tesla – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Tesla Lied To Customers, Blaming Them For Shoddy Parts The Company Knew Were Defective

from the giant-bullshit-machine dept

Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report showing that not only has Tesla aggressively lied about its EV ranges for the better part of the last decade, it created teams whose entire purpose was to lie to customers about it when they called up to complain. The story lasted all of two days in the news cycle before it was supplanted by clickbait stories about a billionaire fist fight that never actually happened.

Now Reuters is back again, with another major story showcasing how for much of that same decade, Tesla routinely blamed customers for the failure of substandard parts the company knew to be defective. The outlet reviewed thousands of Tesla documents and found a pattern where customers would complain about dangerously broken and low-quality parts, only to be repeatedly gaslit by the company:

“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.”

The records show a repeated pattern across tens of thousands of customers where parts would fail, then the customer would be accused of “abusing” their vehicle. They also show that Tesla meticulously tracked part failures, knew many parts were defective, and routinely not only lied to regulators about it, but charged customers to repair parts they knew had high failure rates and were systemically prone to failure:

“Yet the company has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public– and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers.”

This is obviously a very different narrative than the one Musk presented last month at that unhinged New York Times DealBook event:

“We make the best cars. Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?”

They are, as it turns out, not the best cars.

And this is before you even touch on the growing pile of corpses caused by the company’s half-cooked and repeatedly misrepresented “full self driving” technology, which last week resulted in the recall of nearly every vehicle that has it. That problem was, as reports have documented in detail, thanks in part to non-engineer Musk over-ruling his actual engineers when it comes to only using cameras.

This comes as a new study shows that Tesla vehicles have the highest accident rate of any brand on the road. As usual, U.S. regulators have generally been asleep or lethargic during most of this, worried that enforcing basic public safety standards would somehow be stifling “innovation.”

The deaths from “full self driving” have been going on for the better part of the last decade, yet the NHTSA only just apparently figured out where its pants were located. But a lot of the problems Reuters have revealed should be slam dunk cases for the FTC under the “unfair and deceptive” component of the FTC Act, creating what will likely be a very busy 2024 for Elon Musk.

A lot of this stuff has been discussed by Tesla critics for years. It’s only once Musk began his downward descent into full racist caricature and undeniable self-immolation that press outlets with actual resources started to meaningfully dig beyond the hype. There’s cause for some significant U.S. journalism introspection as to why that is that probably will never happen.

Meanwhile, for a supposed innovation super-genius, most Musk companies have the kind of customer service that makes Comcast seem empathic and competent.

There’s no shortage of nightmare stories about Tesla Solar customer service. And we’ve well documented how Starlink can’t even respond to basic email inquiries by users tired of being on year-long waiting lists and seeking refunds. And once you burn past the novelty, gimmicks, and fanboy denialism, Tesla automotive clearly isn’t any better.

That said, this goes well beyond just bad customer service. The original Reuters story from July about the company lying about EV ranges clearly demonstrates not just bad customer service, but profound corporate culture rot:

“Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.”

As with much of what Musk does, a large share of what the press initially sold the public as unbridled innovation was really just cutting corners. It’s easy to accomplish more than the next guy when you refuse to invest in customer service, don’t care about labor or environmental laws, don’t care about public safety, don’t care about the customer, and have zero compulsion about lying to regulators or making things up at every conceivable opportunity.

Filed Under: automotive, cars, consumer rights, ev, mechanics, repairs, safety, tesla
Companies: tesla

Politicians, Car Dealers Trying To Make It Illegal To Buy A Tesla In North Carolina

from the hating-on-disruptive-innovation dept

Last fall, we wrote about how auto dealers were bitching about the fact that electric car company Tesla sells their cars directly. It has “stores” but you can’t buy your cars from those stores, due to antiquated and ridiculous regulations about car sales. Most states have laws that basically say that car companies can’t sell directly. These laws serve no purpose other than to protect (often politically powerful) independent car dealers from being disintermediated.

In North Carolina, however, they’re taking it up a notch. They’re basically trying to make it illegal to sell a Tesla in North Carolina at all. About 80 North Carolina residents have already bought one, but they may be the last:

A legislative proposal, backed by the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association, would make it illegal for Tesla, or any other car maker, to bypass dealerships and sell directly in the state. The proposal cuts at the heart of Tesla’s business model: selling luxury cars over the phone or Internet and then delivering them to the front door of high-net-worth customers.

The North Carolina State Commerce Committee approved the proposal unanimously.

This is the same thing we see over and over again in other contexts. Companies in an entrenched legacy position trying to use regulations to block disruptive upstarts. There is no good reason for this law other than to block Tesla and to prop up dealerships. It’s somewhat disgusting to see politicians actively seek to stamp out innovation.

Filed Under: dealers, north carolina, regulations, tesla
Companies: tesla

What The Tesla / NY Times Fight Teaches Us About The Media

from the the-world-is-changing dept

For media watchers, the very public argument this week between Tesla and the NY Times has been quite fascinating. In case you happened to not be obsessively following each back and forth (what, you have lives?!?), it all began with a NY Times’ less than enthusiastic review of the experience of trying to drive a Tesla S (the company’s flagship electric car sedan) between a pair of Tesla’s new “superchargers.” You can read the full review yourself, but the short version is that it did not get the mileage expected, and at one point a flatbed truck needed to come pick up the totally dead car. I will admit that I’m impressed by the Tesla car in general, and most of the reviews have made it out to be about as close to a perfect car as you can imagine (which is pretty impressive considering that it’s the first year of the car’s existence and it’s the first “mass” produced Tesla vehicle). But this review was less than thrilled, since the whole point was to test out the ability to drive between these “superchargers.”

Upon publication, Tesla’s famous CEO, Elon Musk, began tweeting up a storm about how the article was “fake” and that he had the vehicle logs to prove it. The author of the review, John Broder, responded to many of the tweeted charges, arguing that Musk was misrepresenting things — leading many watchers to suggest that Musk was making a big mistake in attacking the NY Times.

Then, Musk published a blog post with a graphical representation of the log data they had, in which he argues that Broder lied and even purposely tried to run the car out of juice in order to write a negative story. Musk claims that after their dispute with Top Gear, they now keep logs on any media test drives (though it’s unclear if they tell reporters that before giving them the cars). And, suddenly, a lot of people flipped sides, arguing that the data won and clearly the NY Times and Broder had some answering to do. After all, there were charts like this one:

Except… then some people started to look more closely at the data and realize that perhaps Broder’s story wasn’t so crazy and Musk made a number of assumptions that aren’t necessarily backed up by the data. For example, Musk insists that Broder claimed he turned down the climate control to low to conserve energy at 182 miles, and points to the fact that at 182 miles, Broder actually increased the temperature over 72 degrees. However, as Rebecca Greenfield points out, in her piece (linked above), it really looks like Musk may have simply assumed incorrectly that the point where this happened was 182 miles, and at about 250 miles it’s quite clear that Broder does turn the climate control way down and keep it that way for a while (Greenfield added the purple box below).

Then Broder chimed back in as well explaining away most of the accusations, including the charge by Musk that Broder drove the car around trying to run it out of energy:

When he first reached our Milford, Connecticut Supercharger, having driven the car hard and after taking an unplanned detour through downtown Manhattan to give his brother a ride, the display said “0 miles remaining.” Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in.

Except, Broder notes, the “unplanned detour through downtown Manhattan” was not “unplanned” and had been communicated clearly to Tesla beforehand, did not actually go into “downtown” Manhattan, was partially recommended by Tesla employees who thought that the “regenerative braking” might help increase the range and only added two total miles to the trip length. Furthermore, as for the charge of driving around in circles in a parking lot?

Mr. Straubel said Tesla did not store data on exact locations where their cars were driven because of privacy concerns, although Tesla seemed to know that I had driven six-tenths of a mile “in a tiny 100-space parking lot.” While Mr. Musk has accused me of doing this to drain the battery, I was in fact driving around the Milford service plaza on Interstate 95, in the dark, trying to find the unlighted and poorly marked Tesla Supercharger.

Ouch.

In the end this is a fascinating story on many different levels. Dan Frommer makes an excellent point that “everyone’s a media company now,” noting that it’s possible for companies to speak out on their own behalf if they disagree with a story. That used to be a lot harder. He compares that to the Quirky / OXO story we recently covered as well.

But, of course, if you’re going to rebut charges made in a newspaper review, the information had better hold up, and it’s not clear that it does here. Even worse, it really seems like Musk is making a much bigger deal of this than ever needed to be made. Sure, the initial review wasn’t great, but it really didn’t strike me as that bad. It basically said that if you try to drive it too far, or if you’re unable to charge it enough, you might run out of juice. You know what? Same thing is true of a gas-powered car as well. But Musk has called much more attention to the story in a manner that doesn’t necessarily lead to Tesla coming out on top. Carl Malmud’s summary seems instructive:

Musk was offended that a reporter didn’t operate the hardware properly. Blame the manual, tech support, PR, but not the user.

Musk is obviously quite passionate about the companies he runs and their products. And that’s something that’s actually quite appealing. Having followed his work for a while, you know that he really is striving to build “insanely great” products. So I can absolutely understand how his first emotional reaction is to lash out at someone who wrote a less than kind review (I’ve been there myself too many times). But, in the end, it seems like there would have been much better ways to handle this. I’m still a huge fan of the Tesla, and still dream of one day actually getting one, but I’d say that Musk’s response probably made me more skeptical of the company than Broder’s original article ever did.

When “everyone is the media,” amazing and powerful things can happen. And, certainly, the ability to correct the record against questionable stories is something that really changes the game. But, at the same time, everyone is now a fact checker, and that makes for an interesting dynamic for both traditional media companies and those who wade in to respond to them.

Filed Under: data, elon musk, john broder, journalism, media, reporting, reviews, tesla
Companies: ny times, tesla