Tesla is an immature car maker. They might have great designs but they haven't matured their processes. They haven't spent years fine tuning their QA processes so these things slip through. One off type stuff like this and designs that are generally less manufacturing optimized designs coming from them are not surprising.
I don't see why all the fanboys get their panties in a knot when people point this out. To everyone who actually knows anything about cars or manufacturing it's kind of a nothing-burger that everyone expects will slowly go away with time.
According to the initial Reddit thread (anecdotal evidence I realise), while this is the most severe and highest profile incident, there have been quite a few reports of windows being improperly sealed. So as you say, not a one-off, but rather a flawed manufacturing procedure.
I went along with a family member to a Model 3 test drive recently and it was surprising just how many little defects were there, considering the price of the car. While paint finish or panel fit isn't going to ruin a car overall, the fact the big easy-to-spot things are so clearly flawed does make one pause to consider how rigorous the QA is for the parts under the surface.
I find "anecdotes do not equal data" to be unscientific.
Your doctor doesn't take your oral history for fun, it's data. Now, just like a medical doctor we should weigh anecdotal data accordingly, but it's still data.
Here for example we can tell BMW/Audi reportedly sometimes make production errors. Tesla reportedly don't always make significant (to the commenter) production errors.
Sure, that's not terribly useful. It's still data.
The doctor takes your oral history to assess your health. Knowing that $x percent of family tree has high blood pressure means they can more accurately assess your risk of high blood pressure. For the population of “literally you”, your oral history is data. Now, if the next patient came in, and your doctor said “well, the last person in here has high blood pressure, you might have it to”, that’s an anecdote.
Similarly, telling somebody ~”My instance of $product worked great” isn’t really useful info for them. That’s a sample size of 1 out of a massive number.
Where only one or two anecdotes are presented, there is a larger chance that they may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases
He's responding to another anecdote, demonstrating that any anecdote likely has a counter-anecdote. You should read the context of a thread before replying snarkily.
Why is this getting downvoted so heavily? It is totally true. If there are issues with the production, this will show only in big numbers. One anecdote saying "but I hade one and nothing happened" does literally say nothing about the problem.
Which means that when the showroom models don't even get it right, it's all the more underwhelming. The showroom demonstrator we saw had very patchy paint, misaligned exterior panels and trim, and gaps in the interior door finish too.
While Tesla has been making cars for 17 years, they have also been constantly scaling up. Prior to 2018, Tesla had delivered fewer than 500k cars total. By contrast, they are pushing to get 500k cars out the door this calendar year.
Toyota, GM, etc are sitting on mature product lines which are growing a few percentage a year. They can roll out a new assembly line and spend months fine tuning it before turning it up and shutting down the old one. Tesla has no previous assembly line to lean on.
It's pretty clear Tesla as a company values growth over delivering the best quality product.
The flip side of this is I've heard a fair number of people suggest that Tesla's service is good... stupid slow but eventually good.
> Tesla's service is good... stupid slow but eventually good.
It's so slow though that I don't think it can even be considered "good" anymore. Ok fine they eventually fix issues, but at the cost of you having a defective product for weeks/months?
I really want to buy a Model Y, but I just almost had to push back the closing date on buying a new house because it took longer to have somebody in their solar panel department send a single e-mail than it took for the bank to get me a mortgage. It took a lot of stress, over a dozen e-mails and about 3 hours on the phone before I was able to eventually speak to a human to resolve my issue. The whole experience has soured the brand for me, and from googling around my case is far from an outlier.
Boeing has 50 layers of outsourcing. Tesla is vertically integrated and they try to control the whole process. Their QA might be bad but they have the highest safety rating in the market and are technologically the most advanced in terms of EV.
>fair number of people suggest that Tesla's service is good... stupid slow but eventually good.
This luxury sports car business model. Expensive sports cars are very unreliable and delicate. But they are so expensive that providing very good custom service and repair after the sale is worth it.
They are trying to transform into a market where routine million car recalls kills the business and eats all profits. New cars are expected to work.
It's pretty clear Tesla as a company values growth over delivering the best quality product.
Sure, I thought they had been pretty clear they felt reaching volume was critical to making BEV technology competitive (a larger revenue base over which to amortize development)
I'll have to agree. Having bought into the Tesla Kool aid last year, I decided to get myself one (S). Sure, I liked it and all, and it certainly reeks of German engineering design thanks to Holzhausen, but it's overall service model leaves much to be desired. I only realized that when my SO's Dad showed me the Porsche Taycan, that I realized how much Tesla had sacrificed, in terms of customer convenience and customer service. Tesla is no BMW or Porsche, and I don't think it can be one either - not with Musk's demanding sort of leadership. Designing a sexy car might be possible, but designing the processes behind manufacturing that with no qualms or quality issues, with a constantly changing team of engineers, is not possible. That requires time and patience and a lot of TLC, all of which Musk doesn't have.
It's a good stock to ride the sucker wave on though.
O, please. I own both BMW and Tesla, and while BMW is more refined car, service and quality miles better with Tesla. BMW gets obscure error codes, and then dealership lazily tries to fix it for weeks (this year BMW spent 7 weeks at the shop, last year 3 weeks). Tesla needs service, technician comes and fixes it on your driveway!
You are comparing very different classes of cars. A Tesla Model 3 is equivalent to BMW 3 series ($35-40K), and in my experience compares very favorably to it in terms of performance, design, servicing/maintenance and more. Owning an entry level BMW isn't the luxury it's claimed to be in ads. A Porsche Taycan goes for $150K+.
“I only realized that when my SO's Dad showed me the Porsche Taycan, that I realized how much Tesla had sacrificed, in terms of customer convenience and customer service”
Tesla's level of service drops like a cliff after the first year, at least in Europe. While it's still better than the traditional dealership model of service, it's nowhere close to the kind of service that a German car gets. Not to mention the fact that Tesla wants to play the Apple game and become exclusively set on retaining its exclusive OS. I can see more customer unfriendly behavior in the future.
its interesting because Musk isn't trying to design a Porsche, he is trying to design low end cars, but to me that makes little sense. To me, it feels like he should go with the iphone model
It's this the bit where you tell me that unnecessarily gluing in batteries, and soldering in memory, and charging a fortune for cables, and silently reducing processing power of older products, is all somehow about bringing tech to the masses and not a cynical move to reduce repairability and squeeze money out of successful lifestyle marketing?
> To everyone who actually knows anything about cars or manufacturing it's kind of a nothing-burger that everyone expects will slowly go away with time.
Tesla fundamentally disagrees with established ways of manufacturing cars and is still approaching it as a SV startup. They chase growth numbers, rush new models in production, will put home depot scrap in the cars just to keep the lines moving, and have no quality culture.
Company needs to go over very fundamental philosophy changes for issues like that go away. Just the time itself is not enough.
Japanese or Korean auto-markers turned around their quality over time, by heavily investing into that. Tesla shows no signs of that.
Tesla is improving its manufacturing all the time. They have only turned into a mass market manufacturer in 2017. Shanghai where they could start fresh has very few of these problems. The Model Y rollout was early and much better the Model 3 already.
The argument that Tesla is not investing in improving quality is simply not true. Things like casting make far more exact parts and very repeatable. It also reduces 100s of parts, less variation, less manufacturing steps and thus mistakes.
They are investing in the most expensive paint shop you can buy in the market right now for their new factories and they just renovated the paint shop in Fremont (since then I have not heard of bad paint quality).
They defiantly need to do more but its unfair to say they are doing nothing.
In fairness to Tesla, the cars are relatively simple and last a long time (as long as the batteries don't fail.) But more to the point, if competing manufacturers can't get serious about competing with Tesla, then Tesla isn't under pressure to change its practices.
That's a great theory, until you realize that Tesla's been around 17 years, and that for a lot of their issues they really could crib notes on how other vehicle manufacturers do things. A huge amount of their QA issues around non-drive train components are solved problems everywhere else, and they've been at it for a while now.
They've been making at least 10K units a quarter since Q1 2015. I'd hope that in half a decade they would have figured out how to make the body panels align and stay attached to the frame.
Complaints about Tesla's fit and finish extend back to before they were mass producing vehicles, when they theoretically should have been able to hand fit them. So I really don't buy any argument about it being a problem with scaling up; they just seem incapable or disinterested in fixing this.
The example from this article is from the Model Y, which just began shipping in March. Tesla is still in a huge rampup growth phase where their manufacturing processes aren't yet stable.
I don't think Tesla deserves a free pass with these issues, but I also think they should be expected.
Let's not be totally unfair to Tesla here, plenty of cars have had similar issues. Various models of Vauxhall / Opel have been known for the bonnet / hood latch coming undone at motorway speeds and slamming into the windshield. Others have been known to catch fire randomly.
Sure, and when that happened, did people say "oh, that's to be expected, sometimes cars do this sort of thing" or did they say "this is completely unacceptable and must be fixed immediately"?
Tesla gets held to a separate standard, and excuses get made for it, because people want it to succeed. I want it to succeed, too, but my definition of success includes making reliable cars. (And preferably sacking Elon Musk, but that's unrelated.)
I think it can be both unacceptable and not unexpected. No amount of engineering can match a few months of real world testing. So long as there is a good faith effort to fix the issue then it's not necessarily a sign of incompetence on Tesla's side.
Nobody at Ford has been working there for 112 years. The thing is, Tesla could just hire people who have experience working in quality control for car manufacturing and then they'd be just as experienced at it as Ford.
Your logic suggests either a) they haven't bothered hiring people experienced in quality control for car manufacturing, or b) they have, and yet their cars are _still_ this badly made. Neither is a good look.
Corporate culture doesn't just shift overnight. The Big Three didn't get serious about quality control until Japanese automakers started eating their lunch. Even then, it took time to really ingrain it into the company culture.
I don't know what the Tesla culture is like, but if it skews toward the tech "move fast and break things", just hiring experienced QA folks won't magically get everyone onboard to strict, controlled processes.
This is so true, look at any GM or Chrysler car from the 90's. Complete abominations of cars with cheap plastic everywhere and myriad mechanical problems. You can see their attempts to catch up to Japanese cars during this time.
Those methodologies don’t proscribe the bests places to hold a piece of glass for optimal adhesion. Just how to structure and operate just-in-time workflows.
> Do people really think that "gluing the glass in" is some bit of advanced engineering?
Conversely, do _you_ really think that - evenly applying an adhesive to an incredibly smooth surface (repeatably) to bond it to a frame and have it undergo twisting, vibration, and extremes of heat and cold, aerodynamic effects / pressure, exposure to moisture, UV and atmospheric contaminants and retaining its adhesion for the expected life of the vehicle -
But you're talking about chemical engineering of making glue, and luckily 3m (etc) have already done all that work.
All Tesla have to do is "buy the right glue", and then "make sure it gets put on correctly". That is a bit of production engineering but seriously it's not hard to lay down a bead of adhesive, place the glass in, and then check that it's been done.
I understand what you're saying but I disagree that it can be reduced to 'buy the right glue' and 'make sure it gets put on correctly' any more it does any more justice to a model CPU to say it's just 'take a transistor and replicate it 5 billion times on a hunk of silicon'. While that's technically true in both cases, it neglects to consider the level of technology that goes into all of the details to make it possible.
I'm not saying that attaching glass to metal is at the same level of complexity as semiconductor fab, but it's a far cry from using some Elmer's Glue to stick two pieces of construction paper together.
And yes, I'm pretty sure Tesla didn't create their own adhesive for the purpose, but I'm equally sure 3M doesn't have an off-the-shelf "Model Y Roof Adhesive, 500ml" product. Or perhaps they did, but the engineering constraints to develop it were those of normal passenger cars, sunroofs, etc., not taking into account the various forces acting upon a 4'x7' sheet of glass at highway speeds, or perhaps the temperatures or speeds of an industrial applicator robot (or conversely, the slowness of a human applicator).
To go back to your original assertion, no, it's not hard to lay down a bead of adhesive, place the glass in and check that it's been done. If in fact the failure mode was 'Failure to apply adhesive', well, that's a fairly egregious and easy to spot problem. If it's 'adhesive failed for unknown reasons after a short period of time', that's an altogether different problem.
Sure. Choose a glue that has the appropriate material properties in all expected conditions, longevity, resistance to all the various stresses, compatibility with both mating surfaces... Then put it in exactly the right place e.g. where the full range of expected operating conditions doesn't create too much stress or resonance... But only the right amount and with the right cure time and cure conditions.
Repeat this step with literally every weld, seal, screw, or other component. Then get it right for hundreds of thousands of cars regardless of the condition of the factory line and workers/robots.
de Havilland was making airplanes for 33 years when the famous Comet crash occurred.
Manufacturing is a learning process. There's a lot of engineering in every detail, and there will always be room for improvement.
The Comet thing was a design flaw, not a process/quality control flaw. And the Comet was essentially unique at the time; _no-one_ was making things like that. Lots of people today are making cars; Tesla could just hire experts. For that matter, they could buy/merge with a small car company.
I suspect there’s some sort of NIH thing going on.
Nobody had been making pressurised-cabin passenger aircraft for any appreciable length of time when the Comet crash happened. The situations are in no way comparable unless you restrict things to the powertrain.
Musk has admitted to how hard production is. Those little nuances in manufacturing like where to hold glass come from years of production/quality/root-cause analysis to arrive at best practices to avoid exactly these kinds of issues. Don't discount how hard it is just because it seems simple to the uninitiated.
Ever talked to somebody with little to no software experience who will tell you how easy it should be to just slap some code together to build a the next Google? It's like that.
It's only hard because he's insisting on re-inventing everything rather than just using standard engineering practices.
I used to build test equipment for aerospace and safety critical equipment for coal mining. I'm well aware that even with rigorous control you're going to get some errors. But "the glass fell out because we glued it wrong" isn't a normal manufacturing error. It's a mistake that requires more than one process to fail.
This is such a dumb point. When Ford started, horses were the main means of transportation. Comparing that to Tesla’s beginning, which was at the peak of car manufacturing, is stupid.
By the mid 90s the domestics had more or less closed the gap. They just didn't apply the techniques and processes to the product lines they didn't care about (i.e. economy cars, they were selling SUVs hand over fist after all). And if you look at MRSPs for foreign and domestic economy cars throughout the 90s the prices more or less reflect the respective OEM's level of investment in those product lines. If you wanted an economy car you bought a Civic. If you wanted a shitbox you bought an Escort for less money.
> By the mid 90s the domestics had more or less closed the gap.
I completely disagree with that. I bought a Cadillac in 2012. Its build quality was lower than anything I've seen from BMW, Audi or Volvo. I'm talking about really inconsistent panel (internal and exterior) gaps and misc vehicle rattles. It's also worth mentioning the Cadillac was the most expensive vehicle of the group and very much a line that GM cared about. I have no idea how Ford is doing, but GM is still not comparable to German/Swedish/Korean manufacturers.
Also, manufacturing engineering and mass production was just getting started. hell, Ford was famous for adopting scientific management and the assembly line to cranck out a massive amount of cars at that time.
I would even argue ford's model of manufacturing turned the last remnats of workshop based work into the mass producing factory.
Personally, I am waiting until Tesla's competition gets their act together and starts producing more EVs. Mercedes and Volkswagen are both moving in that direction, for instance. I think in the next 5-10 years there will be plenty of EVs on the market in most countries, and Tesla will no longer stand out simply because they were first.
I drive a Subaru now. If I could get an EV version of my present car with comparable range, I'd buy it today and never look back. They say by 2035 they'll have electric versions of all their major models[1], so I guess... sometime in the next 15 years, for me?
> Personally, I am waiting until Tesla's competition gets their act together and starts producing more EVs.
Market share of new BEVs in Germany, January 2020 to September 2020:
Volkswagen-Audi-Porsche: 33%
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi: 18%
Hyundai-Kia: 13%
Tesla: 12%
Mercedes: 9%
BMW: 8%
You don't have to wait, the competition is already outproducing and outselling Tesla in Europe. And all of these car companies have new BEV models in the pipeline that are going to further erode Tesla's marketshare, because Tesla has nothing in the pipeline for the European market over the next couple of years.
I'm very much in the same boat. It's one of the things that has always confused me a little about Subaru, since they seem like they've been really well-placed to take advantage of the transition to electric vehicles. A lot of their customer base cares about things like the environment, usually has some degree of disposable income (they're not the cheapest car on the market) and places a high value on areas like reliability and simple functionality. Electric cars already are supposed to require less maintenance than your average ICE vehicle, and the four-cylinder boxer engine/CVT combo isn't exactly known as a hotrod combo either, so it's not as if the need to satisfy their customer base on 0-60mph time anway (for that type of car, ignore the WRX for a moment).
If they made a Crosstrek/Forester-type vehicle with 300-400 miles of all-electric range, kept the ground clearance, roof rack, and usual interiors, I've always imagined that those vehicles would sell like hotcakes. I know I'd be interested in immediately trading up, in a way that I probably won't be otherwise for a long time.
Subaru is slow to move on industry trends. They were some of the last to get USB ports in their cars, Bluetooth, modern power steering (the wheel in my 2013 Impreza is shockingly heavy for a new car), better fuel economy, etc, etc.
They do one thing - they make solidly reliable 4-wheel-drive cars - and they do it quite well. But I've never seen them be the first on any new thing the industry is doing, no matter how good it is.
You're absolutely right. I always thought of Subaru as a niche car maker appealing mostly to outdoorsy types who don't mind getting their hands dirty to do some maintenance on their car. I don't think they really put much effort into their interior aesthetics. Heck, until recently they weren't really making the best looking cars either. I drive a 2016 WRX and it's literally a box on wheels. There is barely any sound proofing, the audio quality is horrid, the interior is as plain as it gets and they're probably 5 years behind everyone else on innovation, but the car is just insanely solid and incredibly easy to maintain.
Honestly, don't wait. These issues are very rare (otherwise you will see a post on HN every day). And even if you have some issues, they will send someone over to your home to fix it.
and car and production technology has shifted massively in those 100 years.
Producing cars in itself is not a new process from a manufacturing perspective, especially not the non EV parts. (like body work and structural work).
What kind of quality control does tesla have, when it is not able to reliably produce cars with the same finish and fit. Most manufacturers have been able to do this for atleast 30 years. it is not like the industry doesn't have solutions to tackle these issues at scale.
Yes, Tesla may not have the best manufacturing quality, but compared against American cars from the 80's...
They've only been mass manufacturing for about 4 years now; previous models are low volume models with a lot of hand assembly.
Musk says that manufacturing is a couple of orders of magnitude harder than designing and building prototypes. He's learning these lessons the hard way. If you can survive the lesson, it's the best way to learn them. Little consolation to those who buy the lemons during the learning period, though.
This is also a tale about America. Tesla's Chinese factory gets first place on a similar survey to the JD Powers initial quality survey that Tesla America got last place in. America just doesn't have the deep well of manufacturing knowledge that a new company like Tesla can draw on.
The problem is the conscious choice to prioritize quantity over quality. Make no mistake, Tesla's leadership consciously chose to let quality slide in order to meet the delivery volumes because the latter is what pumps stock prices. And they did this knowing it could (and did) very well lead to direct loss of life.
This is what would worry me as a potential customer. That the manufacturer selling me their product considers such disasters acceptable in order to ship a few more units. It's not that often lately than manufacturers are willing to do this (think GM ignition key scandal, rather than VW pollution cheating).
>> America just doesn't have the deep well of manufacturing knowledge that a new company like Tesla can draw on.
Is this serious? America has been offshoring domestic auto manufacturing for a couple decades now. The people who worked in those factories didn’t just die, they’re mostly still available for hire. There is no metric in manufacturing knowledge where America lags that far behind other first world countries, let alone the rest of the world.
The Tesla factory is a former GM/Toyota factory notable for introducing Japanese quality practices to the US, and it ran until 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
The age is a bigger issue than you might think. When I worked in automotive manufacturing, I bet the average age was approaching 50. Combine that with work that is more manual in nature and there might be more concern that there is a skill/worker shortage. The DoD has identified this as a risk [1] and notes that a majority of manufacturing workers are over 45 years old [2]
> They might have great designs but they haven't matured their processes. They haven't spent years fine tuning their QA processes so these things slip through
They’ve been around a while now, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. I think at this point the obvious conclusion is that they just don’t care. Like, it’s not like Toyota locks their process engineers in a basement. If they wanted to hire experts it’s just a question of money.
This seems likely to go badly for them as competition heats up.
It's also a question of listening to them. If the process engineers say "to build a quality product it takes X amount of time" and Musk says "no, we need to hit X cars by next week, we don't have that time, build a tent in the parking lot and build cars in there", all the salary in the world won't help.
> I don't see why all the fanboys get their panties in a knot when people point this out.
People keep saying this but I always see way more critiques of Tesla and Elon than the opposite.
My opinion on the matter is people love pushing back on whatever appears popular. Whether or not it's just a few idiots on the internet with little to no real influence and transform into the powerful strawman others love taking down.
> They haven't spent years fine tuning their QA processes so these things slip through.
That's not true. Similar things happen with all car makers, but if you pick up your car from a car dealership, the dealer will quietly fix the cosmetic issues because they want to avoid a bad reputation.
As someone who’s designed auto interiors, where other people see simplicity like a single touchscreen for all controls, I see an ergonomic disaster motivated by cost cutting.
I'm genuinely curious, could you explain how the touchscreen is a disaster?
I haven't seen a Tesla interior so when you say "all controls" it's a bit concerning. I'm assuming you're talking only of non-driving related control...
Because of the lack of tactile feedback, touchscreens often lead to distracted driving by forcing drivers to take their eyes off of the road to carry out simple tasks. As an example, take HVAC and radio functionality -- in older cars with buttons and knobs, after a short amount of time, people can operate these functions without looking. The same is not true for touchscreens. That's not to say that there is no place for them in cars, but the consensus it's better to use a combination of touch screen (for things you don't often adjust while driving) and physical controls (for things you do). But it's generally cheaper to slap a big ol' touchscreen in cars that does everything, and change configurations in software, rather than investing in custom interior designs for each model of car. And it's not just Tesla doing this, even companies who hang their hat on safety like Subarus are stuffing more and more functionality into touchscreens[0].
Not entirely related, but I always hated the red dash lighting on my car. I thought it looked ugly and wondered why they didn't just go with a cleaner white colour.
Then I read about red light is specifically used in car dashboard lighting and airplane cockpits because it helps with night vision. What I thought at first was just an ugly colour choice was actually a very subtle design decision to help while driving at night.
It always reminds me how complicated and multifaceted good design is. There are always trade offs to consider, but minimalism as a design trend often seems a little too willing to ignore those trade offs and will sacrifice traits like safety, efficiency and flexibility for the sake of cost and simplicity.
Then I read about red light is specifically used in car dashboard lighting and airplane cockpits because it helps with night vision.
Given that there is a stream of not-red lights shining at me in the opposite lane, I've been skeptical of this claim since Nissan did it in the 300Z like 30 years ago. It's there to look cool, not be useful. There's a subtle design lesson in there as well, I'm just not sure what it is.
When I took an astronomy class in college, we'd have "night" class on the roof, with telescopes, and star maps.
We were instructed to bring flashlights, but cover the lens with a red layer, to keep the pupils from closing too much, so we could both look at stars but read our star charts.
The headlights in the other lane don't disqualify the benefits of using red lighting inside the car.
You don't need night vision when headlights are visible in the opposite lane. You'll appreciate it when you are driving on a dark road on a moonless or overcast night.
I don't even have a Tesla, I have a 2013 Prius which has an array of buttons for everything instead. The only knobs are the miniscule (and hard to turn) volume and tune buttons on the radio. They made a token effort but placing indentations on the heater temp and fan speed buttons but after five years I still can't operate anything on the center console without taking my eyes off the road.
I love almost everything about my Prius but the person who designed the interior to look like a Starfleet shuttlecraft should be shot.
As a Model Y owner (who still has his roof!), you very quickly become accustomed to it. Excellent voice controls allow for finding music easily, and adjusting things like the AC is done so infrequently that doing it through the touch screen is a non-issue.
Every human factors study I’ve seen results for indicated that touchscreens were ergonomically inferior. Drivers would take longer to make the same adjustments and were more distracted while doing so. You may be underestimating how much the touchscreen impacts your ability to drive. Voice control is indeed much better, but as others have pointed out, experiences may vary.
or are a non native english speakers.
Sure, not getting voice control to work properly in my language is one thing, but not being able to deal with local accents (which is a majority in the world) makes voice control almost useless.
Even the Ford Mustang Mach E has copied the Tesla center-screen design. At least they also have a short-wide screen behind the steering wheel too, and they've included a big knob embedded into the bottom of the center console screen. Hopefully that helps.
Wow. I feel like I got my Subaru at just the right time when driver assistance tech was somewhat mature but the user interface was still mostly mechanical.
I'm not familiar with Teslas at all, but it sounds like a voice interface might help work around some of these limitations, a la Alexa/Hey Google. Maybe they already have it?
Please no, nothing is more frustrating and distracting to try to get my virtual assistant to fix something they've misunderstood. That's about as fun as arguing with your passenger about directions while driving.
It feels like a specialized voice control interface with a limited set pre-programmed functionality accessible through specific hard-coded keywords (which is what I assume Teslas could be equipped with for this purpose) might have a much easier time getting things right compared to an open ended general purpose virtual assistant that has to deal with completely arbitrary voice commands and unbounded ambiguity.
I used to think that voice recognition sucked until I tried Google Assistant. Holy shit is it amazing when it picks up every single word you utter every single time. Truly impressive and if car manufacturers can license the voice tech from Google I can definitely see the tech being quite useful.
They do. You can control many things with voice in Tesla.
I don't know the comprehensive list of things you can use it for, but so far I used it to:
* Change temperature
* Play a specific song
* Set navigation to a new destination
I didn't put switching music tracks (next&previous)/adjusting volume on that list, because those can be easily performed using the scrollable button on the steering wheel.
If by voice control, you mean asking a passenger to do it, sure. If you mean trying to find the right keywords while driving a vehicle at 65 mph, no thanks. I'm a native english speaker with a california accent and none of the systems I've used have been much help.
It's like playing an old text adventure without the manual, so you don't know the verbs. It uses too much thinking to try to come up with different words while also trying to drive.
Your federal law does not necessarily apply everywhere a tesla may be purchased and operated (I'm not saying it makes economic sense or anything, just that US law is likely not the sole reason it's there)
> I'm genuinely curious, could you explain how the touchscreen is a disaster?
Touchscreens in cars are a disaster, in general. They're a bad technology for the use case. They're more so in a Tesla, because Tesla relies on them far more heavily than any other manufacturer, and gives users no alternative for most functions.
Cars should be designed to minimize touchscreen use, not maximize it.
I completely agree. They're not as reliable as buttons. A single failure breaks everything. They're not particularly robust to temperature extremes. I can't use them by touch alone. They don't work with gloves.
In fact, the reliance on a touch screen is why I've stricken Tesla off the list while shopping for an EV. I currently drive an old BMW and I love the interface. There are physical buttons for everything and there's no unnecessary fluffy stuff.
The most-modern vehicle I've driven whose interface I've liked was a Skoda Fabia.
Sounds like you are stating an opinion rather than some fact based on data. As proven by exponential growth in Teslas, there is clearly a massive fanbase of people who like touchscreen. I personally absolutely love it, and don't really know why other cars have knobs and buttons.
So if that happens, embrace the touchscreens then? I mean, in the 90s, Microsoft was pretty hung ho about having voice as the main interface to computers in the near future. They kept the keyboard, which, given the history of early noughties voice recognition, was probably just as well.
My point is that you shouldn't design things being made right now for an entirely speculative future change.
I don't think anyone believes that Tesla will have actual self-driving cars, which don't require constant driver attention, within the lifetime of the cars currently being produced.
One thing I’ve never seen mentioned online but a Model 3 owner I know complained about is that the speedometer is blocked if you have your right hand between 3 and 6 o clock on the steering wheel. He had to change the way he’s used to gripping the wheel to accommodate the car which seemed like a high burden for a luxury product.
I truly don't understand how your friend has this problem. I have a Model 3, and after I read your comment, I tried to block my view of the speedometer with my right hand and couldn't do it. I tried sitting closer and farther back, higher and lower. I tried every position on the steering wheel. I flared my elbows out. I tried to imagine my hands and wrists were twice the size. I just don't see how this is possible. I'd love to see a POV pic from your friend that illustrates the problem. For my money, having the speedometer on the central screen makes it more visible. My view of a conventional dash is always partially blocked by the steering wheel.
Think I misremembered slightly, I only rode with him once. I though the speedo was at the lower left of the screen but it looks like the upper left. Think maybe he was used to having his hand between 12 and 3 and had to move? He was a larger guy if that makes a difference
Not a friend, just a former coworker I didn’t keep in contact with so I don’t have any way to follow up.
Almost every modern car has an adjustable steering wheel which you can move around to ensure you have a line to the instrument panel. Cars in the Model 3 price range will often project speed and other driving information into the windshield.
A lot of people have offered other details. I’d add: in the Model 3 even instrument panel information like speed is in the center display.
Touchscreens cut costs because you can ship the same hardware to all SKUs and change features in software. Buttons need to be added or replaced with fillers depending on the options that each car has.
On my dad's old land rover, you can literally operate the radio wearing blindfolds because everywhere is simply placed. It responds instantly, draws no power, and shut up when you aren't using it. His current car just gets in your way, even if it has more features.
It's a design that is getting sold to people who are getting starry eyed over other aspects of the car. They don't care that the fit and finish is befitting an Aveo. They care that they're driving a sexy new EV from the leading manufacturer of sexy new EVs. From the perspective of "keep Tesla relevant and financially solvent-ish" it's a great design. They know what the people they're selling to care about and what they don't and the latter isn't getting much attention.
It's like how the Tacoma has been the turd of it's segment on paper for 20+yr but still flies off the shelves. Clearly the metric don't tell the whole story. In both cases there's an emotional value proposition that's doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And since I know in advance that this comment is gonna piss off a hell of a lot of people here (if I had to pick a demographic that will have both a Tacoma and a Tesla in their driveway HN would be about the perfect fit) I'll ask in advance if any of those people would like to tell me why I'm so wrong.
Just my own personal experience, I've owned two Teslas (a 2014 Model S and a 2018 Model 3) and they both had a pretty good number of problems here and there. The S was particularly bad, though that is maybe not surprising since it was one of the first 50k cars the company built, but the 3 has had its share of issues as well.
But the thing is, I've never had any issues that rendered the car undriveable or unsafe, and service has always been a joy to work with. Every problem I've encountered has been addressed quickly and effectively with no hassle or charge. So, I'm willing to forgive some of the rough edges, and I suspect this is why they get such good customer satisfaction ratings despite the relatively high number of issues.
I have a recent X, the panels fit together, no rattles or squeeks and the issues I've had were fixed fast. Last was the voice control button on the steering wheel that failed to work, reported it on last Thursday, they were at my door with mobile service at 9 this Monday.
I did test drive a 2013 S and I decided to wait until they matured at that point but now they seem to have gotten their act together in most cases.
They're actually on par with Audi here in Norway when it comes to customer satisfaction so it's not all bad [1]. Only Toyota, volvo and BMW beat them. They had a dip due to an overcrowded service department at the launch of the Model 3, but they hired a ton of people and trained them.
Now this roof falling off is one area they could improve greatly, factory Q&A. There should be a bumpy test track where they take all their vehicles for a control drive before shipping them to eliminate issues like that roof.
Cars should be available, not spend time in the shop for repairs that could have been avoided. It's great that you are so forgiving but for me a trip to the garage for some small issue would eat up half a day easily and that adds up quickly when there are a number of issues.
I mean, I agree with the sentiment, but also you're assuming you'd similarly waste half a day for a Tesla repair, and that's usually not the way things work. Tesla will frequently send a technician to a customer's home or place of work and fix issues on the spot. Even when I've had to go to a service center in person, they've included free rideshare credits for quick repairs so that I don't have to wait around, or free loaner cars for longer repairs.
Back in the old days when I lived far away from a service center, they once drove hundreds of miles with a flatbed to come pick up my car, and dropped off a free loaner at my house while my car was in the shop, then came back and returned my car and picked up the loaner a few days later. (The loaner was also a nicer Tesla than the one I owned.) They really do go above and beyond to resolve issues as pleasantly and conveniently as possible.
Well, for one example: Tesla Model 3 production was constrained based on the amount of paint their factory was consented to spray every day. When Model 3 production started climbing, customers were seeing very thin and uneven paint application, well below what's normal for a car in this price bracket, and often very light on critical areas like the sills. Owners in snow-bound places where Tesla is popular, such as Scandanavia, were reporting pain stripping within a few months of ownership.
I don't know about you, but my expectation for what is nominally a luxury car would be to have paint standards better than British Leyland in the 70s.
But I designed interior parts, so it's my own Engineering take. Tesla's were not competitive at all. The gaps between panels were so bad, you could stick your finger in it. That's not just an appearance issue, kids and adults will mess around with large gaps and put stuff inside.
And features in the interior were non existent. (Especially for a luxury car)
Interesting that you are just glossing over the fact that a) Tesla trounces all competition on performance and b) Tesla trounces basically everyone on safety as well.
a) for that kind of money, and lack of features, it better go fast (cornering, meh, not so much).
b) You are commenting on an article that talks about a Tesla loosing its roof. That's a new one on me, and I'd thought I'd seen it all back when I was an auto mechanic.
I don't see why all the fanboys get their panties in a knot when people point this out. To everyone who actually knows anything about cars or manufacturing it's kind of a nothing-burger that everyone expects will slowly go away with time.