Frankly, I think we should take this kind of stuff as a moment to consider where we could rebuild public infrastructure to prevent people having to own cars in the first place.
Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
You mean the front fell off? Damn, Elon should move into ship building...
spoiler
asdfasdfsadfasfasdf
The ones that are safe
I knew I wouldn't have to scroll down too far to find this comment. Thank you.
I divested from Tesla years ago.
I still feel great about it.
"a Minor Issue"
So much talk about Tesla. It's like people don't realize Tesla is not even relevant anymore. They were first with good electric cars, but their cars all have reliability problems and tech problems.
In the mean time, other manufacturers like Kia is eating their lunch without much publicity. :)
KIA sold 15,000 EV's in 2023. Tesla sold 1.8 million. That's about 0.8% of their lunch. I think the publicity is appropriately sized.
Didn't know it was such a huge difference, thank you :)
Unfortunately Tesla is still relevant in that you can actually buy a Tesla sedan or suv with very little hassle.
Meanwhile I’ve been on a waitlist for years for a GM EV that has been “launched” but with not a peep about my order.
One of my friends got so dicked around by dealers and waiting he bought a Tesla, and it wasn’t even on his list because of lack of CarPlay.
I've seen bolts and bolt EUVs in stock pretty readily, but Not sure which GM EV you are referencing. If you are still looking for a small SUV, I really like the Nissan Aryia and VW ID.4, and those should be easy to get. Kia dealers are shit almost across the board, and I have doubts about longevity.
Bolt is too small, the ID4 can’t fit 3 car seats comfortably either, and the Aryia is too small and is a sad excuse for an ev, especially given the legacy of the Leaf.
The Buzz comes close but isn’t widely available, the EV9 would fit the bill were it not for its excessive size. That size also rules out the R1T.
What I want is essentially a lifted full-sized wagon, which in ICE terms is like an Outback or Sorento.
Enter GM with the Lyriq/Blazer/Prologue. Perfect dimensions, reasonable range.
Except they haven’t shipped them, and they announced they are stripping CarPlay starting this year.
Lucid has an SUV that might do if I was rich.
Or I can walk into a Tesla store today and buy a model Y with more range, less weight, a great charging network with a future proof connector, and a more proven platform than the unproven and rather piggish Ultium platform. I could buy the Y, put my fucking child car seats in and be done.
Now I’m not buying a Tesla because fuck Elon and fuck not having CarPlay, but you can see why they are so relevant.
There are simply too many unfilled niches in the EV market.
I had not considered that many kids. Yeah, not really much on the market. Subaru needs to get their shit together
Subaru’s EV future is tied to Toyota, and Toyota is fucking around.
They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV on their own unless it’s a rebadge or repackage, maybe in 5 years when EV components get more commoditized.
They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV
Yes they do. It's just they're choosing to spend all of it on hydrogen, which the Japanese companies still think is better than batteries.
Supposedly hydrogen cars are a solved problem now, all the investment is going into infrastructure. The ability to fill your tank in a few minutes is useless if there's nowhere to fill up.
I was referring to Subaru not having enough capital.
But in terms of Hydrogen, it is either a product of fossil fuel extraction via natural gas, or a product of electrolysis at a huge cost of electricity which is better spent charging an EV.
It’s never gonna be widely adopted(which is why Toyota is pivoting after their ceo stepped down).
I have 4 kids and I don't want to pay over 100k for a car. Believe it or not, there is currently no EV option on the market. It's looking like the EV9 will be the first...
Have you looked at a Volvo XC40/XC60 or even EX30, if available where you live? They're not perfect, but spacious, very pleasant to drive, generally very reliable, safe, with decent range and CarPlay (though not Android Auto).
Hmm. In Europe nobody talks about GM for electric cars, it's all Kia now.... Do you have Kia around?
Europe is large and diverse, what country are you talking about?
The local Hyundai/KIA dealer dicked me around when I went to test drive a car. They also add absurd markups to the EV6. There are already headlines about KIA asking dealers not to do similar markups on the EV9.
Also the reliability track record for Kia is mixed for ICE cars, they made defective oil-consuming engines and tried to cover it up.
Their EVs show a similar pattern.
https://m.carcomplaints.com/Kia/EV6/2022/ https://m.carcomplaints.com/Tesla/Model_3/2022/
Tesla being mediocre doesn’t mean Kia isn’t shit-tier.
I think the problem with a number of their reliability issues is that they essentially have (bad) agile in the automotive industry.
They were first with good electric cars, but their cars all have reliability problems and tech problems.
So they weren't, in fact, the first with good electric cars?
It's all relative. When their first cars came, nobody else even had cars that could go that speed and that range. That was considered very good back then.
Now in 2024, a good electric car needs to be reliable and safe. Tesla is struggling with that and have focused their attention on their self driving capabilities, which also has had many issues and accidents.
Uh, a car always needs to be reliable and safe, not just now in the faraway future of 2024. Tesla was first because they rushed the development and refuse to acknowledge or fix the problems
They were first because no one else tried. It's that simple. Companies have been dicking around for decades with the hybrids, electric assist, alternate fuels, etc., and no one went whole hog before Tesla. Then* every auto maker on the planet started rushing to catch up.
Even if you discount Tesla's early lead and fast forward to 2017 when the Model 3 went on sale and GM was offering what appeared to be real competition in the Bolt, by 2021 Tesla has sold over a million 3's to GM's 100,000. And then GM had to recall all the bolts it had ever sold because they kept catching fire.
2019 is the same story with the Ford Mustang EV. Pretty decent, no real problems (other than their glass roof flying off sometimes...) but the model Y out sells it by hundreds of thousands, even beating Toyota one year for most sold globally. It's the second best selling EV SUV behind the model Y. Ford sold something like 10K of them in Q3 2023. Tesla sold over 400,000 Model Y's and 3's that same quarter.
The other car companies in the US at least just aren't putting in the effort to match those numbers. They don't want to put their money on the line.
Have they tried dragging the Teslas out of the environment?
Into another environment?
Hilarious headline
"Front wheel fell off" could mean a bunch of different things here. If the wheel actually became wholly separated from the vehicle, at 15,000 miles, that would most likely be due to incorrectly torqued lug nuts after a tire rotation. Those torque specs are important, and undertorqued lug nuts can work themselves loose, putting undue stresses on the lug bolts, which snap, and there you go. Such a situation would not be Tesla's fault, rather the fault of whoever rotated the tires.
Or, "front wheel fell off" could mean something like a ball joint or tie rod end failure, which could cascade into a very unusual wheel position, easily described as "fell off," while still being connected to the car by the strut mount. That kind of failure would be Tesla's fault, and would align with the mentioned "collapsed suspensions."
In any case, the car would make incredibly horrible noises and vibrations well before a catastrophic failure. These kinds of mechanical suspension parts do not go from "perfectly fine" to "completely failed" in the blink of an eye, even if they do fail far before they should. I'm not putting the blame for the failure on the driver of the car, but I have no problem blaming the driver for letting a situation like that get to the point of catastrophic failure on a brand new car.
Edit: @TheChurn - care to tell me what I said to deserve your downvote?
Jain is one of tens of thousands of Tesla owners who have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts, according to a Reuters review of thousands of Tesla documents. 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.
You got a downvote from me for making shit up about something other than the issues being reported.
I didn't make up anything. I'm not saying Tesla doesn't have some serious QC issues. Clearly they do.
What I'm saying is that "wheel fell off" and "suspension collapse" are not specific enough descriptions to know exactly what part(s) are failing prematurely or why or how one failure cascades into other damage. My descriptions above of potential failure scenarios are reasonably probable. I will also stand behind the notion that 115-mile guy had to have experienced horrible vibration, or scraping, or noise for at least several miles before "the vehicle's front-right suspension ... collapsed" -- whatever that actually means.
You are still making things up by assuming every failure involves prior noises and symptoms.
The wheel falls off. It falls off. It falls the fuck off. Turning your Tesla into a tripod, and spinning you into a dimension of pissed off you have never been in before in your life.
You want to make sure your mechanic isn't sick on lugnut day before letting him work on your Tesla.
Before or after the steering wheel falls off. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/8/23630358/tesla-steering-wheel-bolt-nhtsa-model-y
they also have a minor issue about bursting into flames
'Minor'
Backlog it, low priority.
Mhm, knows more about manufacturing than anyone alive on Earth.
I guess it'll be fun/sad to watch StarShip 3 either detonate on the launch pad or before it passes the Karman Line.
Rockets are harder than cars, so hopefully this means Elon is too stupid to contribute anything but haughty goals while the actual engineers make sure we don’t blow up any astronauts.
He did ask them to make the rocket pointy so it looks like the rocket in Sacha Baron Cohen's "The Dictator".
And they complied.