Tesla Knew Parts Were Defective

They just didn't bother to tell anyone. Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective

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.

Because if they admitted that the parts were defective, they would have been required to redesign and recall the cars, and that would cost money, probably a lot of money.

The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators.

Oops. Not telling safety regulators might be a major problem, especially if accidents were involved.

Click thru for details on things like repair costs that Tesla refused to cover. We will cover one example that was highlighted by article. From Defector: You’re Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk

A guy with a relatively new Tesla Model 3 was charged $4,400 to replace the power steering and the related wiring harness because the car went through a car wash. He was shocked because he had never heard of a car damaged to that extent, and in that fashion, by 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.”

    — Reuters

And then the Author at Defector, Albert Burneko, notes that the engineers at Ford, Toyota, wherever are NOT 100 years old. They didn't learn how to build a car that can take on a car wash from first hand experience. Then why is it that Tesla can't build a car-wash-proof car?

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?"

Both articles are worth a look. (Hat tip to Earthbound Misfit.)