Tesla

Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.

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Filed Dec. 20, 2023, 11 a.m. GMT

Shreyansh Jain was ecstatic in March when he picked up his first electric vehicle, a brand-new 2023 Tesla Model Y. He used a sizable chunk of family savings to buy it with cash.

“We were over the moon!” said Jain, an electronics engineer in Cambridge, England.

His exuberance came to a “grinding halt” one day later, with 115 miles on the odometer, Jain told Reuters. As he drove with his wife and three-year-old daughter, he suddenly lost steering control as he made a slow turn into their neighborhood. The vehicle’s front-right suspension had collapsed, and parts of the car loudly scraped the road as it came to a stop.

“They were absolutely petrified,” Jain said of his wife and daughter. “If we were on a 70-mile-per-hour highway, and this would have happened, that would have been catastrophic.”

At 8:30a the line for the Tesla charger was about out to Dorset St

I may be stating the obvious here, or I may be completely crazy, but I'm just going to put this out there because it's been rolling around in my mind for the last couple of days.

Less than 2 week old Model Y owner here. 61+ years of age. I've been a software engineer for over 4 decades. My wife and I took our first 'test', over 200+ mile trip, with the MY this weekend to rehearse a super charger stop or two and the notion of trusting the car software to lead us completely through the experience.

I just don't know how the legacy auto makers catch up to this. Driving and owning a Tesla is just so much more than the car itself. The entire experience has an aspect of cohesion that, I quite frankly, never thought could ever exist given the seemingly fragmented world we seem to currently find ourselves in.

Knowing this now and experiencing it for myself, it becomes clear to me that any EV directed venom, doubt, distrust, aversion, dismissal, and so forth could only be fueled by a legacy car industry that knows very well that it missed the boat. And by a wide margin. And now they have to catch up, and honestly I don't see how they catch up. You see engineering, especially software engineering, is all momentum based. The hard part about any software project is prepping, laying the foundation, and gathering together to start the momentum. Once the momentum is there, the project can flow, extend, expand, reach out, and fulfill. And Tesla has the momentum, will have the momentum, and such a lead that it's almost laughable, at least from where I sit in my understanding of such things.

So here is my crazy insight in a nutshell.

*) Legacy auto makers know they missed, and they're way behind. And they know they're way behind.

*) To cover for it, for both themselves and their interests, they discredit and hurl stones at those who have innovated. Don't look at Tesla! Hey SQUIRREL! Look over here! OMG Tesla's frunk couldn't hold all of this lady's groceries, etc. (insert all manner of negativity, nonsense, and what have you)

*) In the meantime come buy our hybrids. Because, yeah that's kinda the best we can come up with right now. Or just buy another ICE car from us because, yeah EV's (insert more flow of negativity for cover, gotta keep the stock price up)

*) However while under this cover, they are plotting, no actually working on, the ultimate betrayal of their loyal followers. Because once they have something EV'ish, which will just be a fraction of Tesla's current overall total experience at this point, they will announce to their loyals that now EVs are precisely the thing that they should buy now.

Even if I'm completely off, at least having a small taste of where some forward thinking engineering can take us (i.e. the entire Tesla 'transportation experience'), has been a real, unexpected treat. Thanks for letting me share.