New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/new-images-and-video-confirm-austin-made-tesla-model-y-has-cracked-front-casting-220165.html

by clouddrover • 3 years ago

325 297 3 years ago

autoevolution.com

kevingadd• 3 years ago

Light being able to shine straight through part of your car that's meant to be solid is scary. Does anyone know how common it is for cast metal of this sort to have damage like this? I am kind of surprised their manufacturing would have this issue

sadhorse• 3 years ago

In a well controlled process it should not be common. Bigger parts have been casted before without issue. Tesla cutting corners?

XorNot• 3 years ago

No it's just poor QA. You can live with bad parts coming out of the prices provided you catch them when they do.

This shouldn't ever happen if QA is being done properly.

EDIT: which I recognise is "cutting corners" but the point is, any idiot can make one in-spec part. Making them consistently is the challenge.

kramerger2• 3 years ago

Tesla cutting corners?

Given what we have seen from Twitter, cutting corners and ignoring laws and regulations seems to be an Elon thing.

The guy is even skipping rent.

So why not?

Zigurd• 3 years ago

Rumint: Tesla has designed castings that are too big and/or too complex for the casting presses to produce a good yield. Tesla blames IDRA. But another maker of those machines turned down Tesla's RFP.

causi2• 3 years ago

Cast parts are more brittle than forged parts. Once the cracks are visible you've already lost a great deal of strength. I wouldn't ride in this car.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

It's not clear what purpose this cast part serves. I assume the body of a Tesla is formed/stamped from sheets of steel like most modern cars and that this provides most of the structure. It looks like this part is near the top of the hood, so is it structural? Is it just holding a bunch of other parts in place? Hard to tell.

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

Isn't the alternative actually a bunch of smaller cast parts bolted together, not forged parts?

thworp• 3 years ago

disclaimer: I have no first-hand experience, just second-hand.

It should be impossible to leave the factory like this. Let's say the issue is a substandard batch from a supplier that cracks from stress at some stage of the frame assembly (like when adding the battery pack, welding or adhesive bonding). The car should be inspected after all structural parts are added, at minimum visually but ideally with some kind of spectroscopy.

Also, if this is a whole batch with this issue it should have been noticed when doing QC on the shipment.

One option is that this happened at some stage during shipping (maybe the car rolled off a trailer and fell half a meter). Still, the dealership should be doing an inspection before handing the car over.

All in all, if this really isn't the result of some accident it is a total failure.

manuelabeledo7• 3 years ago

Another option is that workers at the factory are now pushing bad parts knowingly, to get the truck out of the door.

Let's not forget that the truck has been delayed for over two years now. In the meantime, a few competitors have been eating Tesla's lunch, and Musk is notorious for pushing unfinished products.

lnsru2• 3 years ago

Normally cast metal parts shouldn’t have issues detectable with optical inspection system. I worked for a company doing welding inspection systems. It is absolutely crazy when such part ends in the final product. This company clearly overstretched cutting corners on this.

becurious• 3 years ago

Would a part like this get x-ray inspected? I had a summer job working at a machine shop and structural castings would often get sent for x-ray inspection.

dncornholio• 3 years ago

I have absolutely no knowledge about casting metal but I'm 100% sure you can cast these parts without any cracks. This is a very obvious quality control issue, we've been casting metal for decades..

steveBK1232• 3 years ago

This is kind of the perfect Tesla story.

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.

akmarinov• 3 years ago

"It's within spec"

- Tesla

FirmwareBurner3• 3 years ago

The spec tolerances being as wide as their panel gaps.

steveBK1232• 3 years ago

"Frame gap within spec"

viknesh• 3 years ago

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?

print_goto_ten• 3 years ago

Lemon law likely applies

raverbashing• 3 years ago

is there a way to actually prove the frame is structurally defective?

I think the photos do that just fine

foooorsyth• 3 years ago

This is a Lemon Law slam dunk

owenmarshall• 3 years ago

Lawsuit.

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.

throwboatyface• 3 years ago

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.

adionionio4• 3 years ago

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.

HumblyTossed3• 3 years ago

what legal recourse would an individual consumer have to have this fixed?

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.

trogdor2• 3 years ago

When you buy a Tesla, you agree to arbitrate all disputes with Tesla.

Including Lemon Law claims.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

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.

kramerger2• 3 years ago

"Do this only orally" is always to hide evidence from a future court discovery.

I don't think Tesla would do this unless management consider it very serious.

peeters• 3 years ago

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.

maffydub2• 3 years ago

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.

adionionio4• 3 years ago

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.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

Do it anyway. You can always not use the recording if the penalty for recording is going to be more than the benefit it gives you (unlikely).

sixothree• 3 years ago

Is it true that if a business states that “calls may be recorded” then no matter where you live, it’s legal to record the call as well.

tamimio• 3 years ago

but this kind of policy is pretty egregious.

I said it before, musk himself is a big con, so I am not shocked that’s a policy in there.

stephenr3• 3 years ago

The weirdest part of this to me is the customer.

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.

FirmwareBurner3• 3 years ago

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.

stephenr3• 3 years ago

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.

kabes2• 3 years ago

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

jklinger4102• 3 years ago

...and more to do with Tesla chasing higher margins

Which is the most American thing you can do.

adionionio4• 3 years ago

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.

ta9882• 3 years ago

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.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

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.

rsynnott7• 3 years ago

People are _extremely_ weird about that company. I was half-surprised that the usual, near-obligatory, “I love my Tesla, but…” quote was missing.

stef254• 3 years ago

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.

TheCondor• 3 years ago

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.

jcpham2• 3 years ago

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.

artursapek• 3 years ago

American cars, especially trucks, have a great reputation. What are you talking about?

Pxtl2• 3 years ago

You've never heard the joke that FORD stands for "Fix It Again, Tony" (and, unrelatedly, FIAT stands for "Found On Roadside, Dead")?

stephenr3• 3 years ago

American cars, especially trucks, have a great reputation

Not in the rest of the world they don't.

mlinhares• 3 years ago

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.

kkielhofner3• 3 years ago

These people are interesting.

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.

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

Are cast structural parts common on modern cars? I thought the structure of modern cars was forged parts welded together by robots.

zeroping• 3 years ago

Relatively new for such large parts, and an innovation by Tesla, although other manufacturers are picking the idea up too.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Doesn't that mean it's not cost effective to repair in case of accidents?

Small bump - got to dismantle the whole car and replace half of it.

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

Google "Gigapress."

Tesla pioneered cast frames as a way of dropping the cost to manufacture the car.

cypress662• 3 years ago

Has the car owner shown a full video of the car? Are we sure we're not just looking at a crashed car? It'd be nice for the article to include a video like that so there's no doubt.

piva00• 3 years ago

The article says:

NK denied his car was ever involved in any collisions.

And given that the owner took it to an official service center to check the issue I believe the service center would have detected if it was the result of a collision instead of:

The manager of the service center said multiple times that 'the car is safe to drive' and that he had been assured by 'engineers' that it is 'safe.' However, he will not give me anything in more detail or any official Tesla documentation to confirm that.

cypress662• 3 years ago

Has the owner provided any proof of such interaction at the service center, other than his words?

A simple video of the whole car would cast all doubts away.

flutas• 3 years ago

IMO (and I'm not a materials engineer) my first thought was the car got ramped off a railroad track or something and landed hard, which basically took any stress in the materials that were already there and caused them to essentially "bubble up" in the form of visible cracking.

Something like that most likely wouldn't be logged as a collision, but I think there would be other signs of that... Of course we're basically getting the best angle of one side of the story and none from the other side in the article.

mjhagen• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, TSLA is up 2% pre market.

manuelabeledo7• 3 years ago

Further evidence that its product is the stock.

misiti37805• 3 years ago

what does that even mean ?

FredPret4• 3 years ago

One cracked casting will not move the stock. One million, maybe. $TSLA is a big company.

Cockbrand2• 3 years ago

If the issue hadn't been noticed in time, it could have become a textbook example of "The Front Fell Off" [0]

Good thing that this hasn't happened, though.

[0] https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

HankB99• 3 years ago

Is this in the US? I was surprised I could find no mention of the NTSB. At Tesla's first attempt to reject a warranty claim I would have at least been thinking about filing an incident report.

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

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.

rsynnott7• 3 years ago

I own two Teslas and their service is horrible.

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.

toddmorey3• 3 years ago

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.

gottorf• 3 years ago

I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands

At your rate, you might run out of brands to buy from ;-)

ta9882• 3 years ago

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).

postmodest• 3 years ago

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.

agloe_dreams• 3 years ago

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.

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

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.

toddmorey3• 3 years ago

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.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

Every time I take it in, they never put the car back together and I have to take it back.

What does that mean? The car is in 5 pieces? Take it back unfixed? What do you do then to fix it?

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

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.

fingerlocks• 3 years ago

I had a Subaru where the GPS / Stereo would reboot while I drove and loose its settings.

I had this same problem and it was solved with a firmware update. I wonder if that came later?

EGreg2• 3 years ago

Finally! How long have they been working on it? Front casting is not an easy technique to pull off, but confers a lot of advantages. I expect it will come standard on new Teslas starting next year.

seattle_spring2• 3 years ago

What an extremely odd comment to make, given the context of the article.

Front casting is not an easy technique to pull off

They're obviously not able "pull [it] off" if people are finding dangerous structural problems that Tesla is sweeping under the rug

EGreg2• 3 years ago

I was joking, because the title reads like they’ve finally “cracked it”.

throw9away64• 3 years ago

50% failure rate is going to result in a large number of defects leaking into production. You can’t screen that high a defect rate very well

drewg1232• 3 years ago

Sounds like not much has changed since 2015.

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.

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

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?

Are NDAs like that actually enforceable?

nimajneb• 3 years ago

My bet is that becomes a scenerio where the party with the most money for lawyers wins. If it was me, I would have almost no money for lawyers.

gabereiser• 3 years ago

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.

chrisco2553• 3 years ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

And this is how they treated their early adopters that were paying $100K in 2015 for their higher end cars.

And yet it didn't stop anyone from buying Teslas... It's almost as if they knew they could get away with murder.

jen20• 3 years ago

This kind of thing certainly stopped me from buying one, even in the days before they were referred to as “MAGAmobiles”.

Instead I waited for companies that actually know how to make cars to work out how to make electric cars.

71a54xd• 3 years ago

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.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

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.

thfuran2• 3 years ago

(removing his financial burden) and then just do whatever he wanted with the info..

Thus creating a whole new financial burden.

bowsamic• 3 years ago

He was a fool to avoid a legal battle with Tesla?

thejazzman3• 3 years ago

My 2015's battery "died" the day after the warranty was up.

$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.

scoofy2• 3 years ago

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.

Roark663• 3 years ago

Aren't there some laws that require a car manufacturer to buy back a faulty car like this?

red-iron-pine2• 3 years ago

lemon laws will vary by state and level of impact. but, basically, yeah.

most have warranty laws, too.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Even regular car has cracks what’s new?

toddmorey3• 3 years ago

This is the frame of the car. Don’t accept a new car with cracks in the frame. Ever.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

I mean why is this news that a car can have defects? Are most tesla y from the same press like this?

opwieurposiu• 3 years ago

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."

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.

dopamean2• 3 years ago

Is there a functional difference? Would cracks from a cold shut not disqualify the product (whatever it is) from going into service?

padjo• 3 years ago

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.

gaze3• 3 years ago

Any sort of defect like this should disqualify the product. It’s embarrassing and alarming that this casting wasn’t scrapped.

short_throw• 3 years ago

It's still a serious structural defect.

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.

specialist3• 3 years ago

There's a learning curve parable about the fastest way to learn how to make quality clay pots.

Team A focuses on making 1 perfect pot. Specifications, research, process, testing, verification, etc. They get pretty close with their initial pots, but they struggle to scale up.

Team B just starts making pots. As fast they can. Make incremental tiny improvements. Most pots are total losses. But they do manage to start making pretty good pots. And they hit scale.

Which approach is better?

Tesla's QA/QC will not improve, stabilize until their rate of change slows down. They are hellbent on scaling up (20m vehicles, build out charging network, etc) while reducing costs (new tech, fewer parts, etc).

A lot of mistakes will be made.

In the future, I'd consider buying a budget (~$25k?) Tesla vehicle. Maybe after they ship a few million.

Hopefully, we'll have many options to choose from (BYD, Kia, etc).

chronicsunshine• 3 years ago

Being that your life depends on your car not failing catastrophically while using it, I think your analogy would make more sense if you replaced clay pots with pacemakers.

bityard• 3 years ago

I would not bank on Kia or Hyundai... A large swath of of their engines made within the last decade or so have a reputation for not lasting within or much beyond the warranty period, which has lead to multiple class-action lawsuits.

I have a Kia Sorento and overall it's a simple, honest car that's easy to work on and pretty well-built overall. But at 80k miles, the engine burns a quart every 1k miles which is entirely stupid. By comparison, our Mazda 5 (a very cheaply-made car!) engine lasted something like 150k miles and burned no oil with practically no maintenance to the engine.

I think a Toyota is in our near future.

specialist3• 3 years ago

Conceptually, Mazda 5 BEV is exactly what I want. For my dogs, road-trips, and runs to the hardware store.

I'd accept a passenger-oriented Ford Transit Express BEV.

throw9away64• 3 years ago

A lot of companies have major build issues. Honda had a batch of engine heads cracking and bad transmissions. Subarus are oil and had a long slew of head gasket issues. Sometimes you just goof a design in a way you can’t easily correct out of

sangnoir2• 3 years ago

A large swath of of their engines made within the last decade or so have a reputation for not lasting within or much beyond the warranty period

A warranty that is now of 10 years/100k miles (or 15 years/150k miles when extended). The value proposition of Kias, when you factor in features included as a standard, has never been greater, and is better than most other manufacturers.

throw9away64• 3 years ago

The second approach is better but… you need a system of continuous improvement in place and production stability to capture and hold the improvements. Tesla just doesn’t have to culture of capturing or embracing quality

specialist3• 3 years ago

Yes and: Tesla sacrificed low defect counts for other qualities {1}. Such as high iteration, units shipped, reducing weight. {2}

Which could maybe be fine, if Tesla had also adopted the Bezos Amazon obsession with customer satisfaction. Bezos knew that given Amazon's growth there would be a lot of errors (defects). So they built out superior customer service infra, gave CSRs wide autonomy/authority to fix stuff, try to make every customer whole.

And Amazon's customers loved them for it, have high tolerance for mistakes, which would harm most other CPG brands.

Instead, Tesla adopted the Page Google antipathy towards customers. So dumb.

At some point, Musk will have spent all of his goodwill. Then Tesla's brand will suffer accordingly. And that kind of soft equity is wicked hard to rebuild.

These lawsuits are going to hurt Tesla's brand. Celebrity is a two-edged sword. The media that fawned over him for so long will now gleefully tear him to shreds.

{1} IIRC, Tesla's defect rate is %10 vs %3 for other "luxury" auto brands, however that's measured.

{2} Noting that defect rate varies across subsystems. IIRC, Tesla motors and batteries remain best in class; Whereas body, paint, interior, and trim suffer.

samstave• 3 years ago

Brings "Move Fast and Break Things" to a ludicrous new level.

Is this just one vehicle, or systemic? If there is one instance like this in a space vehicle - wouldnt you immediately go and inspect EVERY SINGLE space vehicle you've ever made that's flying around in space to make sure they don't crash into all the other things flying around in space?

Also, my Aunt's best friend (can't recall his name) was the designer for the original electrical harness for the very first tesla roadsters... I only met him a few times, at parties at my aunts house, but I do recall him to be 'pretty hacky' (in a good way) and he told me all about it, though I recall very little now, but I am sure a lot of the maverick hacker dna from the original team still exists?

FredPret4• 3 years ago

I took an Uber in a Tesla (the small flat one) recently. I could not believe the squeaking. Every Tesla driver I talk to loves theirs though. I hope the Cybertruck is much better built.

dopamean2• 3 years ago

It wont be. It's being built in the same place this cracked Tesla was built. Also it's so over due I've got to imagine they're rushing to get it out the door.

chrisco2553• 3 years ago

Squeaking? That's usually a signal the brakes need replacement.

FredPret4• 3 years ago

No, the seat was loud. Every time anything moved, including the car, or me breathing, it sounded like a clown folding a balloon schnauzer.

ParadisoShlee• 3 years ago

Are these parts being made with the gigapress? or is this older casting methods?

whalesalad• 3 years ago

yes this is gigapress

pengaru2• 3 years ago

That's an exceptionally poor quality casting, Tesla clearly has a QC problem.

mrcwinn• 3 years ago

It's one car, so I don't want to pretend like it's every car, but certainly Tesla has earned a reputation at poor quality control. It seems obvious to me they optimize for factory output even at the cost of delivering a correct product.

Anecdotally, a close friend had a Model S Plaid. He took delivery roughly a year after they were announced. Tesla forgot to install weather stripping in the frunk. "Flood" is too strong a word, but yes, during a rain storm water seeped into the frunk. This car is very expensive, but honestly I would expect an entry-level Toyota to have correct weather stripping.

Elon is all about "hardcore." He belittles his own employees and plays classes against one another — claiming information workers should continue to commute on the Bart just like factory workers. But oh, by the way, he takes a private jet from meeting to meeting.

So what baffles me is how Elon Musk continues to say casually that production ramp is "really hard." I have no doubt that it is, but the Model S was released in 2012. It's been, what, 11 years, and you're still delivering like this? Not good enough.

kkielhofner3• 3 years ago

They also prioritize manufacturing capacity for new product at the expense of replacement parts.

Many Tesla owners have had the experience of waiting forever for replacement parts because of an accident, component failure, etc. A minor fender bender can result in having a damaged (potentially undriveable) Tesla for months whereas for other cars you're reliably back on the road in a week or less.

sangnoir2• 3 years ago

It's one car, so I don't want to pretend like it's every car, but certainly Tesla has earned a reputation at poor quality control

This is like discovering one roach in your hotel room. Sure, you only have the evidence of the existence of the one roach, and it might be the only one in the entire chain of hotels - but what are the odds?

jfb• 3 years ago

It is so amazing to me that Elon set himself the simplest possible problem in car manufacturing and is till terribly bad at it.

thfuran2• 3 years ago

What problem is that?

chaos_emergent• 3 years ago

For industrial manufacturing engineers in the audience - what is the threshold of cracking that’s acceptable in a casting this size given the constraints of safety and reliability?

Curious if selling this casting to a customer was an intentional decision, and if so, what the tolerances are for this type of deviation in a factory making cars.

digdugdirk3• 3 years ago

Zero.

A defect like this absolutely should have been caught by quality control. Even if they only take some sample size of parts for detailed analysis from every run, this would have been readily apparent. If it wasn't visible at time of manufacture (sometimes there can be a thin "skin" that covers underlying defects like this) this would have been evident from other inspection methods - X-ray analysis is commonly used to check for internal porosity or cracks in safety critical applications like this.

Roark663• 3 years ago

Manufacturing aluminum castings at scale efficiently (without using excessive amounts of metal) is a difficult problem to solve. This kind of stuff has plagued other car manufacturers too and with much smaller components. For example aluminum Ice engine heads and blocks. Certain vehicle years (for example 2005 Golf tdi) are known for "porous" and cracking castings.

There is a very good reason (other than "they" want cars to rust) for using steel. Just based on my hobbyist knowledge it's a metal that behaves a lot more predictably.

digdugdirk3• 3 years ago

This isn't accurate. Aluminum casting is a well known and understood process, the only issues are either from poor manufacturing control or a poor design. In Tesla's case, it seems to be a mix of both, with a bit of "we're doing something gigantic that few companies have experience with" sprinkled on top.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 years ago

The problem with how difficult aluminum casting is or is not is totally irrelevant.

The real problem is that this structural member with a giant visible crack in it somehow made it through Tesla's QA process. I think I could give Tesla some slack when they were originally ramping up Model 3 production (it was a "succeed or the company goes under" moment), but reports of their sub-par QA keep coming and coming.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

This company is supposedly sophisticated enough to develop AI technology capable of driving their cars.

Surely they can point some of those cameras at the gigapress output with their AI magic rejecting any parts letting light through where none is expected.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

If the recall is more expensive than the possibility of mass lawsuits, then Tesla will leave the owners deal with the issue.

To be fair, this is typical behavior of any automaker, not just Tesla.

I myself had my ordeal with Honda over a poorly designed auto braking system on a new $40K vehicle that almost got me killed.

The response I got from Honda both the dealer and service was pretty much the same, we checked the computer logs and didn't find anything wrong with the car so it is safe to drive.

I decided to trade it in for a Toyota and take a $10K loss.

A couple of years later there was a class action lawsuit for the same exact problem I had and eventually a settlement, obviously Honda never acknowledged any wrongdoing.

Shortly afterwards my Toyota got recalled for the airbag malfunction after many people got killed or badly injured.

jm4• 3 years ago

Except for the motors and batteries, Tesla cars are awful. I would never buy another one or recommend it to others. The only car that was put together worse than this one is a Mitsubishi I had back in the 90's. Elon Musk is a con man. I feel like it's only a matter of time before people get wise to his bullshit. My next EV will be from a reputable manufacturer, even if it's not as fast or as flashy.

mft_2• 3 years ago

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.

maxerickson• 3 years ago

Given the pretty consistent advancement in batteries over the last 20 years, it doesn't pay to be in a hurry.

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.

frumper• 3 years ago

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.

mft_2• 3 years ago

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.

GaryNumanVevo• 3 years ago

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.

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

What part of the car are we looking at here? "Front casting" is not a standard car part. I am going to assume the Tesla does not use castings for it chassis. The article did not make this clear at all.

WA• 3 years ago

Is Tesla a) car quality and b) customer service better in the EU?

thehappypm• 3 years ago

Sure you didn’t get in an accident?

New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting

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