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Elon Musk, it is widely acknowledged throughout the world, is the smartest man in tech, and everything he touches or sells is of the highest quality. His genius is easily as great as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, Albert Einstein, and those two gals from Tucson who invented Post-Its put together.
Which is why it’s so surprising that Reuters reports that Musk’s car company, Tesla, knew it had crap parts in its cars’ steering and suspension systems, but fought against recalls and told regulators that the problems were due to “abuse” by drivers, and had nothing to do with their faulty components.
The article leads with the sad case of an English Tesla owner, Shreyansh Jain, whose brand-new Tesla Model Y had 115 miles on the odometer when, the day after buying it, the car crapped out on him — fortunately, at low speed:
As he drove with his wife and three-year-old daughter, he suddenly lost steering control as he made a slow turn into their neighborhood. The vehicle’s front-right suspension had collapsed, and parts of the car loudly scraped the road as it came to a stop.
“They were absolutely petrified,” Jain said of his wife and daughter. “If we were on a 70-mile-per-hour highway, and this would have happened, that would have been catastrophic.”
The complex repair required nearly 40 hours of labor to rebuild the suspension and replace the steering column, among other fixes, according to a detailed repair estimate. The cost: more than $14,000. Tesla refused to cover the repairs, blaming the accident on “prior” suspension damage.
According to a review of “thousands of Tesla documents” obtained by Reuters, Jain has company. Tens of thousands of other Tesla owners, in fact, all over the world. It’s like an old Benetton ad, but with wrecked electric luxury cars!
The chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe, according to the records and interviews with more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians.
The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty.
To be sure, the company has a point. If people hadn’t driven the cars at all, they’d still be in perfect shape.
Mr. Jain’s experience sounds like pretty much what you’d expect from a company whose owner recently told advertisers “Go fuck yourself” if they didn’t like the fact that he tweets antisemitic stuff, and whose standard reply to press inquiries about Xwitter was for part of this year simply an email with a poop emoji.
At first, a Tesla service rep texted Jain to suggest no problem, you’re under warranty (but without a firm commitment), and the first inspection showed found “no evidence of any external damage.”
About a week later, Tesla sent Jain a letter denying responsibility, saying it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension.”
Jain said he was the only driver of the car during the one day he owned it and hadn’t had an accident before the suspension failure. “I was like, ‘Bloody hell, how can metal just snap like that when I know for sure the car has not hit anything?’” he said.
Excuse me, sir, doesn’t this poop emoji speak for itself?
And then there was the 2020 Tesla Model 3 with fewer than 15,000 miles that lost a front wheel at 60 mph. These things happen. To be fair, Reuters doesn’t say whether the owner might have leaned out the window and started banging on his own front wheel with a crowbar.
Oh yes, and then this: In a 2020 letter to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration during an investigation of widespread failures of suspension parts, a Tesla attorney insisted, “There is no defect in the subject components and no associated safety risk. […] The root cause of the issue is driver abuse.”
And we must all keep in mind that Tesla really does build the best cars, because Elon says so, it’s right in the Reuters article:
“We make the best cars,” he said of Tesla at a New York Times event last month. “Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?”
Clearly, because Yr Wonkette is short-staffed this week and also because we don’t want to risk summarizing anything in a way that would get our asses sued by the Smartest Best Tech Guy on the Planet, this is one of those stories where we’ll point you at the link and say “Go read the whole thing.” Now Git! But make sure you aren’t reading this while driving, yeesh.
[Reuters]
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