despite some of those issues.
To the issue at hand here, this is the eMMC endurance issue. Tesla should absolutely replace that for free since it is their software writing too much data that destroyed them.
Their software now detects the issue before it occurs and adds a notification alerting the driver. [2]
I assume the difference with a recall is there’s no limit to the age of the car, and it would have to be done proactively on all vehicles.
Currently 15% of vehicles have had this issue according to Tesla.
[1] - https://www.tesla.com/support/warranty-adjustment-program
[2] - https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/attachments/96f386d3-2a95-49...
I've never seen this notification on my 2015 Model S, whose MCU (the center console display referred to here) has become increasingly unreliable over the past year. Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive. (its actually even worse than that now, as the car now gets stuck installing a firmware update every night and needs a reboot to get that bit working again)
I honestly can't tell if the issue is eMMC partial failure, corruption, or simply a lack of proper regression testing on Tesla's part. (After all, if all new cars use the new MCU2 then they probably don't care about my MCU1 car unless they have to.)
That being said, I personally care a bit more about long term reliability and responsiveness than being annoying and making them pay. So the moment I qualified for an upgrade to their newer MCU, I just went ahead and scheduled that. Sure, it actually costs me money, but in exchange I get a faster UI, better software support, and hopefully fewer issues. (I plan to keep the car for a while still, and MCU quirks are really my only complaint.)
Holy. Shit. If this is true (I no reason to doubt you, yet at least), the market cap of Tesla makes even less sense. Who in their right mind would invest in a car company that can't even build a car that work half of the time you're using it? Especially since all controls are depending on the console as well.
Sure, today, it's a generous 8 yr / 100k mile warranty voluntarily extended, but I can easily imagine a scenario where Tesla (or whoever else is large) has bean counters that figure out most of these parts will fail 2 years and a day from now, so throw 2 years as a cheap means to appease owners.
In fact, many auto manufacturers today (and historically) have not covered technical defects in electronics as well as they should, in my opinion. I would argue for greater regulatory enforcement on this front. "Bumper-to-bumper" is not the same as "bumper-to-bumper-but-not-the-silicon-bits", and it can be a meaningful and large difference in the total cost of ownership of a vehicle that is increasingly focused on "the-silicon-bits".
If this stays a purely proactive measure that adds to the Tesla experience, I'm all for it, but I really hope regulators continue to hold their ground without ceding to the industry pressure of "we'll self-regulate because we have the best data on individual component failures and can provide a better customer experience around it than recalls."
It's not like the regs and/or Tesla have fixed the discovered flaw in a new design, and will be replacing the old part with the newly designed part. In that case proactive recall would make sense.
But that's not the case here. Here if you've only used 0.5 of 8Gb, and Tesla is required to make a recall, all Tesla is doing is replacing your old unit with the exact same model but now 8Gb free space instead of 7.5Gb free.
Instead, if a new design is not developed, shouldn't it be treated like a recurring maintenance? like when the memory is 6 or 7Gb full, the user gets a warning to take it to the repair to have the unit replaced, or something.
Also why isn't the memory emptied from time to time? old data should be of no use and should be backed up to Tesla cloud, or user's cloud storage outside the vehicle or something? In which case the whole exercise is moot.
This is the same fix a southern Cal company has been performing for a few years, at car owner’s cost.
They are not doing much in the way of preventive replacement, and their “predictive failure” notification is BS afaict. Maybe it’s new, but I’ve not yet seen it when my MCU starts acting up.
It’s currently a $500 non-warranty service, but they won’t do it until the chip fails.
Ask me how I know.
Edit: mem sizes
The problem isn’t lack of capacity, it’s that Flash storage(of all kinds, from microSD to NVMe SSD) bears only so many write operations.
Reading is fine but reflashing takes away lifespan like what poisonous metals do to a person, they gets slower and slurred and eventually die.
It’s not a problem had their software been actually tested and finalized before shipping so the cars don’t have to download Chromium patches every few weeks. Tesla being Tesla do that and break cars.
My understanding is that the parts have decent endurance, it was just that a ton was being written there.
If that's true, replacing the hardware is a long term fix.
Edit: elsewhere in this thread points to 6000 cycle endurance, which means a best case of 42 TB lifetime writes, although write amplification will lower that.
That's enough for 6gb of logs a day over a 20 year lifetime which seems plenty.
Although that's also predicated on a controller that wear levels well.
One complication is that there were various reasons to upgrade, not just eMMC failure.
15% is a HUGE recall.
> Elon Musk bragged that the Model S's 17 inch screen isn't automotive grade, but now Tesla and its customers are mired in "replacement hell."
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
So they chose to intentionally reduce the car's range when parked in hot weather (e.g. a day hike in a forest where you need the range the most to return home) because they didn't get an automotive grade (Grade 2 instead of Grade 4) screen like every other auto manufacturer? wow..
Two separate accidents in 2018-2019, Model S crashed, fire started, owner (and passenger in the second case) survived the crash but couldn't get out of the car because the flush electronic door handles didn't unlock and present themselves out. The police officer on scene couldn't open it to get them out. Both cases everyone inside the car burnt to death [1][2][3].
In all modern cars, including the Model S [4] the doors are supposed to automatically unlock on a crash or airbag deployment. I haven't heard this happening on any other car (not that many cars use those flush door handles anyway).
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29576096/tesla-model-s-la...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3CJuX8QdjM
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetR1QHzHrM
[4] Page 26 at https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2016_Mod...
The front window is made out of laminate glass so that it won't shatter on a heavy impact (or simply a stone chip) and spray the occupants in the face with glass fragments or shards. Even if you crack it, or manage to make a hole in it, it's pretty difficult to get through it, and certainly difficult to make a hole big enough for a person to fit through.
The side windows are made out of tempered glass, also known as safety glass, which when broken shatters into tiny pieces rather than large shards. However, it's really difficult to break. Blunt force often won't do it: you need quite a lot of force concentrated on a very small area. This is why glass breakers have quite sharp points and are often made of tungsten: it allows the to focus the force so that the glass will break on impact.
It's possible the officers involved simply didn't have anything suitable for breaking the glass, and very likely that the occupants didn't.
(Which reminds me: I've been meaning to put glass breakers in the door pockets of my car for ages. Must do that.)
[1] https://virginiatech.sportswar.com/mid/12654629/board/vtloun...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0AlomPlAY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7cANvD0CRE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU9xj-I1kMA
etc etc
I LOVE the car and will stick to it that it's the best car I've ever owned but it has its flaws and hopefully this recall teaches Tesla a lesson.
Anecdote time: my parents bought a secondhand 93 Toyota Corolla that I inherited and drove until 2011. They continued using it until 2018, and got rid of it. It was still running. A few plastic internals had failed and the engine was rough, but still going. It easily had another 5ish years on it.
Teslas seem to be on the same path as smartphones - even if the original hardware doesn't get any slower as such, the experience gets worse and worse and worse with updates, to a point where a car that's less than 10 years old is now uncomfortable to use. It's a tragedy.
Still worked like a charm, and it wasn't a particularly fancy model or brand.
I hope GP just used "aging" meaning "not brand new", it would scare me deeply if we started replacing cars the way we do smartphones.
27/83 = .33
3/17 = .18
Yes, the math checks out. The 2017 model is only 18% of the age of tesla motors, while the corolla was 33% of the age of Toyota.
How is a three year old car aging?
I have a twenty year old Honda and a six year old Toyota and both feel amazing. The Honda doesn't feel new, but it doesn't have any problems. All I have to do is change the oil.
Are we switching to a disposable car model now?
It shouldn't be; depending on source, average length of new car ownership in the US seems to be somewhere in the 7-9 year range, and average length of car ownership (including cars bought used) seems to be ~4 years, and average car lifespan seems to be around 15 years. A car 3-4 years from new shouldn't be “aging”.
To keep the meme bubble Musk's created alive and justify the market cap as well as personal buying decisions, it is neccessary to create a conversation where a Tesla is always the default, the "normal".
Thus: A three year old car is "aging", the steering wheel falling off is no reason to complain [0] and buying a two-ton sportscar is the ultimate pro-environment move.
[0] https://preview.redd.it/canfcfr00tw41.jpg?width=551&auto=web...
I'm afraid we have done long ago now. BMW estimates that 90% of buyers won't keep their car for longer than 3 years. They are rolling out a subscription model for features based on that fact - so you buy the car which has all the functions built-in from factory, but then pay an annual fee to unlock them. Fancy heated seats? You get a 7 day free trial, after that it's a paid unlock. Same with adaptive cruise control, adjustible suspension, sport driving modes, etc etc. Tesla might have pioneered this model but BMW is taking it all the way. And they have the gull to say it actually saves their customers money so it's a preferred option.
That's exactly what this recall is meant to address: that the eMMC is aging faster than what is reasonable.
Deleted Comment
How many miles does the car have?
The screen isn't a mechanical part. That's the equivalent of someone trying to justify their radio failing because they drive a lot.
Sorry if my statement wasn't clear.
There is no such thing as a failed emmc card - it's simply that the built in firmware has failed to correctly remap data around failing flash sectors. There is always life left in the actual flash provided you're happy to throw enough error correction at it.
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INRM-EA20003-11321.pdf
CNBC provided the link and they're saying Reuters broke the original story.