Written byMa Xiaolei.
EditZhou Zhou.
DesignZhao Haoran.
Reuters, by Hyunjoo Jin, Kevin Krolicki, Marie Mannes, Steve Stecklow
Shreyansh Jain is an electronics engineer based in Cambridge, England. In March 2023, he took out a large sum of his savings to buy a Tesla Model Y, which was the first electric car in his life. When the new car arrived, he was very excited. "We couldn't be happier!He said.
However, after only one day, his joy was gone.
After driving 115 miles (184 kilometers) in his new car, Jain drove slowly into his neighborhood. Suddenly, the vehicle steered out of control, the right front suspension fell off, and there was a harsh grinding sound against the road surface. At the time, his wife and 3-year-old daughter were in the car.
They were terrified, and if they had been on a 70-mile-per-hour highway, the consequences would have been dire. Recalling the accident, Jain still feels afraid.
According to a detailed estimate, the repair required manual repair work such as rebuilding the suspension and replacing the steering column, which took nearly 40 hours and cost more than 1$40,000.
Tesla, on the other hand, refused to cover the cost of repairs, blaming the accident on "the suspension system was previously damaged." ”
Jain said the car had not been in an accident before the suspension failure and was sure it hadn't hit anything. "How can a new car that has been in hand for less than 24 hours break like this?He said.
The place where the suspension of the Jain vehicle broke.
Reuters reviewed thousands of Tesla documents and found that tens of thousands of Tesla owners, like Jain, suffered suspension or steering failures at the new car stage.
Combined with these documents, foreign media interviewed more than 20 car owners and 9 former Tesla managers or service technicians and found that these "stubborn diseases" can be traced back to at least seven years ago, and all Tesla models and major markets around the world.
Documents revealed
Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of Tesla suspension or steering failures, but how big is the scale of such failures?How does Tesla deal with what engineers internally call "defects" and "failures"?
The latest revelations show that Tesla is far more aware of the frequency and scope of failures than it has disclosed to consumer and safety regulators.
The documents are from 2016 to 2022, repair reports from Tesla's global service centers, analyses and data reviews by engineers for parts with higher failure rates, and memos from Tesla's global technicians asking them to inform consumers that the broken parts on their cars are not faults.
However, the company denied some of the suspension and steering issues in a statement to U.S. regulators and the public, and according to Tesla's records, the company also tried to pass on some of the resulting repair costs to car owners.
Based on interviews with former service managers, company records, and a 2020 letter from Tesla to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla blamed Tesla owners for frequent failures of multiple components, saying they were "misusing" the vehicle.
In addition to this, Tesla also charges owners of vehicles that are out of warranty to replace parts that Tesla engineers internally call "defectives," or parts they know have a high failure rate. Engineers have asked for a redesign of multiple parts and have discussed asking for a refund from the supplier.
Records show that there have been problems with low-tech suspension connections such as upper and lower control arms and front and rear connections. For Tesla, the cost of these parts is relatively low and largely invisible to most consumers. But they play a crucial role in the safe connection of the car's axles and wheels to the body and steering gear.
Company records show that between 2018 and 2021, at least 11 owners reported to Tesla that the accident was caused by a failure of the suspension, steering or wheel assembly.
In April 2021, the owner of a 2020 Model 3 went to a Tesla repair center in Brooklyn, New York, after an accident, and the odometer showed that he had driven less than 150,000 miles (2.)40,000 km). The technician's summary was: "The front wheel fell off while driving at 60 mph in Autopilot mode". Auction records show that the car was ** in November 2021 without a front wheel.
Records show that the following month, another 2020 Model X owner in Madrid reported a wheel falling off while driving.
The control arm and connecting rod are inexpensive and simple parts, and the half-shaft (left and right drive shafts) and steering rack are more complex and expensive, and often fail on ** vehicles.
Some Tesla owners reported that the power steering suddenly failed, which almost caused an accident, and the half shaft and steering rack had to be replaced afterwards. One owner said in an interview that his all-new 2023 Model Y was driving at high speeds when the power steering suddenly failed, and his car slammed to the right, almost crashing into a ditch.
Dump the Chinese car owner
This 2016 memo describes a series of incidents reported by Chinese customers in the suspension of the Model S falling off.
The accident in Jain bears a striking resemblance to a series of suspension failures in China in 2016.
Between 2016 and 2020, Tesla resolved about 400 complaints involving rear linkage failures in China, according to a former Tesla employee with knowledge of the situation. The former employee said the company would make repairs to cars under warranty, or what they called "good faith repairs" to vehicles that were out of warranty. The company's records show that Tesla redesigned the part four times, as the initial modifications failed to fully resolve the issue.
Even so, Tesla's recall was delayed for four years until Chinese regulators stepped in in in 2020.
On October 23, 2020, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) issued a recall announcement for Tesla, recalling a total of 29,834 imported Model X and Model S models. Among them, some need to replace the front suspension rear link, some need to replace the rear suspension upper link, and some need to replace both. The vehicles were manufactured between September 17, 2013 and January 15, 2018 at the Fremont** plant in California.
With Tesla's regulatory advisor Elizabeth HMykytiuk) wrote a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on September 3, 2020, and Tesla showed "inconsistency".
In the letter, Tesla counted its grievances and helplessness, not only completely denied that there was a problem with the vehicle's suspension, but also completely put the responsibility for the broken axle incident on the Chinese car owner, suggesting that the Chinese driver's behavior such as rubbing the road teeth is the main reason for the broken axle of the vehicle. This move led to Xinhua News Agency's November 3, 2020 article "Tesla's malicious dumping is an unreasonable arrogance to Chinese consumers", naming and criticizing Tesla.
However, despite reports of frequent failures worldwide, the automaker has never recalled the part in the United States and Europe.
Xinhua News Agency issued an article criticizing Tesla.
Obviously, the recall in China has been postponed for four years, and when it arrives in the United States, it will be dumped on Chinese car owners. Tesla has adopted this strategy of refusal and delay because its ballooning warranty repair costs threaten the company's profitability at a critical time when investors are examining its long-term prospects.
In a series of memos, service engineers learned that in the fourth quarter of 2018, Tesla paid an average of nearly $500 for repairs for each Tesla operating at the time. An April 2019 memo noted that Tesla's repair business lost a total of 2$6.3 billion. That's pretty much Tesla's quarterly profit of 1Twice as much as $3.9 billion.
Some U.S. customers who own out-of-warranty cars have paid more than $1,000 to repair the rear linkage. Tesla's records show that many European customers are frustrated with paying for replacements. Tesla's base warranty in the U.S. is four years or 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers), with similar warranty coverage in most other markets.
Tesla is also fighting in court to avoid repairs to suspension components, including control arm assembly parts. The automaker recently won a potential class-action lawsuit, alleging that Tesla knew there were "suspension defects" in Model S and Model X cars manufactured between 2013 and 2018, but refused to pay for repairs, even for vehicles that were still under warranty.
A federal judge in California dismissed one plaintiff's claim in January 2023, ruling that the plaintiff failed to prove that Tesla "knew or should have known" of the alleged defect in its car.
Rear linkage problems
Company records show that until 2022, Tesla engineers were still checking for rear linkage failures. In February of the same year, the company's data review noted that multiple revisions to the part over the years had finally fixed all the "material defects".
Previously, in April 2019, Ralf van Gestel, a product support engineer at Tesla in the Netherlands, presented findings about the rear linkage problem in an analysis. He found that over the past 12 months, Tesla has spent nearly $4 million worldwide on suspension warranty repairs for Model S and Model X models. Rear linkage failures, which typically occur in cars less than two years old, accounted for the largest portion at $1.3 million.
Data collected by Gerstel shows that in the 12 months prior to his analysis, Tesla had replaced about 110,000 parts, about two-thirds of which are under warranty.
In September 2020, Valentin Oetliker, a French engineer and company intern, said after reviewing past rear linkage failures that the part still had a high failure rate despite the redesign. In an analysis written for other engineers, he noted that many customers were dissatisfied with paying for repairs to new cars. According to Reuters calculations based on data from the Ertrick report, about 5% of Tesla's 12,858 Model S and Model X vehicles on the road in Southern Europe and the Middle East at that time required repairs due to rear linkage failure.
A senior Tesla lawyer wrote to NHTSA saying that "there is no defect in the part in question and there is no associated safety risk," and again blamed the owner, "The root cause of the problem is driver abuse." ”
However, U.S. safety regulators have been investigating similar front suspension components in Model S and Model X models, known as the front linkage, and their risk of breakage since 2020. The agency said it had received dozens of complaints about the breakage of the part, including some about breakdowns that occurred on the highway.
In 2023, Tesla owners have filed about 260 complaints with NHTSA about suspension and steering issues, while GM and Toyota have received about 750 and 230 complaints, respectively. While GM and Toyota have a much larger vehicle base, Tesla has a much higher complaint rate in comparison. According to data analytics firm Experian, Tesla's share of U.S. car ownership is less than 1%. This compares to 21% for GM and 15% for Toyota.
Control arm failure
When Göstel examined common suspension issues, he found that the control arm failure was the automaker's second most expensive failure in the 12 months prior to April 2019. During this time, the Model X's control arm failed more than 3,000 times, despite a redesign of the section.
Throughout Tesla's model lineup, the control arm problem persisted for years. From January 2021 to March 2022, the automaker replaced the front upper control arms of about 120,000 vehicles worldwide, according to a Reuters analysis of repair records contained in Tesla's filings. Most of the alternatives are from Tesla's cheapest model, the Model 3.
Reuters analysis shows that Tesla paid for most of the 120,000 vehicles repaired under warranty. According to the customer's invoice, the cost of the upper control arm for the Model 3 is about $90 and the cost of the Model X is more than $280. And that's not even counting labor, as Tesla technicians can earn up to $200 or more per hour.
D**id Friedman, the former director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the Obama era, said this suspension defect is rare on relatively new cars.
Norway has the highest number of Teslas per capita, and former service managers and technicians said in interviews that many owners have complained that the control arm malfunctions during the new car. Beginning in 2017, they said, Tesla changed to tell employees to pass on the cost of frequent and repetitive breakdowns to customers in order to cut warranty and goodwill repair costs.
The restoration of Jain's Model Y, mentioned at the beginning of the article, took about three months. He paid a deductible of about $1,250, which was covered by his insurance company. After the payment was completed, the insurance company significantly increased the premium for his other car.
Later, Jain sold the repaired Tesla, **5 more than he paid when he bought it$50,000 is about $10,000 lower.
I completely lost faith in this car. He said.