Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom (opens in new tab)

I guess because most of their competitors are 100 yrs old? Making cars is really, really hard. Tesla’s first mass produced car was only ten years ago, and their top two models 6 and 3 years ago. The average age of their entire fleet is in the low single digits.

In the car world that’s just getting started.

Their valuation is three times larger than Toyota, yet they manufacture only 10% as much cars a year. It’s still deeply rooted in hopes of future expansion and innovations, lack of which they might not survive.

Funny enough I can comment on this with some data…

I was involved in a study a few years back that looked (in part) at how engineering undergraduates defined entrepreneurship and startup. It fortunately the results from that part ended up on the cutting room floor to focus out main paper on something else…

Generally, to undergraduate engineers, entrepreneurship and startups are defined by the following things:

Being in Silicon Valley/San Francisco

Doing something related to technology

Being financially successful (yes…noting another finding was that they often subconsciously conflated revenue and profit, but only when told the financial data was from a “startup”)

Being controlled by their founder

In mentality, I guess. If I was pressed to give a definition right now, I'd say a company stops being a startup when they have self-sustaining revenue without continual outside investments and subsidies propping them up. That hasn't been the case for Tesla the entire 20 years of the company's existence.

Also, valuation is effectively meaningless. That valuation has nearly zero correlation to Tesla's actual value.

tesla is a startup because it allows less strict oversight from the public. “startup” seems to now simply mean “burn cash until market dominance” or “regulations have mot caught up to our industry”. it is not an actual startup, just a court of public opinion one, allowing it to do shady shit under the guise of progress at any cost

> How is Tesla still considered a startup?

It is a public company, so by definition it is not a startup.

> 80billion valuation

You mean 800 billion valuation?

Do they move fast, though? The Model S is ancient history now, and the Model X is aging too. Both models are in need of a successor.

To me teslas are still annoying and dangerous because of a bunch of small things last time i rented one, like buying a great computer, but the screen colours are inverted:

1) No buttons but shit quality touch "areas in places you have to guess" on steering wheel, is straight up dangerous, and incredibly annoying because you can't "get a feel" for anything you have to do, ie. turn lights, wipers etc.

2) No other knobs for sound, climate etc. instead touch screen. Same thing stupid, slow and dangerous.

3) No speedometer, "just look constantly to the right and down" ok now it's getting in to joke territory.

4) Shit interior.

A Renault Zoe cheap mini car is easier in day to day use because of this.

> They move fast and break things.

You forgot the third: they (Silicon Valley) also change the world. For the better. Most of my (and my family’s) every day work and fun are coming from SV. I would not give it up for anything else. If occasionally breaking things is the price - I am more than willing to pay it.

HN is suddenly anti-innovation

You must be a 100yr old conglomerate, those companies never do shady things or have failures in quality control.

Wouldn’t it be more fair to compare a Chinese made Tesla to a Chinese made BYD? Surely, some Chinese consumer sentiment has been developed since they compete head on in the Chinese market?

What does your poor choice of ICE cars have to say about Tesla though? Having a crap experience across the board isn't a redeeming feature you think it is.

Infotainment is not a cars purpose but an addition. If you need to play video games and watch Netflix then you should not be driving.

Aren't everybody using android auto (or its Apple equivalent) these days anyway?

The builtin infotainment system is usually just a second thought that exist just to showcase something in the showroom and setup android auto at first use.

> loose fits, and an interior that rattles until it drives one to violence

Confirmed. Friends in the car maintenance business have witnessed for years a quality fall (materials etc).

"Infotainment", I hope I will not have the experience (apart maybe from removing some), but my last car was the first one with a sound system that hissed.

How is your anecdote supposed to counter cold hard data gathered at the level of a whole country?

What do you mean by “ICE cars?”

To be fair, infotainment is a relatively recent feature of cars.

Were they luxury cars, like teslas?

Lucky you, a month out of warranty mine had an issue that was $1000 to fix. It was, IMO, clearly a manufacturing defect they should have handled but did not. It was really fun being stuck at a grocery store with my infant in below-freezing temperatures with a car that would not start!

I suppose that was a sarcasm/irony ...

China's ability to manufacturer at both speed and scale is indeed impressive and scary. I think I saw some Navy worries that China is able to build naval ships and carriers at speeds well beyond the U.S. capability, and that within just decades, they will have double the ships.

Not considering assembly to be manufacturing is an interesting take. Counter example: Apple (innivation and all that) and Foxconn.

Assembly absolutely is manufacturing.

OP is comparing them against the legacy car making industry - they are still a 'young' player by a long way, and a relative newcomer.

Besides, the SEC scandal is pretty small-beer in terms of auto industry scandals - see the VW emissions scandal, the safety scandal of Toyota which is only just kicking off, General Motors ignition switch scandal, going all the way back to the classic defective gas tank scandal from Ford...

Here is one source: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

The interior is cheap. Even my 10 year old BMW 1 series interior feels better and is much sturdier.

Totally agree with you on interior feel. However, the acceleration is tunable in the settings whenever you want.

According to reviews, the refreshed Model 3 has a considerably improved interior. Here's one from Motor Trend:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2024-tesla-model-3-highla...

I agree on the Model S, some of the interior feels cheap (but some does not). In particular the panels around the door interior don't mount very well or stay put. The rest of the interior seems good though. This coming from an Audi A8, which had a really great interior.

We had a model s, the software crashed constantly. Or just locked up.

Nothing like having your dashboard go black at 70 mph to instill confidence in your car.

My partner and I share a Tesla. It's 'mained' under her account. About 25%-50% of the times I enter the driver's seat - it varies depending on the version it's on - it forgets my driver profile and I have to reconfigure the mirrors and seat. This bug was first reported in 2020 IIRC and never fixed. Never buying another Tesla. Their only advantage is the network of superchargers.

Their software is strong compared to other car manufacturers. Which is a fairly low bar to cross.

Their software is buggy and has a lot of friction points compared to mobile phones which is a high bar to cross.

The catch is that a lot of the other car manufacturers supports CarPlay and Android Auto which allow you to have a better experience.

I've had my car for about the same length of time. It is fun to drive when it's working. The first two years were uneventful, but it was evident that the build quality was subpar and the software substandard. And I'm not referring to the entertainment system here, but rather the software that controls the car itself, which falls short compared to my Volvo XC60. The fly-by-wire system lacks the necessary redundancies and telemetry/logging to fail safely. My experience involved the car's computer malfunctioning while in lane-keeping cruise control (Autopilot, not FSD). The vehicle would abruptly and violently swerve out of the lane, crossing over the white line into adjacent lanes and towards barriers. Tesla initially attributed these issues to wheel alignment or tracking. It took several service appointments and months to convince them otherwise, requiring me to mount a GoPro in my car and dangerously recreate the issue, which randomly occurred after about 45 minutes of cruise control driving. It wasn't until I contacted their PR department and threatened to involve the press that they took the matter seriously.

What a perilously flawed failure mode. Yet, throughout these months, during which the car swerved erratically at least 20 times, no alerts were triggered, nor were errors or crash dumps logged that could be detected by their technicians or the main office in California. It required GoPro footage from inside my car to highlight the issue.

Their service process is Kafkaesque. Phone support is ineffective, and you're relegated to using a text box in the mobile app that only accepts small image attachments. Videos cannot be uploaded directly; they provide an email address, but emails can;'t contain links or they will be blocked and emails with large attachments won't work. Each interaction feels like starting from scratch, as they don't seem to review the history or notes of your issue.

As for the humidity or fog in your headlights, they claim it's within specifications and will dissipate once the car warms up. There's so much more, phantom breaking at highway speeds, exaggerated range estimates, slow headlight dimming, headlights that need constant re-calibration, terrible rain sensors and wiper modes, etc. etc.

Same here, have a Model 3 for 1.5 years and so far my best car ever. Parts and material aren't top notch but I feel I get my money's worth.

Unless the car becomes a pile of junk under me I don't see all the hate. As with any popular product, you'll find people with several sigmas of bad experience.

Not the OP, but I've daily driven a Model 3 for several years now and have a list. It's not a huge list, and some of them aren't unique to Tesla, but a lot are.

Problems that I think are unique to the Tesla:

Even after 4+ years of driving, I still hate the door handles. They require so much more dexterity than "normal" car door handles. You gotta aim your thumb at a quarter sized spot, then push in so that your fingers have a chance to catch the lever before you pull your thumb away. Normal car doors are stupid enough that they could be opened by a lobster. When the Model 3 handles freeze (which happens where I live), the user manual instructs you to hit the handles with your fist. Like a caveman. How about real door handles?

The entire top sheet of glass spontaneously shattered while just sitting in my garage. I was sweeping the other side of my garage one afternoon when there was what sounded like a gunshot. I looked over and saw that the top class window had just fully cracked diagonally across the entire pane. There were no rock chips on its front edge (a common precursor to full shatter), no kids standing on it (a less common precursor). My best guess is that the body of the car warmed up in the garage after coming in from the cold, but the glass itself wasn't yet warm enough and that was enough to cause thermal expansion that was incompatible with it wanting to remain whole. Cost $1500 to replace, and Tesla refused to cover it under warranty, claiming it was not a manufacturing defect. No appeal, no second opinion. Also, it was during covid, and it took 7 weeks for the glass to arrive. So for 7 weeks, I had a very big, open, sunroof.

Then there's the UI. This is my single biggest gripe. Parts of it are objectively terrible.

The part of the UI that tells you how fast your car is going is, compared to the rest of the UI, microscopic, and rendered in a grey on white background. It's not in your line of sight, which requires you to turn to look at it. I figured out a hack though - let someone else, like my wife, tell me when I'm speeding. That only works when she's in the car though. When she's not in the car and tells me I'm speeding, I tend to ignore her.

When you're stopped at a stop, there are dancing grey car and truck models all over the place. There was a tiny old Toyota pickup truck next to me the other day, and the UI wanted to simultaneously render it as a traffic cone, a big box truck, a motorcycle, and then a sedan. It never could make up its mind, and decided to just place it sideways growing halfway out of the model of a box truck that was meant to represent the Toyota Corolla that was in front of me. What's the point of devoting more than a third of the UI to this endeavor? To show me how wrong the computer always is about what's around me?

Here's a fun one that made it to my list super early into my ownership experience: sometimes the UI will reboot while you're driving 75MPH in the middle of rush hour traffic. That makes for some serious puckering, even if it's happened 10 times before. No worries though, after driving blind for about 2 minutes it comes back online.

One time, it came back online to the "romance" app, showing a lovely fireplace and adjust the fans to gently blow warm air on me to set the mood. I was not in the mood. I was using the route navigation to get me someplace. Instead of knowing what exit to take, I was enjoying a warm fire. On an August afternoon in Los Angeles rush hour traffic.

Then there's the Autopilot experience. Not Full Self Driving, but just Autopilot. When you're using it to stay within lanes, it'll aggressively try to center itself in the lane, which is good for staying in the lane, but if you pass an onramp, and the right lane line vanishes for that onramp to merge into the lane you're in, the car will violently align itself between the left lane line, and the onramp's right lane lane. It'll happily do that whether you're going 20 MPH or 100 MPH. I don't use Autopilot any more.

When I go to work in the morning, while backing out the overlays that show your rear and side cameras will appear, but imagery from the cameras will often take over a minute to appear. But not always, and it's that part that's the most unsettling. Why be slow sometimes and not others?

Let's talk about the front trunk latch. Is there an actual trick to close it the first time, gently? I still don't know how to best close it. I don't think I'm alone either. Yesterday while at a Super Charger I saw two different people trying to close their frunk at least 3 to 4 times each. One of them even got into an argument with their passenger for how best to do it. I rarely use my frunk anymore because I hate trying to close it.

What's crazy to me is: despite all of what I just said, damn I love driving it.

It's why I think Tesla is stupid for not pursing a bare bones, "dumb" version of the Model 3. Give it physical buttons, no driving assist fluff, real door handles, minimal glass. I'd trade in my current Model 3 for that, no question.

What else have you driven?

I always find this sentiment about BMW surprising - iDrive is my favorite of the OEM infotainment systems.

It would be much more productive to ask why rather than to dismiss my observations as some sort of grunge against the CEO. See my other comments.

I also have a Volvo XC60 with lane keeping, I find it's much more reliable than Autopilot and doesn't dangerous "phantom break" at highway speeds for no reason. See my other comment for some more, but not an exhaustive list, of the issues I have with my Model 3.

Inspection interval is the same, but maintenance interval is different.

I think it specifies in the article that the interval is longer because Teslas don’t need oil

Dacias are definitely not reliable.

CR is biased garbage

Squeaking interiors and misaligned doors are not “significant faults” at TUV.

> This implies we need an inspection regime in America.

Many states require yearly inspections already.

> Fifteen states have a periodic (annual or biennial) safety inspection program, while Maryland requires a safety inspection and Alabama requires a VIN inspection on sale or transfer of vehicles which were previously registered in another state. An additional 16 states require periodic emissions inspections.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

Many states (or all the ones I have lived in anyway) have regular, mandatory inspections.

Because faults can include items such as the first aid kit expired, tyre inflator expired, headlights out of alignment, a crack in the windshield wiper, worn tyres, worn brakes, or low washer fluid.

These are not initial build quality issues.

> This makes me a feel a lot better about choosing a Toyota over a Tesla back in 2019.

To anyone not into cars I'll give a simple advice: unless you really do a lot of high-speed highway driving (that'd be 80mph+ / 130km/h+, european highways speed), simply buy a Toyota.

I don't think you can go very wrong buying a Toyota.

And this comes as a german cars lover.

The only reason wife traded her Toyota CH-R for a BMW is because we do lots of (european) highway driving and we felt the CH-R was too noisy on the highway (at 80 mph: at 55 mph it's totally fine).

Buy a Toyota, make sure to do the maintenance needed in official Toyota dealership so you can extended the Toyota warranty for as long as possible.

And you're good to go.

Even Toyota is moving in that direction. They put their remote start under a subscription model and to my knowledge haven’t backed off it despite the initial backlash. [1]

And GM is removing CarPlay and android auto entirely from their head units. Under the guise of “safety”.[2]

Frankly unless consumers react strongly, I don’t see the car industry righting the ship with their anti consumer crap.

I have a 2009 Toyota. Arguably the sweet spot for features. Have a backup camera integrated into the tailgate but minimal otherwise computerized stuff. The A/C controls are the traditional 3 dial setup which is ideal for me, I can adjust it without looking down at all. I had to pull over to turn off the heat when I borrowed my in-laws F-150 for a day. I did swap the head unit for a kenwood with wireless CarPlay and integrated dashcam.

Given what I had seen from new models, I’m going to be sticking with my 09 Tacoma for a while longer at least.

Even my wife’s 2018 Honda Pilot had surging issues at low RPMs that was caused by dirty transmission fluid. Nothing that would throw an error, luckily my mechanic had just seen the same issues before. Her car has had more issues than mine honestly.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...

Right? It's remarkable seeing people here defending Tesla while saying "I've only had a few major issues in four years"

I've had a Hyundai for ten years and literally crashed it into a tree and it had no major issues for five years after that (and I gave it away and it ran for another five until it protected someone from a head on collision!). Now I'm on a ten year old Honda and haven't don't anything except regular maintenance.

It's wild to see people saying they have only had a few issues with a car a couple of years old. That's a problem!!

Toyota has never understood infotainment software. It’s my one and only complaint of the brand after owning many of their cars. They need to just give up.

which model Toyota?

The only mechanical fault I've had with my model 3 in five years of ownership was the bushings in the front upper control arms (part of the suspension, for anyone unfamiliar with car suspension parts.) Tesla replaced the UCAs under warranty. This occurred at around 50k miles, which is a fairly early but not unheard of failure timeframe (normally, I'd expect UCAs to to last around 100k miles and for it to be a crap shoot as to whether the bushings or the ball joint fail.)

My personal advice is to wait until 2025. Many other automakers will be releasing models with NACS support, which will immediately make them much more usable in real life.

Tesla also outcompetes other cars on the price/range ratio, so it's the best choice if you want a car for road trips and if you're price-sensitive.

I'm going to lease Lucid Air once they release NACS-based versions.

I don't own a Tesla but this brand is so volatile when it comes to internet forums, I wouldn't let it sway you.

Talk to a person IRL that doesn't sit on social media and ask how they like it.

This is like going to the Dell laptop support forums and concluding that 100% of Dells are bad.

Because Musk is an idiot it's fashionable to hate on Tesla. But there are plenty of us out there who have had an amazing experience. We had one minor issue in 4 years and it was fixed extremely promptly. The car is amazing.

I drive a f150 lightning, and honestly there is no competition. The Tesla is still a much better vehicle.

Probably the same reason people go through a BMW every few years: leasing cars so you are always driving new cars.

> why are you buying an electric car in the first place

When you compare the current Model 3 feature-wise to most other brands, it's a no brainer. You need to fork out a lot more than 50k to get the assist and safety features, leather seats, seat heating, power seats, cameras, sound system, heated steering wheel, matrix headlights, backseat control screen, 4wd, performance and so on. Not having to deal with sales people and regular maintenance are bonuses.

And if you're in Europe, you charge it a home or on street parking with no hassle of going to a charging/gas station.

> 4 cars in 10 years is 3 cars too many

If you’re constantly totalling them, sure. If you’re re-selling, it’s totally fine to show a preference for new vehicles. I don’t. But I also don’t care that much for cars or driving; to each their own.

Well, N=4 in this case. But sure its no research

You should try asking it about the heated seats in cars that don't have then unlocked.

They dropped the price of a new model a few times recently which meant used cars dropped that much more. I think that’s what is being referenced here.

Otherwise, the (mostly) static nature of Tesla models kept the used Tesla market in decent shape

I bought a GTI in 2018 for $28k. I could fetch North of $20k for it today. Granted its light mileage (37.5k miles). It's still held its value because it was a sub-$30k popular vehicle in a good year for reliability and going into a period of car scarcity.

The big factor is how far above the $30k floor do you reach. A rav4 hybrid keeps a much higher percentage of its value than a rav4 prime.

My Maverick went up in price after I bought it at MRSP. But that was a market anomaly.

There’s usually a drop some but that amount is excessive.

Japanese cars aren’t

The manual clearly states that the breaking discs need to be cleaned every, what was it, 25k km. Thats a job for a mechanic. Also in the DIY section it says that the brakes should be burnished as well.

It's not "degraded" if it has rust. Brakes rust if you look at them too hard and then they clear up when you brake again.

There is a service screen in the UI with alerts and details on when tires were last changed. There is an alert for windshield fluid.

It should be possible to equip the car with enough sensors to detect or predict maintenance needs. Tesla's approach is, however, still incomplete. The powertrain is sensored enough, suspension/brakes/tires aren't.

Brakes are probably going to last for at least 100k miles easily. Mine are still fine after 150k miles.

Wait, Tesla does not have that?

If not, that is really, really dumb, and there is no way to justify not doing that. Especially for car that probably has more sensors, electronics and software than most cars (that also provide such info).

The regular inspection for ICE vehicles is centered around oil changes, air filter change (engine, not cabin), valve checks and distribution chain/belt changes. Everything else, from brake pads (wear sensors entered the chat), tires (life varies a lot, from 10k km to over 40k km for cars), windshield wipers (no determined lifetime, change it when it breaks) to brake fluid (recommended to change every 3 years) are done opportunistically with some oil changes.

Without an ICE, the only regular maintenance you need is brake fluid. Everything else depends loosely on kilometers and style of driving and quality of materials (wipers).

Assuming this, no scheduled services, is Tesla policy, it is very well possible that Tesla doesn't have task lists in place for said checks. Which would be bad...

Seems so, the official owners manual foresees some maintenance, but there is no regular service schedule.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E95DAAD...

Edit: interestingly, the German link seems to show something else: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/de_us/GUID-E95DAAD...

Every quarter? Even when driving a 15 year old combustion car I have never had a car that needed to go for service that often! My new EV has a two-year service interval to check the coolant and brakes.

I swear that most model 3's I see in Europe have their headlights adjusted up so high that they're still looking for German aircraft. It's blinding.

Oh yes, maintenance on condition! Great concept, but it requires regular inspection to appraise said condition. Otherwise it is just "until failure".

That's just freedom of speech[1] /s

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/tesla-claims-its-f...

I think what he is saying is that there's a dealership service visit immediately before an inspection. That would certainly decrease inspection rejects.

A great way to manipulate inspection statistics.

> Those latter two are, in modern cars anyway, lubricated for "life".

I don't believe there is a modern gearbox where the manufacturer of said gearbox says it never needs oil changes. The vehicle manufacturer might say that, but not the gearbox manufacturer.

Case in point - my 2021 Wrangler has a ZF 8 speed auto that Jeep says never needs an oil change. ZF says it needs an oil and filter change every 100,00km.

> On the cheaper end of cars, a lot of those are not maintained regularly,

Heh, by this logic Tesla as somehow expensive brand should be wa-a-ay below Dacia.

Exactly this. My Duster cost me 6 years of Mercedes service fees to buy outright.

Yeah mine is doing ok (2018 Duster). Hasn’t needed anything major doing to it other than tyres brakes and normal service stuff. Driving it to Iceland this year from UK via Norway so will probably kill it at some point.

Sounds like you are not valuing your time.

I suppose it depends on what parts are rusty and how rusty. Surface rust on rotors is not really problematic. I'm wondering if it's a subjective visual inspection vs a test of brake function.

TÜV competitor DEKRA stopped publishing their "fault report" because most cars are nowadays fixed before being checked by Tüv/Dekra. ( https://www.dekra.de/de/dekra-gebrauchtwagenreport/)

That's why the buyer demographic of a car is the most significant factor in the ranking. Cars used by companies, seniors, wealthy individuals or cabriolets have a good ranking. Meanwhile cars bought majorily by frugal or smart customers (Dacia, Tesla) tend to have bad rankings. This is because it's much more cost efficient to let Tüv/Dekra check you car before doing any repairs. Also what is ignored in the ranking is that some faults are much more important than others. Afaik a bad parking light can have the same influence on the ranking as a broken down transmission.