Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures

https://electrek.co/2025/10/14/tesla-is-at-risk-of-lossing-subsidies-in-korea-over-widespread-battery-failures/

by Bender • 9 months ago

103 132 9 months ago

electrek.co

josefritzishere2• 9 months ago

It's most incredible to me that this company, obviously in distress, still has not fired their CEO.

testing223212• 9 months ago

They sold more vehicles in the most recent quarter than ever in their history.

It’s always interesting when the perception given by the media is so far removed from the actual facts.

kmontrose• 9 months ago

YoY sales are down while other automakers are up, Q3 might be an artifact of EV incentives expiring. Iirc other manufactures also saw an increase in EV sales in Q3.

lesuorac2• 9 months ago

Eh downvote. This is so trivially look-up-able.

[1] Total revenue decreased 12% YoY to $22.5B. YoY, revenue was impacted by the following items:
- decline in vehicle deliveries

[1]: Page 5 - https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...

etchalon• 9 months ago

I think next quarters results are going to be a lot more indicating of the company's health than the most recent one, since the ending of federal subsidies inflated demand across the industry.

But "more vehicles than ever" is factually false, according to Tesla itself. They delivered ~397,000 vehicles in Q2-2025. They delivered ~437,000 in Q4 of 2024.

So I'm not sure what you meant by that statement.

sottol3• 9 months ago

Beat Q4'24 by 0.3% in the quarter that EV tax credits ran out and EV buyers used their last chance to pocket it. Most other EV models had 50%+ sales lift that quarter.

Aurornis• 9 months ago

They sold more vehicles in the most recent quarter than ever in their history.

EV tax credits were only available through Q3. There was a rush to buy EVs before credits expired.

If you’re only looking at that one quarter, that’s the most biased signal you could get.

bdcravens• 9 months ago

That quarter is an asterisk for every EV maker, due to the ending of US subsidies. (ditto for whatever decline we see in Q4)

blackoil• 9 months ago

TSLA is near all-time high and more valuable than next 10 automakers combined.

LargeWu• 9 months ago

And it will be, until it isn't. It certainly isn't on the basis of fundamentals. It's purely vibes, but that won't last forever.

kibwen• 9 months ago

TSLA is a meme stock; the CEO's antics are the source of its value, and the board knows this.

izzydata2• 9 months ago

It's interesting that people are willing to take the risk buying a vehicle from a company that is effectively a meme. I take my safety seriously and I'd prefer the company that builds the vehicle I am driving to also be serious.

hearsathought3• 9 months ago

The stock doubled in the past 6 months. And tsla has a market cap of $1.5 Trillion. To put that into perspective, south korea's GDP is $1.7 trillion.

I don't think tsla shareholders are complaining.

josefritzishere2• 9 months ago

The reason it increased (not doubled) is that their CEOs public behavior drove the value down over 100 points in the months prior. I think the meme stock comment above actually has some merit though.

GuB-42• 9 months ago

Elon Musk personal brand is incredibly valuable, justified or not.

I don't think that he really runs the company, and kicking him out will most likely not change anything technical, but it will affect the company image among shareholders, most likely negatively.

MBCook• 9 months ago

I thought they couldn’t? Doesn’t he basically control the board through his shares and puppet/crony board members who have little incentive to kick him out?

I thought it was similar FB where Zuck owns enough voting shares to be effectively untouchable as well.

Rover2225• 9 months ago

My god, people are so brainwashed. You really think the most effective CEO in generations should... be fired. It's absurd.

testing223212• 9 months ago

Strange this has never been reported to happen elsewhere in the world with teslas.

Is there something different about South Korean cars?

pengaru• 9 months ago

My totally uninformed guess is a defective run of batteries from gigafactory shanghai that landed in SK market next door

bestouff• 9 months ago

... or something different about Korean administration which makes it more immune to corruption and allows it to report effectively batteries failures ?

Etheryte• 9 months ago

Surely you can understand that the option that Tesla has quietly bribed every country in the world that its vehicles are bought at is not very likely.

iknowstuff2• 9 months ago

Lmao of course they bribed every country on earth except for the “immune” one known for chaebols like Samsung, Hyundai and LG

downrightmike• 9 months ago

Their president tried to do martial law and those that had the responsibility to stop it, actually stopped it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_...

tromp• 9 months ago

With possibly more cases outside Korea:

My understanding is that most of Tesla’s vehicles sold in Korea are made at Gigafactory Shanghai in China, and that’s Tesla’s main export hub. Most of Tesla’s vehicles outside of the US are made in China. We should start seeing similar issues in other markets unless there’s a specific contributing factor in Korea.

cyp06332• 9 months ago

A brief search in Chinese social media turns out:

- the cases are rare, once every several months

- the affected battery pack is usually replaced free of charge

- many of the cases are from Chinese in North America, and even one case is about imported Model 3

Considering Chinese media prefer reporting Tesla defects to gain more clicks, I would assume this is not a Shanghai-specific, broadly affecting problem.

zamadatix• 9 months ago

I suppose that may depend how one defines a "broadly affecting problem". 2/3 (~2.9k) of the cases are for 2021 vehicles, and maybe it's possible those relate to specific batches shipped only to South Korea or something, but that still wouldn't explain the other 1/3 (~1.6k) of cases.

Tesla hasn't provided statistics about cases in the Chinese market, but I have a hard time believing it's really a handful of battery issues per year (regardless what one assumes of social media). That's just too far beyond any reasonable quality level expectation for ~half a million cars over the time period.

nitwit0052• 9 months ago

I have never considered posting to social media about automotive issues, unless something truly egregious happened that I felt I should warn people about. If you see complaints, it's probably fairly frequent.

speedgoose• 9 months ago

As an owner of a 2021 Model Y made from the same factory, I will try to not think much about this.

But it needs a battery replacement under warranty, my car will truly be some modern ship of Theseus.

guywithahat• 9 months ago

I'm not sure about the ones made in Shanghai, but the US ones have a very strong warranty, with an 8 year 120k miles retaining 70% of the battery. You likely still have four years to see

_ea1k3• 9 months ago

In the US, the 2021 Model Y is known to have some fairly significant battery issues. It appears to have started around when they updated from 74kwh to >80 kwh packs. Unfortunately, the replacements are often refurbished packs that also fail early.

I'm not sure about yours, but if you do end up needing a replacement, replacing the car soon after might be a wise move.

sidcool• 9 months ago

Well it's Fred Lambert from Electrek. A widely known Tesla hater. So I would take it with a pinch of salt.

_ea1k3• 9 months ago

You are getting downvoted, but there's definitely some truth to this. Every negative gets a little bit over-dramatized by his writing.

It is weird.

JumpCrisscross9• 9 months ago

You are getting downvoted

“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Veserv• 9 months ago

You mean a widely known and documented Tesla promoter: https://www.jalopnik.com/elon-musks-antics-cause-tesla-super...

He held undisclosed stock, made millions of dollars worth of referrals to Tesla, and was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars from those referrals all while reporting positively on Tesla while actively refusing to disclose their clear conflict of interest even when the issue was raised.

Rover2225• 9 months ago

I was ready to assume the article was bullshit, but it seems like a legit, accurate piece.

nothrowaways• 9 months ago

I never understood why Tesla valuation is orders of magnitude higher than honda

nixass• 9 months ago

Becaut Tesla is everything else (whatever is hot topic) than car manufacturer

thelastgallon• 9 months ago

It's a meme stock, like an NFT with a ticker.

standardUser• 9 months ago

I understood it when Tesla was the path towards widespread electric car adoption. Now they have tons of competition and an aging lineup, I'm amazed they're competitive at all in East Asia.

philistine• 9 months ago

Look at their sales numbers ... they aren't.

Rover2225• 9 months ago

The current valuation is largely driven by a future in robotics, not in traditional consumer vehicles. Both in driverless cars and the humanoid form factor. There is not another US company with anything near the position of tesla in terms of vertical integration, in-house self driving technology, manufacturing advancements, ambitious leadership, engineering talent, etc etc.

Chinese companies are the only large threat on the horizon.

zerotolerance• 9 months ago

Because it isn't a car company, it feels more like a fraud funnel for retail investor funds into multi-billion special dividends and bonuses for Musk.

thethimble• 9 months ago

You're welcome to short it and make lots of money if you are correct!

IT4MD3• 9 months ago

Its a meme stock kept at stratospheric heights by hype. It's only built 1 new vehicle in the last decade and that was the CyberFlop.

Watch the stock on any news. Completely disconnected from reality.

_ea1k3• 9 months ago

Usually people respond to this by questioning Tesla's high valuation, and that's fair.

TBH, though, I also wonder why auto companies tend to be valued so lowly. Often P/E ratios are in the single digits, and frequently paired with high dividends.

Maybe both valuations are really wrong.

bryanlarsen• 9 months ago

Auto companies aren't valued as lowly as the P/E ratio indicates. Auto companies have massive amounts of debt, and debt has higher priority than equity.

Instead of "P" you should use "Enterprise Value", which is Equity + Debt - Cash. (cash subtracted to prevent double counting it).

Their EV/E ratios are much more reasonable. And Tesla's used to be only a small multiple of traditional companies, when I owned shares. Now they aren't, and I don't own shares.

justin662• 9 months ago

Some of those companies have an awful lot of debt on their balance sheets.

jerlam• 9 months ago

Cars are a mature market, with lots of competitors and flat overall sales. Many brands are consolidating or contracting.

US total vehicle sales, historical: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA

Growth markets like China have stiff domestic competition and many barriers to entry.

zpeti• 9 months ago

The answer is fairly obvious, humanity is always more obsessed with potential value than actual value. Elon sells that potential very well, but he does actually follow up in a decent way.

Turning the impossible into late is a legitimate business strategy, because you create markets that weren't there before (like cheap satellite launches).

And he has a history of doing this, and he's trying to do it again with optimus and robotaxi. There's massive potential in humanoid robots and robotaxis, which is why people are willing to take a risk. You might think that's irrational, and that's fine. Others do not.

Compare this to other car companies, they don't offer any vision of changing the future in any major way or bringing new products to market. That is boring and predictable. Still valuable, but not as much as Tesla.

specialist• 9 months ago

Me neither. Which is prob why I remain poor (comparatively).

Now that our domestic grid storage market has "crossed the chasm" -- new energy with solar & battery is cheap enough and quickest to deploy -- methinks future Tesla will do fine. Surely making up for any lost vehicle revenue.

nicoburns• 9 months ago

For the same reason that Bitcoin is valuable and property prices in many markets are insane. It's valuable because other people consider it valuable. The stock market stopped being an accurate measure of the underlying value of the assets it tracks decades ago, if it ever was.

JumpCrisscross9• 9 months ago

never understood why Tesla valuation is orders of magnitude higher than honda

Tesla has solved the problem of unit profitably manufacturing EVs. Outside America and other petrostates, these are broadly accepted to be the future of transportation. (It’s getting its ass kicked by BYD, which didn’t distract itself with a Cybertruck or what increasingly looks like an Optimus follow-on. But being the only American challenger in a new economy is not worthless.)

Tesla’s also lead by a man who has consistently made money for his investors. Even when bets are bad, e.g. Twitter, he’s financially engineered an outcome that ensured, at the very least, nobody who backed him lost money.

Tesla being public, he can’t provide that sort of assurance to everyone who buys at any price. But he can at least credibly pretend to do that for anyone who buys in or near a primary.

Rover2225• 9 months ago

Nice to see some rational thought around here about Tesla and Musk's role.

traceroute66• 9 months ago

Tesla has solved the problem of unit profitably manufacturing EVs.

Well, you can say "profitably" because Tesla drivers seem to be surprisingly willing to put up with corners being cut in order to achieve said "profitability" ... panel gaps, cheap interiors and lousy software. :)

justapassenger3• 9 months ago

Tesla has solved the problem of unit profitably manufacturing EVs. Outside America and other petrostates, these are broadly accepted to be the future of transportation. (It’s getting its ass kicked by BYD, which didn’t distract itself with a Cybertruck or what increasingly looks like an Optimus follow-on. But being the only American challenger in a new economy is not worthless.)

They solved it by borrowing from the future and gutting their R&D. That's the main cost in the car industry and Tesla basically just stopped developing new models many years ago, to the point that they struggle with a simple refresh.

Tesla’s also lead by a man who has consistently made money for his investors. Even when bets are bad, e.g. Twitter, he’s financially engineered an outcome that ensured, at the very least, nobody who backed him lost money.

That man also walks a very thin line between engineering outcomes and fraud, let's not forget that.

dkobia• 9 months ago

Besides being a meme stock, Tesla is also in the enviable position of owning its entire stack - software, hardware, chips, manufacturing etc., unlike Honda that has many critical components built by other manufacturers and not tightly integrated with the software. It is therefore well placed to make much more revenue per vehicle, if only the owner of the company can get out of its way.

justapassenger3• 9 months ago

Owning entire stack has benefits for sure, especially if you're dominating market. But it also comes at a huge cost - you now need to pay for R&D for the whole stack yourself.

Tesla was dreaming of dominating market. But it looks like it peaked already and its sales are falling. Having to do R&D for entire stack without growth is a very very costly proposal. It often results in just not doing R&D, and falling behind.

plqbfbv• 9 months ago

This is far from a new story. What is notable is that the failure is so widespread it's prompting government inquiry and action.

When I still had my reddit account, maybe 95% of battery failures showing up in r/TeslaLounge or r/TeslaModel3 were from 2021 models. If I understood correctly by reading the many threads, 2021 it's around the time that Tesla changed the manufacturing process to seal the battery, so this is likely the initial batch of batteries with the new sealing process (perhaps not so refined/polished).

For most of these cars the powertrain and battery are still under warranty (8y or 100k/120k miles). As noted in the article, Tesla normally replaces failed packs with refurbished packs of about the same capacity/degradation, which are bound to fail sooner than brand new ones of course.

I don't see a way out of this for Tesla except to recognize the manufacturing defect and waive the mileage warranty limit (and only hold to the 8y age) when a 2021 car rolls in to swap the battery pack.

Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures

Related Stories