A good friend ordered a new Model S in 2015. It arrived with a "squeak" that turned out to be due to missing welds in structural components of the chassis. They wanted him to sign an NDA to get a replacement vehicle (which he refused to do, both on principle, and because he'd talked to friends about it already). So he was forced to keep his vehicle, which was then repaired under warranty for what they initially said was not a warrantable defect. To quote him "They took a huge proponent and turned them into someone who will never, ever, recommend them"
And this is how they treated their early adopters that were paying $100K in 2015 for their higher end cars.
I had a few very smart friends who were very successful in business at a young age. They all sort of celebrated having made it by buying high-end Audi’s when they were the hot luxury cars in the mid-2000’s.
The cars weren’t very reliable (even dumb shit like the electric windows would break) and the repairs were notably more expensive than they should have been. One of them explained that he finally understood that someone willing to pay triple the price of a standard car can be charged triple for repairs too.
He sold the luxury car and bought a Prius and said it was 100x better just because of how reliable it was, and it had the same bells and whistles anyway.
Who's to stop the victim from recording evidence, accepting the replacement car, and submitting said evidence anonymously to the media and / or consumer protection and / or the car safety institutions?
It would be a weird play for anyone to sign such a thing. Most states in the U.S. have lemon laws that prevent maufacturers from selling such vehicles. A manufacturer only gets a certain number of attempts at repairs (usually 3 for new cars) on new vehicles or a limited time frame to fix them before they must offer a full replacement.
This is exactly why NDA's are enforceable. If you sign one, you can not break it without risking litigation. In Tesla's case, they totally would. You can't share any information that is called out in the NDA. This would probably include video, recordings, messages, media, any and all online posts referring to the incident and future discussions of the incident. Whatever is specifically called out in the NDA as far as terms, timeframe, etc. There are some NDA's that are for life.
Your friend was a fool to not take the new vehicle (removing his financial burden) and then just do whatever he wanted with the info...
Granted, I'd lease a Hyundai before ever considering buying a Tesla. It's too bad bc I like the tech, but lack of ownership, software telemetry and shoddy service is a deal breaker.
Yeah shoddy service that is. A colleague has model S, in Switzerland, when going for some service checks they kept him there, in the middle of nowhere without any good public transport for half a day without any warning during work day, he was furious.
Every single crappy dealer/official service here will give you a replacement car to not mess up your life for just stupid car checks, whatever basic car is fine. Tesla no, fuck off we don't care, wait.
> The Tesla Files episode revealed that the BEV maker instructs its technicians always to provide feedback orally. Internal documents obtained by Handelsblatt stated: "Do not copy the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer."
I don't know how serious a crack in the front casting on a Tesla is, but this kind of policy is pretty egregious.
That kind of policy should mean that in any court case where a customer's version of events/conversations differs from Tesla's, the customer is assumed to be telling the truth until definitely proven otherwise. The legal liability of this policy should be so great that no sane company would have this policy over just creating a paper trail in the first place.
In previous employment (as a software engineer), I've been told to do this too - mainly around inventions we were trying to patent. The reason is slightly less nefarious than you might think - for example, someone might casually say that some aspect of their patent is "obvious" but they're saying that as an expert in their field who may have spent months or years thinking about the problem and alternative solutions. However, if it came to court, "even the inventor said this was obvious" is a pretty hard thing to respond to.
If it is legal where you live, you might want to get in the habit of secretly recording business dealings. I always have a recorder in my pocket when dealing with more than a few hundred dollars.
This looks to me like a "cold shut", which is a type of casting defect.
"Cold shuts occur when two relatively cold streams of molten metal from different gates meet and do not fuse together properly during the casting process. This problem is visible to the naked eye – giving the appearance of a crack separating the two sections."
I think it’s safe to say cracks in a structural member are always bad. I think the point the OP is making is that it looks like a manufacturing defect not the result of a crash.
New delivery buyer is digging around under the hood to confirm their brake fluid reservoir cap is in place, as there had been recent reports of missing caps.
Finds the cap is good, but that the cars frame is cracked instead.
This is a slam-dunk for the typical American lemon law.
The owner of the car should go out and find a lemon law lawyer. When I had to work with one I didn't have to pay a thing.
(I had a Subaru where the GPS / Stereo would reboot while I drove and loose its settings. After a bunch of replacements, the car still had the problem. I had to catch it on video, though. Subaru ended up declaring the car a lemon after trying to fix it multiple times.)
FWIW: I own two Teslas and their service is horrible. Every time I take it in, they never put the car back together and I have to take it back.
Genuinely curious; why did you buy the second one? I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands, but once a brand fails me I’m very reluctant to buy something else from them (a Samsung TV with some silly quality control and firmware issues was enough to make me swear off Samsung, and the Nexus 7 (original one; the one that tended to degrade after about a year) was enough to convince me never to buy hardware from Google again, say). In particular, I would never buy the _same thing_ (most current Tesla cars are ~the same thing) from a company where I’d already bought one defective thing.
Ironic fact: The Nexus 7 and the original Tesla Model S share the exact same flaw: They both used a Tegra 3 SOC with memory that would effectively fail in shorter-than-normal time. The outcome is that the system would get slower or in the Tesla's case, crash.
I’m shopping for anything EV other than a Tesla now. There are many options now, but Tesla is still way ahead with the power train. Most competitors aren’t at the same place on range & performance yet.
It’s an amazing power train glued inside a 90s-era Oldsmobile.
Being "in the market" it wasn't until thr new crop of Hyundai EVs came out that there was anything approaching the Tesla in the car-design feature set. Sure you could buy a Prius, but I always felt like the Prius was designed to be ugly and awkward to drive specifically so it wouldn't hurt Toyotas billions of dollars of ICE sales.
Because I needed a 3-row vehicle, I refuse to buy anything that runs on gasoline, and the Supercharger network is the only viable high speed charging network in the US.
I didn't know the Nexus 7 had issues I had mine for almost 10y and just gave it away to someone it is still working and the battery too (albeit not really long anymore).
I had to go in for a recall on the charging port, and when I came back home the car wouldn't charge because they connected something incorrectly.
When I went back to get the car fixed, they left a bunch of wires disconnected under the back seat.
A few weeks ago I had to go in for a problem with the driver's seat belt. They didn't re-attach the panel with the switches for the power seat correctly, so now it keeps falling off.
Us too! They fixed a door handle and now the interior door panel falls off. They fixed a flash storage issue with the touchscreen and now it leaks some kind of sticky sealant everywhere. I’m scared to have them address anything.
You knew the manufacturer had a reputation of forgetting hard to check parts... and you still bought one.
What else could it be missing that you can't practically check for?
Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality. I feel like they're going a bit overboard on that factor though.
>The electric SUV owner told me he still prefers that I use only his initials and his other nickname (Cracked_Tesla) because he wants to give another Tesla Service Center a chance to do the right thing.
The owner received a car with cracked structural components and is still going to give them another chance. I could understanding asking to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation or public scrutiny, but not whatever this is.
Cracked_Tesla, if you're listening, the correct response is to demand a complete refund or replacement. If refused, take legal action. This could be an ordinary lawsuit in civil court or a complaint filed under the local lemon laws. You are owed tens of thousands of dollars, so hire a lawyer. And then spread the story far and wide, naming the particular Tesla employees involved, because these people tried to kill you.
Unfortunately when people are so emotionally involved with something be it a CEO, a brand or a religious group they will go through all kind of brain gymnastics to not really blame them. Look at the child abuse in the catholic church (and all the others that are just barely starting to be known), their congregants protected the priests too and found all kind of excuses.
For what it's worth we've wanted to own a Tesla for a long time to own an EV. The overpriced nature and all the terrible things I've read about the build quality continually shied me away from actually spending money or even leasing one.
That is until I just so happened to make a little extra money on TSLA stock by accident. I then turned around and found a salvage title, dirt cheap, home wall-charger included 2018 Model 3 and sold off some that TSLA profit for a free car for my wife. We've owned it long enough to confirm all "the build quality is crap" rumors. I'm a mechanically inclined person and I'm not idiot so I have taken the car apart enough to verify it is safe and it isn't dangerous (salvage title, total loss vehicle) but once you start taking things apart you see the corners they've cut where other car manufacturers do it differently - things like water drainage and body panels alignment is just too easy to spot if you've owned 15 cars over 30 years.
Long story short, I wouldn't buy a new one. I certainly wouldn't spent my _hard earned_ money on one. But I don't mind gambling a bit on a rebuilt title mass-produced one. That's about the level of trust I have in Elon's ability to build a quality automobile.
They are ok cars but everything you've heard about build quality and defects is absolutely true. I've never attempted to use the autopilot because I value my life.
Former colleague of mine was Tesla from day 1. Started an online journal of the life of his car. It's stuff like "well this car is great but this year I spent a huge amount of money because A, B, C broke and wasn't covered under warranty". As time goes on the journal just gets worse & worse. Can't help but laugh and be reminded by the family guy episode where they see a Tesla driving itself while the driver's busy sucking his own dick.
People are weird about nearly all car companies... Tesla hits some other nerves and feels with electricifaction and being a new "American company" but it's the same as most other car companies. There are crappy car companies out there and there are people that will buy their cars.
It's a status/whatever symbol, build quality doesn't really matter. I've a friend that drives a Model 3 and said "it's just like driving a BMW" and of course he has never driven a BMW.
Anyone who has so much as sat in a mid to top tier car from BMW/Mercedes/etc will instantly come away with an overwhelming sense that a Tesla feels cheap by comparison (because it does). Classic things like the sound and feel of closing a door, gripping a steering wheel, pushing a button, etc.
If you pay attention to detail this can often be experienced from the car externally - famous cases of Tesla tending to have poor tolerances and high variability in things like panel gap, etc.
> You knew the manufacturer had a reputation of forgetting hard to check parts... and you still bought one.
Sometimes, you have to make tradeoffs. You may want a Tesla for a variety of reasons, and the reputation for unreliability is not enough to tip the scale for another maker. With that in mind, buying the Tesla and thoroughly checking for known issues may be the most rational thing to do.
>You knew the manufacturer had a reputation of forgetting hard to check parts... and you still bought one.
Yeah but the company is run by a hip cool memelord who's gonna get us to mars, and his cars have nice softwares like my iPad. Who cares about the metal parts of the car's rigidity structure? That's just something old boring people think about. Everyone knows EVs are more reliable than ICE so no need to ever look under the hood. $TSLA to the moon! /s
>Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality.
The shit build quality has less to do with being American, and more to do with Tesla chasing higher margins, high margins which in part come from cutting a lot of corners in places where customers aren't looking for, which in a tracic-comedy way is what most American auto-makers did to get to their shit-build quality reputation.
To be fair, many brands have QA issues all the time, but that one from the article is so big and obvious it should never have made it passed inspection.
> The shit build quality has less to do with being American
I'm not suggesting they're shit because they're American. I'm just saying it's nice to see them living up to the existing standard of shitness set by the existing American manufacturers.
I'm sure each American car manufacturer has their own unique and interesting reasons for having reliably shit build quality compared to European or Japanese manufacturers.
Got a friend working for tesla after-sales service in Europa and he claims the Chinese-made Teslas are better quality than the ones that are American-made
If this vehicle were truly unsafe to drive (according to US safety standards), what legal recourse would an individual consumer have to have this fixed?
Unless the user gets in an accident, is there a way to actually prove the frame is structurally defective?
Tesla's service center might be willing to say "within spec!" but I suspect they'll have a much harder time finding an engineer willing to put their license on the line in court.
Lawyers prove things in court for a living. They wouldn't have any trouble proving the frame being cracked nearly in half is a defect.
It probably wouldn't get to court, though. The government deals with lemons all the time. Every state has ways to get lemon buyers relief quickly and at minimal expense.
Pretty sure the onus is on the manufacturer to produce cars in a repeatable fashion such that crash test samples are representative. If they can't make the cars consistently they shouldn't be making cars.
Ah, more confirmation (bias) making me doubt the wisdom of ever buying a Tesla in the future.
I had a Model 3 LR as a company car and really liked it - even being fine with most of the usual concerns or dislikes people share. I even like the brand (although I dislike most of Musk's other shenanigans over the past few years).
I've since given the car back and am considering purchasing a BEV in the future. I've obviously been considering another Tesla, but my single (small) negative experience with their customer service, plus myriad stories online (including this one) make it a total lottery: you must cross your fingers that your car is perfectly reliable, else be launched into a world of potential frustration and difficulty (not to mention potentially huge cost, if not warrantied) gettings things fixed.
That lottery extends to every other car maker/dealer. Lemon laws existed before Tesla for a reason. Dealerships put a bitter taste in peoples mouths for a reason.
I agree. However, with most other manufacturers there are options beyond the dealerships. In contrast, Tesla is notable for the lack of spare parts available to the public (making DIY repairs difficult) and a relative lack of third-party specialist garages.
After I realized the Base M3 was just the M3LR with a software locked battery, that settled it. So if you buy a base M3 you're just hauling around 20-30% of that battery weight for literally no reason.
Readit News
A good friend ordered a new Model S in 2015. It arrived with a "squeak" that turned out to be due to missing welds in structural components of the chassis. They wanted him to sign an NDA to get a replacement vehicle (which he refused to do, both on principle, and because he'd talked to friends about it already). So he was forced to keep his vehicle, which was then repaired under warranty for what they initially said was not a warrantable defect. To quote him "They took a huge proponent and turned them into someone who will never, ever, recommend them"
And this is how they treated their early adopters that were paying $100K in 2015 for their higher end cars.
$15k for a refurbished battery from another old broken car. Once fixed, the cars resell value is at about $20k.
And they took my battery back to sell to someone else for $15k.
Definitely feel like a HUGE sucker for supporting them. This thing was $101k new.
The cars weren’t very reliable (even dumb shit like the electric windows would break) and the repairs were notably more expensive than they should have been. One of them explained that he finally understood that someone willing to pay triple the price of a standard car can be charged triple for repairs too.
He sold the luxury car and bought a Prius and said it was 100x better just because of how reliable it was, and it had the same bells and whistles anyway.
Are NDAs like that actually enforceable?
And yet it didn't stop anyone from buying Teslas... It's almost as if they knew they could get away with murder.
Instead I waited for companies that actually know how to make cars to work out how to make electric cars.
most have warranty laws, too.
Dead Comment
Granted, I'd lease a Hyundai before ever considering buying a Tesla. It's too bad bc I like the tech, but lack of ownership, software telemetry and shoddy service is a deal breaker.
Thus creating a whole new financial burden.
Every single crappy dealer/official service here will give you a replacement car to not mess up your life for just stupid car checks, whatever basic car is fine. Tesla no, fuck off we don't care, wait.
I don't know how serious a crack in the front casting on a Tesla is, but this kind of policy is pretty egregious.
I don't think Tesla would do this unless management consider it very serious.
I said it before, musk himself is a big con, so I am not shocked that’s a policy in there.
"Cold shuts occur when two relatively cold streams of molten metal from different gates meet and do not fuse together properly during the casting process. This problem is visible to the naked eye – giving the appearance of a crack separating the two sections."
https://www.haworthcastings.co.uk/news/the-differences-betwe...
Cracks caused by impact have sharp edges and cracks caused by cold shuts have more rounded or sandy looking edges.
The importance of the distinction here is that Tesla can't argue the customer caused this...a cold shut can only happen at casting time.
New delivery buyer is digging around under the hood to confirm their brake fluid reservoir cap is in place, as there had been recent reports of missing caps.
Finds the cap is good, but that the cars frame is cracked instead.
The owner of the car should go out and find a lemon law lawyer. When I had to work with one I didn't have to pay a thing.
(I had a Subaru where the GPS / Stereo would reboot while I drove and loose its settings. After a bunch of replacements, the car still had the problem. I had to catch it on video, though. Subaru ended up declaring the car a lemon after trying to fix it multiple times.)
FWIW: I own two Teslas and their service is horrible. Every time I take it in, they never put the car back together and I have to take it back.
Genuinely curious; why did you buy the second one? I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands, but once a brand fails me I’m very reluctant to buy something else from them (a Samsung TV with some silly quality control and firmware issues was enough to make me swear off Samsung, and the Nexus 7 (original one; the one that tended to degrade after about a year) was enough to convince me never to buy hardware from Google again, say). In particular, I would never buy the _same thing_ (most current Tesla cars are ~the same thing) from a company where I’d already bought one defective thing.
It’s an amazing power train glued inside a 90s-era Oldsmobile.
At your rate, you might run out of brands to buy from ;-)
What does that mean? The car is in 5 pieces? Take it back unfixed? What do you do then to fix it?
When I went back to get the car fixed, they left a bunch of wires disconnected under the back seat.
A few weeks ago I had to go in for a problem with the driver's seat belt. They didn't re-attach the panel with the switches for the power seat correctly, so now it keeps falling off.
I had this same problem and it was solved with a firmware update. I wonder if that came later?
Dead Comment
You knew the manufacturer had a reputation of forgetting hard to check parts... and you still bought one.
What else could it be missing that you can't practically check for?
Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality. I feel like they're going a bit overboard on that factor though.
The owner received a car with cracked structural components and is still going to give them another chance. I could understanding asking to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation or public scrutiny, but not whatever this is.
Cracked_Tesla, if you're listening, the correct response is to demand a complete refund or replacement. If refused, take legal action. This could be an ordinary lawsuit in civil court or a complaint filed under the local lemon laws. You are owed tens of thousands of dollars, so hire a lawyer. And then spread the story far and wide, naming the particular Tesla employees involved, because these people tried to kill you.
That is until I just so happened to make a little extra money on TSLA stock by accident. I then turned around and found a salvage title, dirt cheap, home wall-charger included 2018 Model 3 and sold off some that TSLA profit for a free car for my wife. We've owned it long enough to confirm all "the build quality is crap" rumors. I'm a mechanically inclined person and I'm not idiot so I have taken the car apart enough to verify it is safe and it isn't dangerous (salvage title, total loss vehicle) but once you start taking things apart you see the corners they've cut where other car manufacturers do it differently - things like water drainage and body panels alignment is just too easy to spot if you've owned 15 cars over 30 years.
Long story short, I wouldn't buy a new one. I certainly wouldn't spent my _hard earned_ money on one. But I don't mind gambling a bit on a rebuilt title mass-produced one. That's about the level of trust I have in Elon's ability to build a quality automobile.
They are ok cars but everything you've heard about build quality and defects is absolutely true. I've never attempted to use the autopilot because I value my life.
Anyone who has so much as sat in a mid to top tier car from BMW/Mercedes/etc will instantly come away with an overwhelming sense that a Tesla feels cheap by comparison (because it does). Classic things like the sound and feel of closing a door, gripping a steering wheel, pushing a button, etc.
If you pay attention to detail this can often be experienced from the car externally - famous cases of Tesla tending to have poor tolerances and high variability in things like panel gap, etc.
Sometimes, you have to make tradeoffs. You may want a Tesla for a variety of reasons, and the reputation for unreliability is not enough to tip the scale for another maker. With that in mind, buying the Tesla and thoroughly checking for known issues may be the most rational thing to do.
Not in the rest of the world they don't.
Yeah but the company is run by a hip cool memelord who's gonna get us to mars, and his cars have nice softwares like my iPad. Who cares about the metal parts of the car's rigidity structure? That's just something old boring people think about. Everyone knows EVs are more reliable than ICE so no need to ever look under the hood. $TSLA to the moon! /s
>Still I guess at least it's good to see Tesla living up to the reputation for American cars to be generally shit build quality.
The shit build quality has less to do with being American, and more to do with Tesla chasing higher margins, high margins which in part come from cutting a lot of corners in places where customers aren't looking for, which in a tracic-comedy way is what most American auto-makers did to get to their shit-build quality reputation.
To be fair, many brands have QA issues all the time, but that one from the article is so big and obvious it should never have made it passed inspection.
I'm not suggesting they're shit because they're American. I'm just saying it's nice to see them living up to the existing standard of shitness set by the existing American manufacturers.
I'm sure each American car manufacturer has their own unique and interesting reasons for having reliably shit build quality compared to European or Japanese manufacturers.
Which is the most American thing you can do.
Unless the user gets in an accident, is there a way to actually prove the frame is structurally defective?
Tesla's service center might be willing to say "within spec!" but I suspect they'll have a much harder time finding an engineer willing to put their license on the line in court.
A lawsuit. That is what the legal system is for. But for some reason people seem to look down on this which I find baffling.
Including Lemon Law claims.
It probably wouldn't get to court, though. The government deals with lemons all the time. Every state has ways to get lemon buyers relief quickly and at minimal expense.
I think the photos do that just fine
I had a Model 3 LR as a company car and really liked it - even being fine with most of the usual concerns or dislikes people share. I even like the brand (although I dislike most of Musk's other shenanigans over the past few years).
I've since given the car back and am considering purchasing a BEV in the future. I've obviously been considering another Tesla, but my single (small) negative experience with their customer service, plus myriad stories online (including this one) make it a total lottery: you must cross your fingers that your car is perfectly reliable, else be launched into a world of potential frustration and difficulty (not to mention potentially huge cost, if not warrantied) gettings things fixed.
Between that and various automakers starting to produce, it's likely enough that a new 2027 will be cheaper and better than a new 2024.