"…[Tesla] is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern." https://t.co/XriEM71kpG
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 22, 2023
Since a lot of people will be traveling this weekend… Albert Burneko, at Defector — “You’re Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk”:
… On Wednesday, Reuters published a big, thorough investigative story documenting a pattern of major parts failures on low-mileage Tesla vehicles—and Tesla’s organized years-long effort to obscure the pattern and offload its costs onto drivers, so as to sustain the illusion that it is a profitable company making cars that are not piece-of-shit death traps. By “major parts failures,” I should specify here that we are not talking about, like, a faulty turn signal, or an unreliable trunk latch. We are talking about stuff like a whole-ass wheel falling off of your Model 3 while it travels at highway speeds, or the suspension collapsing while you make a left turn, causing the body of the car to crunch down onto the road, or an axle half-shaft fucking snapping while you accelerate, or the power steering suddenly failing while you are zooming along at 60 miles per hour.
We are talking, in short, about engineering failures—failures that anyone would find alarming if they encountered them in a soap box derby racer made out of literally a soap box—happening, abruptly and without warning, to Tesla cars that are for all practical purposes brand new. Moreover, they’re happening to lots of them, because of manufacture and assembly problems the company knew about, and hid, and lied about, and blamed on the poor suckers who bought its crappy cars.
The Reuters piece is quite long, and earns its length with an incredible wealth of damning receipts, including internal Tesla communications making clear that the company has known about its own shoddy work for a long time, even as it deceived investors, regulators, and drivers. I urge you to read it for yourself…
… In general I don’t like spoiling the kicker of somebody else’s article, but I’d like to call your attention to the following quote, which ends the Reuters piece and crystallizes, I think, something important. The context is: A Tesla driver has brought his wife’s Model 3 in for servicing because the power steering ceased operating after the car went over a normal speed bump. The service manager (note that Tesla, unlike other car manufacturers, owns and operates all of its dealerships, so the workers there are Tesla employees) identifies the culprit: A system component has become corroded—probably, he says, because the car went through a car wash. The repairs will cost $4,400. The driver observes, reasonably, that he has never heard of a car’s wiring being damaged by simply taking it through a car wash.
Lundeen [the driver] said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”
Imagine offering this as a defense, as you charge a customer $4,400 to fix your own shoddy product. Look, pal, all I can tell you is that I don’t know how to make the thing I sold you at great expense. Contained in this doofus Tesla service manager’s quote is the ethos shared among all Elon Musk’s ventures. It is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley.
The engineers who work at GM and Ford (or at Toyota or Honda or Nissan or Mercedes-Benz or any other company whose cars you can drive through a car wash without corroding their power steering components) are not themselves 100 years old; they are not the original discoverers of how to design and manufacture power steering systems. The reason those companies, and not Tesla, know how to build cars that (in general) can drive from here to there without dropping a wheel or bursting into flames is not that they are staffed by a bunch of centenarian Lore Wizards who learned the secrets of auto manufacture back in nineteen-aught-dickity and now hide this sacred knowledge in a walled mountaintop abbey. What those car companies know about building cars is collective industry knowledge. It is best practice. It is, that is to say, Out There. It can be had by any car company that wants it.
What keeps Tesla from having that knowledge, then, isn’t that the company is too young to have acquired it, or that it simply cannot be had except by learning it from scratch. The knowledge can be had in the person of any number of far-less-than-100-years-old engineers Tesla could hire; moreover it can be had by reverse-engineering a frickin’ Miata. The reason Tesla hasn’t “worked all the bugs out yet” is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn’t as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works. You must reinvent, almost literally in this case, the wheel—this time, apparently on the premise of “…and what if it sucked?”…
Don’t Let Anyone Tell You That One Vote Doesn’t Count. Or a Handful of Postcards. Or a Targeted Donation. Or Political Action.
craigie
I have had 2 electric cars so far, and neither of them were Teslas. And neither of them sucked.
mrmoshpotato
Good news everyone! -Professor Farnsworth
Also, stupid 44° rainy weather in December!
Math Guy
Subaru Outback – love it. Will give the Subaru EVs a few years on the road (to work out the bugs) before I buy one.
Kristine
I recall Kay talking about the substandard work at her area Tesla plant last year or even the year before. Lower pay. Unhappy workers who weren’t well-trained. Even then, the plant didn’t have a good rep.
So I guess the Reuters report doesn’t surprise me. I’m surprised it took this long for the word to get out.
Parfigliano
I wouldnt even ride in let alone buy one of Elmo’s shit boxes.
Ruckus
You know, when the news media can report on something that is being built with pompous arrogance because those building the whatever want to reinvent the wheel without failure experience, and that pompous arrogance can easily get people killed, those are humans that can not see beyond their bank accounts. They should be relieved of said bank accounts completely and strung up by their parts that are not intended to be used to hang people up to dry. Fair is fair after all.
Baud
Do you want a working car or do you want to be part of the future?
TF79
Looks like Tesla has adopted the “throw up a cloud of bullshit” approach of insurance companies to frustrate you until you give up.
Though I have to say I find the framing in that Defector piece of US automakers as paragons of customer support and quality engineering to be hi-fucking-larious given some of the cars I’ve had over the years.
Ken
Apparently Tesla’s philosophy is that you can’t have both.
MattF
A few years ago I watched a video where a professional ‘car quality’ person gave his considered opinion about the vehicles Tesla manufactured. It was not pretty. At the time, I was still at the “It’s not impossible that he’s not an asshole” stage in my opinion of Musk. It feels like long ago.
NotMax
Did someone say exploding Tesla?
Moving along to something more seasonal, EL&P rock the nut back when they could afford only two shirts.
;)
NotMax
@MattF
When does he ditch the Nikola sobriquet and rebrand it Xesla?
//
Another Scott
I saw a headline about the Reuters report, but hadn’t read it yet. E.g.
BI – A Tesla owner says he got a $14,000 repair bill one day after buying a Model Y. A new report suggests it’s part of a much bigger problem.
24 hours and 115 miles on the car and a $14,000 bill for suspension failure??
Yeah, there’s a problem there.
There’s also a report about problems with a Chevy Blazer EV that a magazine was testing, but these seem to be electrical display gremlins rather than the car catastrophically failing. And I don’t think that Chevy is going to bill Edmunds $14,000…
(No problems with my Kia Niro PHEV. [knock wood])
Cheers,
Scott.
New Deal democrat
Well, if this as widespread a problem as the article says, it is about to be massively discovered, because the Tesla Model Y had the 2nd highest number of sales in all of 2023 through September, at 2.5% of all vehicles sold, right behind the the Ford F-150 and ahead of the Toyota RAV4.
RSA
Speaking of Tesla, this has lately been making the rounds: lendingtree.com did an analysis of insurance quote data (2022-2023) for 30 car brands. Highlights:
This is about drivers rather than cars, but I thought it was informative and funny.
Another Scott
I had to see that again.
[ insert Joe Biden joke here ]
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
“Quality is Job [flipping through pages of a loose leaf binder] 11.648.”
//
BethanyAnne
@RSA: Damn, Subaru? I rode a motorcycle in Berkeley for 5 years, and it was Volvo 240s that were my nemesis. Inattentive death bricks
eponymous
Move fast and break things!
Another Scott
@New Deal democrat: I’m sure catastrophic failures are fairly rare.
But when I was looking around a year or two ago at the start of my new(er) car search to replace my 2004 Jetta TDI, I looked at Carvana and wondered why they had so many Teslas with low mileage – 4+ pages of cars with less than 10,000 miles (out of 718 total Teslas). It just seems like there’s more to the story…
A retired neighbor down the street had a Model S for years and apparently just replaced it with a 3. I don’t think they drove it a lot – it was very often in their driveway at any time of day.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@RSA
Pontiac? Kaput in 2010.
Mercury? Kaput in 2011.
Saturn? Kaput in 2010.
Another Scott
@RSA: I wonder if they controlled for car color?
“Arrest Me Red”
I can easily see a BMW getting more attention from a cop than a Forrester, especially if there’s an age difference favoring the Forrester. Driver age is probably the biggest factor in these comparisons… ;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
OT: Inflation has dropped below 2%. Waiting to see if Biden gets any credit from the usual suspects.
Paul in KY
@NotMax: I give it 10 months tops.
eclare
Disappointed in my 2018 Honda CR-V right now. It’s under one recall for seat belts, which I haven’t gotten fixed yet, and now another recall was just announced for the fuel pump. The dealer is an hour away, and the seat belt repair takes several hours, so it would be expensive to drop it off and Uber home and back.
Dammit, the whole reason that I bought a Honda was for the quality and reliability.
Paul in KY
@RSA: Everyone I knew in college who had a beemer was a partier. Not many had that car, but they all got around.
cain
We bought a tesla back in July. Luckily it is a lease and only for two years. My wife likes the Tesla. They are selling quite well here. That said, my eye is still on the Ioniq 6. When the lease runs out we’ll look into that. We purposely got a charger that works with many cars.
cain
No kidding – I got into an accident way back about 7 years ago. Last year, we got into an accident with a Tesla driver. Meh.
Geminid
I’m waiting to see some Florida Man driving a Tesla that gets hit by a falling iguana and bursts into flame.
Come to think of it, that could make a good computer game, something simple you could play on a smart phone.
SpaceUnit
I’ve been seeing quite a few more Teslas in my area recently. I assume it’s now an identity thing. Like a MAGA hat on wheels.
Paul in KY
@SpaceUnit: I’m awaiting my first ‘in the wild’ sighting of the Incel Camino.
SpaceUnit
@Paul in KY:
Yeah, I haven’t seen one of those shitty-ass trucks yet. Thank God. You could go blind looking at something that ugly.
p.a.
@eclare: My 2010 Suzuki is long-in-the-tooth, no major problems, but just this week I asked my mechanic’s opinion for when I decide to (or have to) move on.
I asked specifically abt Honda, Toyota, & Mazda (whose reliability ratings have risen to H & T levels apparently.) He recommended Honda, basically because repair costs for dealer parts aren’t as atmospheric as the others, all other things being equal-ish.
Craig
@Math Guy: just drove 1200 miles in a rental Subaru and loved it. Great car.
eponymous
@eclare:
That is disappointing. I have a Honda HR-V, & love it. It’s a 2017, so I avoided the recall by one year.
Brachiator
Toyota has had problems building good, reliable EVs. Consumer Reports recently did a comprehensive review of buyer satisfaction with respect to EVs, conventional ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles and hybrid cars. Car manufacturers display different strengths and weaknesses in building each type of car. Toyota is good with hybrids. Tesla is good with EVs. Past auto manufacturing knowledge is not sufficient to guarantee that a car company can do well with vehicles of the future. And future developments in battery technology might render obsolete much of what is currently done with respect to EVs and hybrids.
One model of Tesla ranked high in terms of customer satisfaction.
This should link to a video of the Consumer Reports discussion.
Based on various media reports, Tesla may have delivered about 520 Cybertrucks to new owners. We may soon get some ideas as to whether these vehicles have any value at all, or are pointless pieces of steel body junk.
eponymous
@Paul in KY:
I recently enjoyed seeing a picture of the Cybertruck, with a well-known logo on it, saying “Incel Inside”.
HumboldtBlue
Fuck Musk, listen to The Drifters instead. Far better use of a Friday evening a few days before Xmas.
Craig
@eponymous: That’s beautiful. Incel inside.
eclare
@p.a.:
Except for oil changes, these recalls are the first repairs on a car that I bought in 2018. It just sucks because I’ll be trapped at a dealer for several hours for each. For oil changes I take my car to an independent place that is about a ten minute walk away, I guess I got spoiled.
Oh, I also replaced the battery because I don’t drive much, and it just gave up.
SpaceUnit
I’m waiting for Elon to change Tesla’s symbol to a swastika.
You know, just to be edgy and push some lib buttons.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Another Scott: How would that not be covered by a warranty?
laura
We saw a Tesla while driving to San Francisco when they just started selling and it stood out due to the body design. It was a looker and now they’re everywhere and no longer attractive to my eye for (gestures broadly at all the reasons). There’s a tremendously awful commercial on spotify that encourages uber drivers to rent Tesla’s in the hopes of getting a higher tip. The financial precarity that forces so many into the uber gig could easily become an unimaginable nightmare if you threw a catastrophic breakdown in the mix.
kindness
I’d love an EV. I wouldn’t buy a Tesla any more. No, not because they are now shoddy vehicles (although that helps). It’s because I don’t want one dime of my money going to Musk. That and the major manufacturers are starting to put out competitive EVs
I’d keep my truck. I need a mountain vehicle.
Bill Arnold
@SpaceUnit:
Also “electric MAGA hats”, “battery-power MAGA hats”, or (Betty Cracker) “rolling $100K MAGA hats”.
SpaceUnit
@Bill Arnold:
A MAGA hat that might blow up and kill you.
Captain C
A couple times I’ve ridden in a yellow cab Tesla in NYC (both times near my orthopedist’s office around when I was having knee surgery). This was about 2ish years ago. The cabbie said there were about a dozen or so at the time. I wonder whatever happened to them, and I hope the driver had his on a daily lease.
MagdaInBlack
@eclare: Shouldn’t they provide you with a loaner, since its their recall? I know I’ve seen that done in the past for recalls. Maybe they’ve gotten cheap about it, but they used to.
twbrandt
@NotMax: I saw ELP at Detroit’s Cobo Arena back in the, umm, 70s. It was a great show, although they didn’t do Nutrocker.
sab
@New Deal democrat: I’ve been noticing a lot more of them around. I think the MAGAs have discovered them now that we lefties hate Musk.
wjca
You have to understand that it’s comparative paragons. Your experience only highlights (lowlights?) just how bad the Tesla operation is.
Burnspbesq
@craigie:
Ditto. One was well suited to its intended purpose. The other is by far the best car I’ve ever owned.
BretH
@New Deal democrat: Buried under the rest here is the tidbit about the F150 being the best selling vehicle – a truck that gets about 20 mpg average. That’s insane.
I’ll bet for 99% of use they’re used like I use my 2011 Prius- to go to the grocery store, etc. And I consistently get 50-60mpg.
But I don’t have a front end that screams “I’m a BIG man” and would throw a pedestrian a city block if I hit one so there’s that.
wjca
My first thought was that it would give them some severe cognitive dissonance, what with their fascist hero Musk/X but then an electric car???
But then I realized that they’re necessarily immune to cognitive dissonance. Whether this is inherent or acquired immunity I couldn’t say.
Annie
This — “people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt” seems to apply to a lot of Republicans and RWNJs right now, not just Tesla and techbros. We know how to pass a budget for the U.S. government, for instance. We have an international alliance system that stabilized Europe for over 70 years. But RWNJs hate them because they don’t match their completely unrealistic ideology.
SpaceUnit
@wjca:
One acquires it by consuming RWNJ media.
Burnspbesq
@SpaceUnit:
Price also has a lot to do with it. If you can make full use of the federal income tax credit (which is gone after 12/31), the net cost of a base Model 3 is around $31K—at a time when the average cost of a new passenger vehicle is north of $47K.
wjca
Or, perhaps, one is willing/able to consume RWNJ media because one already has it.
Just saying, the direction of causality is not certain.
SpaceUnit
@Burnspbesq:
Cars are crazy expensive now. That’s why I’m driving a twenty year old Jeep.
But I can’t see buying another combustible engine vehicle at this point. I’ll eventually get an electric, but it sure won’t be a Tesla.
Burnspbesq
@SpaceUnit:
if you shop carefully, you can find low mileage CPO ID.4s for around $35k. That’s arguably the best value EV today.
Kayla Rudbek
@wjca: a lot of my spam emails on my ATT email account are titled something with Elon or Musk in there and “saving money” in the first few words of the body of the email, so he’s appealing to someone, I guess.
SpaceUnit
@wjca:
I won’t argue the point, but I’ve personally watched Fox News and other garbage media take a toll on the rationality, discretion, and critical thinking skills in members of my own family. It’s real.
Brachiator
@RSA:
I wonder what the hell is going on here?
Interesting news nugget.
SpaceUnit
@Burnspbesq:
What’s holding me back is that I live in a condo where we have a communal garage. I’ll have to wait until the HOA installs charging stations or allows residents to install them on their own. So far they haven’t permitted it.
They have concerns about batteries catching fire and burning the buildings down. And frankly, so do I.
eclare
@MagdaInBlack:
Not in the past for a Honda, but I’ll doublecheck. Friends with much more expensive cars get loaners.
Dopey-o
Names / Models?
Another Scott
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!):
From the BI story:
I liked this other tidbit:
Heh.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@SpaceUnit: Like I said, I was charmed by the little Chevy Bolt I rented when I was in Rochester, only to look it up and find out the model’s already been discontinued.
Anonymous At Work
Brava: vicious snark as only the Internet can achieve. Someone needs to call CPS on behalf of Elon’s feelings.
SpaceUnit
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s too bad. I know someone who has a Bolt and loves it.
Tony G
There are many things that I don’t understand, but the thing that I REALLY can’t comprehend is the cult of Elon Musk fan-boys. Why worship a guy who consistently fucks up everything that he touches? The cult of Trump — as horrible as it is — I can sort of understand. The Trump cult is just bitter white men who are angry that non-white people have some rights. But the Musk cult makes no sense to me.
New Deal democrat
@Matt McIrvin: I understand that GM has decided to continue selling the Bolt for at least another year, so take heart.
Also … in response to someone else’s comment upstairs, the Hyundai Ioniq 5&6 are both excellent if you want an EV. And hybrids are still flying off dealers’ lots, and now accelerate as quickly as their gas only counterparts.
Hope that is helpful.
Another Scott
@Dopey-o: IIRC, he had a VW ID.4 then got a Porsche Taycan (not sure which model).
Corrections welcome!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kirk
@Another Scott: sure, but not at
3 timestwice the rate of the next highest company’s notice.Llelldorin
@wjca: Immunity to cognitive dissonance is a basic feature of fascism. Orwell called it doublethink:
Edited to add: When I really feel like being depressed I reread 1984 and Death of a Salesman in tight succession, and realize that if you throw one book at the other MAGA pops right out.
Burnspbesq
@Dopey-o:
VW ID.4 is a perfectly good compact SUV.
Porsche Taycan is a game-changer.
Burnspbesq
@Dopey-o:
VW ID.4 is a perfectly good compact SUV.
Porsche Taycan is a game-changer.
Burnspbesq
@Dopey-o:
VW ID.4 is a perfectly good compact SUV.
Porsche Taycan is a game-changer.
Ruckus
@BretH:
The 2 vehicles I notice more than any other here in SoCal are F150 or a GM full size pickup. The vast majority seem to be being used as private vehicles – going to and from work, the store, etc. It’s almost rare to see them with anything in the bed. And that’s at gas at around $4 to $5/gal. Sure they get somewhat better milage than they used to 20 yrs ago but still….
Ruckus
@Tony G:
I’d adjust my point of view if I was you. It’s not actually elon they are worshiping. It’s the money. And yes, elon being in the limelight because of his money, and Tesla, is the draw for a proportion of the population.
Mick Mcdongell
@Another Scott: that is a hoot