They won’t because they know they don’t need to. The auto industry just got a huge PR boost through the whole UAW affair. They’ll leverage that position to lobby the government to continue the same protectionist policies that are already in place and if you don’t like it you can eat shit. Everyone wins, but you and the rich get richer selling you $42,999 MSRP (plus dealer tip) crossovers loaded with features that nobody asked for!
i mean, there are already cmpanies making ones at a lower price down the line (Rivian’s R3 target price is 35000) so saying 42999 is already being sort of dishonest.
Is it weird that I’m considering a Mexican citizenship? I mean it cones with a small truck that is actually useful for $15k, AND I can get more first world EV.
Don’t forget the features that people do want for safety and such are locked behind premium tiers too. But we can have Sirius XM ads and OnStar giving our data to insurance companies without consent.
LoL at the dealer tip. Even if the used market sucks, it’ll always be a better experience then buying at a stealership. The entire process is trash start to finish.
Beginning of covid was probably the best time to buy new through my entire life and I don’t ever see that situation ever coming back throughout the rest of my life.
Yeah. That’s my biggest question mark with these BYDs. Oh they’re made dirt cheap in unregulated markets? Definitely going to see some Li-Ion explosions in the near future.
Right. But bringing it over to the US would also mean the manufacturer would need to import it from wherever they’re making them. which also would raise the price.
People need to seriously consider 40mi range PHEVs.
Toyota Prius Prime, Ford Escape PHEV, and others have “EV-mode” buttons that drive exclusively on electric now. Meaning you could keep the gasoline for “emergency use only”, even as you enter highway speeds. (Older PHEVs would turn on the engine because they didn’t have this mode-selector button).
All the complexity of a gas engine, plus the cost of a battery. Just so you can use the range once or twice a year? What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas? You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
Batteries are more complex. A 200lb battery is less complex than 1000lb or 2000lb battery.
EDIT: I’m an electrical engineer. I can prove to you the complexities of a modern EV Battery. Or do you think 400V systems composed of parallel transistors, battery-management systems, and a whole slew of literally fucking computers estimating the internal-state of the thousands of individual cells that compose a modern EV is a “simple” task?
EDIT: Do you know what kind of degrees you need to design a battery-management system? To mass produce those circuit boards? And to do it all over again 2 years from now when all the chemistries change and therefore the internal estimates of each of these cells completely and drastically changes? No? Please stop pretending that “Batteries” are simple.
Case in point: it’s the battery that will most likely fail in ALL of the discussed designs here. Why? Because chemistry is incredibly difficult and hasn’t been solved yet. I do await for the future improvements in the EV battery pack that are sure to come over the next few years and decade… But let’s not pretend that anything is done R&D yet.
The gasoline engine? Okay we’re up to Atkinson cycle so that’s a bit different but was around in the 1800s anyway. Nothing is really new or complex here. The engines mechanics were understood nearly two centuries ago.
There’s a reason why gasoline engines are so reliable, while batteries keep having faults. Complexity has a lot to do with it.
What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas?
If only computers existed and had timers that automatically burned off stale gasoline.
Also, just fill up 2 gallons or so to minimize the stale gasoline effect. You’ll only be filling up once or twice a month with all the EV driving you’ll be doing in practice.
You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
No. The 800+ to 1500+ extra lbs of battery you lug around with a full 300mi electric car is what’s actually being wasted in practice.
The internal chemical structure of Li-ion is only designed to work for a limited number of charge/discharge cycles. As the chemistry is stressed out, the internal metals begin to form dendrites (or in more simple terms, spikes) internally.
We have reasonable estimates for how long this takes, but everyone’s battery pack is different. And the process is invisible (you have to cut open & destroy a battery to figure out how much of these dendrites or whatever have formed). So the best we got are some computers slapped on the outside of the battery pack that measures temperature, voltage, current, and time to guestimate the effects from the outside.
As cells fail, modern BMS systems will reroute power away from degenerated cells. Its not that the problem was solved per se, its that modern battery packs have a bunch of extra cells waiting in reserve to pretend that nothing has happened to the end user. But this process eventually breaks enough cells that the whole pack fails and inevitably needs replacement.
Exactly when depends on how many cells were left in reserve, how much “fast charging” you do (which is extremely harsh on the internal chemicals), the temperature of the pack under use, and any aggressive driving you might do that heats up the pack more than usual.
Its… really complex. There’s a lot of research going on right now to try to stop these dendrites from forming.
EDIT: In any case, Consumer Reports reliability surveys on various parts of say… a Toyota Prius Prime or other PHEVs. Go look at them all, see what parts fail. Its the battery.
It’s interesting to be on the other side of watching a subject matter expert being downvoted by laymen suffering from Dunning Kruger. Their feelings will always Trump your knowledge.
I’ve read enough on these systems to understand you’re speaking the truth here. Thanks for trying. I learned some new details on these system’s complexities.
I chose Toyota first for a reason. The other two are just common PHEVs that came to my mind.
In all three cases, the Battery Pack is one of the least-reliable parts of the car. Even for notoriously unreliable cars, the worst part remains the battery.
I’m not kidding when I say that the battery pack is one of the most complex and least-understood parts of EVs, Hybrids, or PHEVs.
EDIT: Wanna go Honda? Guess what part was least reliable again.
Consumer Reports conducts surveys where they ask car-owners of various model years how many issues, and what kind of issues, their cars have.
I know the difference from “predicted reliability” and their “Reliability history” page. There’s a reason why I’m posting history. These survey results look back into the past and is more appropriate for our discussion.
Before criticizing my methodology, you probably should see what pages I’m posting and understand the material I’m quoting.
The reliability data comes from our Auto Reliability Surveys of Consumer Reports members. In all, we received responses on over 330,000 vehicles in our 2023 surveys, detailing 2000 to 2023 models and some early 2024 vehicles.
Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports’ newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars. Based on owner responses on more than 330,000 vehicles, the survey covers 20 potential problem areas, including engine, transmission, electric motors, leaks, and infotainment systems.
It is physically impossible for an EV with much fewer parts, all of which require no maintenance, to be less reliable than a gas car with highly complex parts like transmissions and differentials and combustion engines.
I’ve worked on both for a living. I’ve seen first hand which cars come into the shop and how frequently. I used problem tracking websites like Identifix daily to see common failures on all the cars I work on.
EVs rarely break.
Gas vehicles turn into paperweights if you go too long without changing the oil.
It is physically impossible for an EV with much fewer parts, all of which require no maintenance, to be less reliable than a gas car with highly complex parts like transmissions and differentials and combustion engines.
And transistors, and transformers, battery management systems, and inverters aren’t complex?
Are you making fun of my degree? Power engineering is a masters-level subject at a minimum, and easily reaches into the PH.d level.
As I stated earlier. I’ve got an electrical engineering degree. When EV buffs talk about the “simplicity” of EVs I can’t help but roll my eyes. Yall probably can’t even pick out the right chips for a Li-ion BMS, or tell me the differences between LiFePo4 or NMC Li-ion is.
There’s some highly technical magic going on here. MOSFETs, Power-circuits, complex inverters, microcontrollers to carefully time the movement of electricity with the movement of those magnets. There’s a hell of a lot more complexity in there than people realize. And when things go wrong, there’s not much else to do but replace the entire damn part, because it requires a very advanced facility to create electric motors, the chemistry behind these cells, or PCBs for those battery packs.
BMS systems are far from it. Lots of technical work going into simplifying measuring techniques, automatic switching between series parallel linking of cells based on system needs (at my company)… but the essentials of measuring current, thermal and voltage? Lmao. I’m making fun of your degree, as a holder and EIT myself.
If you’re into BMS systems at all, you know that the ridiculous levels of modeling are chemistry / cell specific, to the point that would make the typical layman’s eyes glaze over. A litany of cell types (NMC, LiFePo4, NCA) and more as new chemistries are invented (or go in and out of fashion) requires updates to BMS, the modeling of how the internals of the cells work, and how all of that is related to the voltage/current/temperatures of individual cells.
Measuring voltage/current? Yeah, that’s easy.
INTERPRETING voltage/current? That’s the hard part. And requires a giant mess of R&D effort on these cells and their individual chemistries.
There’s nothing “simple” about that battery pack. The shear number of control systems that go into a modern battery-pack it should be proof enough to you.
Not only is there difficulty in building and manufacturing this… there’s also difficulty in maintaining this item. I mean yeah, we don’t maintain it, its just replaced wholesale. But there’s also the whole 400V will-instantly-kill-a-technician problem if they’re not careful.
Sorry, I have designed complex 4 and 6 layer high speed FPGA boards, this BMS board looks moderately dense but not crazy, nor does it look like it’s dealing with high speed signaling.
Try dealing with RF or something, those PCBs are quite a bit crazier.
The models for the cells are implemented in software. You know what’s easy to update in place? software. You know what’s hard to update in place? Mechanical systems. That’s my point.
Lmao go for it, I deal with systems shoving kiloamps at multi-tens of kv around quickly, I’ll chalk it up to a small fry “power” electronics engineer not knowing better, as is customary for you so far.
GaN MOSFETs, because igbts are too slow, tech you, @dragontamer, haven’t even gotten to touch yet. TeChNiCaL MaGiC in your parlance.
So you do touch BMS systems and understand that the hundreds or thousands of MOSFETs that control the electrical currents of a ten-thousand cell battery pack are arranged in systems of series and parallel … Running advanced modeling software that tries to peer into the internal chemistry of modern cells…
Yet you want to convince me that this is simpler than the like, 15 gears that make up Toyotas Powersplit Device?
How do you account for tribological degradation in tolerances over time? There are techniques to negate the problem entirely, my 40+ year old Japanese motorcycle uses high-ish pressure hydrodynamic bearings to allow oil to be the “wear” surface… But it isn’t foolproof.
Newer techniques rely on better metallurgy, oil additives which precipitate on designated surfaces, etc etc etc. It’s one of those things you and I have both observed where the more you look at it, the more complex it gets.
Now change gears (haha) and observe the complexity of analog/digital systems. You and I front-load the complexity, so that any configuration changes should (mostly) be possible in software. “Oh no, we didn’t use this particular junction of p-n MOSFETs”… They added $3 to the BOM, but our flexibility/redundancy is increased.
Look, you should know as well as any EE that solid state systems, when run within parameters, have a tremendous unchanging mtbf. While there are currently issues with undersizing MOSFETs and igbts, I expect our engineering models (in our heads) of what to expect from these evolving electronic components to adapt to these new operating environs, the already reasonable reliability will only increase.
Failure of these packs and their bms’ are low enough that we can point to specific failures, versus how often we see someone with serious ICE engine issues in the local mechanic’s shop.
Moving parts wear out due to friction. The electronic parts you listed are not moving parts and rarely fail. I would know, as an automotive technician they come to me when they break.
If you really were an engineer, you would know about minimizing points of failure. And you would be able to recognize gas vehicles have exponentially more points of failure due to the amount of moving parts and sealing surfaces and combustion temperatures.
It’s easy to claim you’re an engineer on the internet. But you’re definitely not talking like an engineer.
Engineers look at empirical results most of all. They don’t dismiss large, 300,000+ car surveys just because they’re inconvenient to your argument.
I’ve said my piece on the reliability of battery designs over the past 5 years. Hopefully battery engineers improve their reliability moving forward. I don’t think it’s going to be easy though, as the simulated models of the internals of Li-ion cells is just such a devilishly difficult problem.
I’d want to raise the question of if “battery problems” may be a catch-all for other self-reported electrical problems but that’d be getting alarmingly close to “moving goalposts”.
That’s it. There are other categories for electrical problems. Ex:
ELECTRIC SYSTEM: Alternator, starter, regular battery, battery cables, engine harness, coil, ignition switch, electronic ignition, spark plugs and wires failure, auto stop/start.
ELECTRICAL ACCESSORIES: Cruise control, clock, warning lights, body control module, keyless entry, wiper motor or washer, tire pressure monitor, interior or exterior lights, horn, gauges, 12V power plug, USB port, alarm or security system, remote engine start, headlights, automatic headlights, automatic wipers, wireless charging pad.
IN-CAR ELECTRONICS: CD player, rear entertainment system (rear screen or DVD player), radio, speakers, in-dash GPS, display screen freezes or goes blank, phone pairing (e.g., Bluetooth), voice control commands, steering wheel controls, portable music device interface (e.g., iPod/MP3 player), backup or other camera/sensors, Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, infotainment hardware replacement, software over-the-air fixes, head-up display.
The Consumer Reports Survey is very clear. “EV Battery” problems mean exactly the battery. There’s other categories for other cases.
The whole table didn’t fit inside of my screenshot. (I can only screencap what is on my screen…). The “In Car Electronics” also have a 3% failure rate, but are at the bottom of the chart. But between that and EV Battery, they are the #1 failure points of a modern car.
He’s been posting like this in multiple threads with one or two others. The way he’s pushing hybrids and talking up Prius makes it seems like a Toyota shill.
The concern is that you have basically two different drivetrains to worry about, where if either fail you’re (potentially, depending on what/where/etc fails) without an operational vehicle at worst.
Meanwhile, the Toyota Prius has been sitting on the top reliable cars for the last 20+ years…
There’s like, statistics… ya know? We don’t have to hypothesize the problems or “expected” problems. We can look at these cars and their long history now and see where the problems occurred.
Sure, a PHEV battery a bit larger and might postpone things a bit longer but why sign up for a future guaranteed replacement item?
Because replacing a 200lb battery is easier than replacing a 1000lb battery in a full EV.
You’re right. Battery packs have limited durability / cycles. Its just how the chemistry works. The question is if you want to have a 200lbs of it or if you want 1000lbs of it.
This is utter horseshit. Gas cars fail way more because they have way more parts and all of those parts require more maintenance.
I would know, I bought a house and put a kid through college with the money I made fixing gas cars and now I’m changing careers cause EVs are taking over and they rarely break.
The batteries degrade over time slowly, especially compared to gas engines. Just compare the warranties! Gas drivetrains get 3 year / 36k mile warranties. EV battery warranties are 8-10 years.
If I have a 400 V 50 kWh battery and charge at 400 V 50 kW, won’t it be charging at 1 C? Like you could use the Nissan leaf as an example but it’s dishonest since it’s the worst type of battery cooling, air, which makes the cells die prematurely.
Tesla is one of the more failure prone brands. Hybrids are a bad solution since it won’t address the problem fully, and only serves to lengthen the ICE industry.
Hybrids are a bad solution since it won’t address the problem fully
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
There’s no perfection in engineering. Just a series of compromises. Anyone who is an absolutionist is going to have a bad time in engineering, policies, and politics.
Which is why converting 100-million ICE cars to 100-million Hybrids is our best chance for reducing our fossil fuel consumption.
We are Li-ion limited right now, and will continue to be Li-ion limited for the near future. Hybrids are magic technology because not only is Li-ion chemistry available, but also cheaper/easier to manufacture NiMH (Nickle Metal Hydride), which grossly reduces fossil fuel consumption on the order of 30% to 40%. (50mpg vs 30mpg is 40% savings).
You wish to deny the intermediate step just because… of your weird obsessive compulsive desire of perfection? We all know that 100-million EVs is out of the picture, even on the scale of 10 years of progress and production. We’re literally going to run out of Lithium by 2025 and become production constrained.
When the battery tech is ready. Sodium-Batteries are coming as are Silicon-Lithium, both of which will improve our chances. There’s also recycling centers that aren’t functional yet before Li-ion is a truly green solution.
How many EVs do you think can be made in the next 10 years? Now multiply that by 5 to 20 (because PHEVs / Hybrids use 5x to 20x fewer batteries than a pure EV). How much fossil fuel savings do we get from 20x more Hybrids (or 5x more PHEVs) ??
Its an intermediate step, but economically speaking its a necessary economic step because its more efficient to transition from ICE -> Hybrid/PHEV -> EV, than to not do so. Especially given the economic realities of spinning up Li-ion production.
There exists a Hybrid in every vehicle segment, and its technology available to Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Ford, GM, Stellanis, BMW and more.
The only reason we’re not converting to Hybrids is because online idiots have decided to kill the idea and never give them a proper try. But the market is healing, people are realizing how reliable and practical they are today.
EVs should continue developing of course. But the immediate best move for our society is to immediately move to hybrids and off of traditional ICE. And the technology is in fact, available today… and at cheap prices… to allow for such a move.
What we need is EV fans to get off the backs of people buying a $23,000 Corolla Hybrid or $25,000 Ford Maverick. They need to congratulate these car drivers for making a better environmental choice and something that fit their budget. Trying to get the poor or middle class to buy $40,000+ class EVs is insane. It feels even more insane to fund that through $7500 tax credits, but even with that tax credit the Hybrids are still winning out.
The US has a deeper systemical issue of corruption regarding energy sources and pricing, I’ll agree that hybrids are the better solution when ICE fuels pay to carry their costs.
Another EV fanboy complaining about corrupt taxes and policies who likely benefits from $7500 direct handouts as well as pays $0 in gas tax aka how most states pay for Road Infrastructure.
Politics is shit. Let’s not go there. There’s black marks everywhere.
Btw. I support EV subsidies. But I admit that they are in fact, one of those subsidies you are complaining about. I feel like the subsidy regime favors EVs and therefore we EV fans should celebrate it… not bite the hand that feeds us.
We aren’t going to reach widespread adoption of electrified transit unless we have large scale subsidies like this.
Why is it that all the batteries are the things that fail in these designs?
And why is it that the gasoline engine lasts for a decade or longer, with very few repair issues? In fact, when was the last time you heard of an old car where the engine needed to be replaced?
When old cars break down, its the suspensions, the belts… radiator (those things rust / break surprisingly often), etc. etc. Its not really the ICE parts that break down.
The overall numbers are a bit misleading yes. But…
Fisher says there are always exceptions to these reliability trends, which is why it’s vital to consider the reliability score of any model before buying. “PHEVs as a class are unreliable, but the Toyota RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability.”
So its still possible to pick out reliable PHEVs with research (and EVs I guess). But all this “Hybrids are more complex” is a crock of bullshit. They’re literally the most reliable vehicle on the market when taken as a whole.
Gas vehicles have complex combustion engines, transmissions, differentials, emission systems all of which require maintenance and can leak fluids that are expensive to fix. All of which are common points of failure. Everyone I know owns a car and all of their cars have had problems with one or more of these systems. These are all facts that are common knowledge and don’t need any supporting evidence.
EVs have 1 common point of failure. The battery. That’s because there isn’t anything else to break on them. They’re simple and durable.
“Stats” means statistics. Go see which parts are failing out there. I brought up Consumer Reports survey that has 300,000+ cars as part of their yearly study. I dunno exactly what you think has a better statistic than Consumer Reports survey, but I’m curious.
What parts of cars are failing? Across different brands, across different designs, etc. etc. Is there any pattern?
Answer: I already told you above, and have posted the articles and survey results.
There’s no control arm failures in Teslas? There’s no rust on cybertrucks? There’s no complaints about malfunctioning wiper blades? There’s no complaints about phantom braking? There are no spurious battery failures that leave people stranded on the side of the road? There’s no 12V battery failures that lock the car?
There’s lots of reasons why any car, electric or ICE, could fail. So instead of theorycrafting it all, I suggest the following.
Run a survey
Ask people what failed in the survey.
Tally up the results.
Survey says? Batteries are the part that most commonly breaks. EV components in general are the least reliable (be it EV Motor in Tesla Model S, Battery packs in most EV or electrified designs, 800V chargers hooked up to other systems, and the like). All in all, the least reliable vehicle you can buy is an EV, while… strangely enough… Hybrid vehicles rank on the top of reliability.
That’s survey data, pragmatic, what has actually happened. Its not 2015 anymore where talking out your ass about theoretical complexity is useful anymore. Its 2024, we can look back at the last 9 years of EVs and see what has failed.
Sorry, fellow me/ee, disagree on complexity, having worked directly with both. Advantage of mechanical systems: theoretically predictable action, repeated endlessly so long as torque at the tires is req’d. Reality: tolerances in various parts open over time, resulting in a nonlinear decrease in efficiency and power. A symphony of hundreds of bolted joints, springs, tappets and valves, a sum of thousands of parts dancing while a complex ECU watches over the system. A single part or joint far enough out of tolerance will cause very, very expensive damage.
Battery powered vehicles: motor has full torque at close to zero RPM, all components in the control system are solid state, and software (always updateable) handles control decisions. Electric motor has 6 to 30 parts, based on whether liquid cooled or air cooled.
Hybrids have been out for over 20 years, and this simply isn’t an issue.
Furthermore, “a problem that doesn’t exist for 99%” is false because this article is just talking about averages. When you look at the average mileage driven per state, it ranges from 9,900 miles to over 24,000 miles per year. There is no one size fits all solution. Would you rather someone drive an old Suburban 100 miles per day or a Prius prime 100 miles per day? It’s that simple. These people aren’t going to buy a BEV until the segment is nearly ubiquitous, if ever.
I think people use the gas more than twice a year. For me, the electric could suffice for weekday commutes, but weekend trips end up requiring the gas.
I have personally avoided EVs in favor of PHEVs because I think charging all the time would be a pain. EVs like Tesla claim you get like 320 miles of range, but that’s on a full battery and they recommend only charge to 80%. So it drops to 256 miles. However even that is on the high end as driving at normal highway speeds, using AC or heat, in cold weather all kill the range even further. Tesla actually got caught exaggerating the range and canceling customer appointments over the issue. So, a realistic estimate there is probably more like 175 miles left. From there you probably don’t want to risk getting stranded and would need to find a charge with no less than 25 miles left. This gives an effective range of more like 150 miles out of the claimed 320. If you’re on a road trip, stopping every 150 miles for 20-40 minutes is going to be a pain.
As a model 3 owner of 5 years, your math is just wrong and charging is a minor inconvenience if you have a level 2 charger at home or work. I went the first 3 years with no home charging.
I went well over 200 miles on my first road trip with the Tesla … on highway, with heat, and my speed demon teen exceeding 90 mph when I wasn’t looking
If you can use a charger at home, most charging is a non-event. Plug it in when you get home and it’s just always ready to go.
I’ve only ever charged on the road once. It was 15 minutes of walking around Walmart
All the complexity of a gas engine, plus the cost of a battery.
We’ve been building hybrids for decades with no observable decrease in reliability.
What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months
These operating modes are accounted for by the OEMs. They pressurize the gas tank to improve longevity. They’ll periodically enter “maintenance mode” to waste gas as necessary. Most people just drive around with a very small amount in the tank until they need it.
You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
The article is wrong and stupid. Its most certainly exists for anyone who ever travels outside of their daily commute. Which is virtually everyone.
There are 1000s of Priuses that require repairs every year, including the batteries that also go bad. So, all of the normal gas engine maintenance, plus the risk of a battery going bad too. It’s just basic logic.
Once or twice a year? Do you mean daily? We have a phev Prius and it is great. It is able to run EV mode to work, but the trip home requires hybrid mode.
If you took the cost of gas engine and had a bigger battery instead, you could make it home without burning gas. How often do you travel more than 250 miles round trip? For me, that’s only once or twice a year.
Who could have predicted that a Republican would trash a long-held belief of his party (government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers) in order to directly benefit a friend of his?
While this isn't exactly new behavior, they used to at least exhibit a modicum of discretion. Now they just let it all hang out for the world to see. And why shouldn't they? It's not like there's going to be any consequences.
That’s not even their party position as Republicans have a very long history of choosing winners and losers. They just like to pretend that they want the market to decide but that’s far from reality.
No thank you. Made in fucking CCP run China is not the same as the 1980's high quality Japanese cars and motorcycles. Furthermore, the Chinese will face patent infringements that will block importation to the 1st World, with exception to Volvo.
It’s kind of depressing to see the EV prices available in China and compare it with the prices available in Europe. Hell, there are only three sub-30000€ EVs available on the German market, after two models were discontinued last year
In fact the article is guilty of doing exactly what you’re talking about! Doing a direct conversion from RMB into USD without adjusting for PPP, basically throwing out all CoL differences, is what leads to stupidity like this article.
In the USA you can get like $7000 back from the government when you buy an EV, but the manufacturers are hip to that and price them to absorb that credit. Then of course that doesn’t help anyone buying them used or certified pre-owned. Oh, and they were talking about eliminating that credit last time I checked. QQ
They really should disaggregate recalls fixed with OTA updates from recalls that need a physical intervention. Obviously Teslas almost always need an OTA update
No, they are cheap because Tesla built extremely efficient factories, assembly lines and car designs from the start. Try to look up the differences between Tesla and other manufacturers like VW, Toyota etc…
Because they sell direct to consumer and not via dealerships who, due to the lobbyists and supporting legislation that they have, pretty much own the US automotive industry.
They don’t do all the checks in process that are normal in automotive industry. They build them “good enough” and hope for the best. The plastics and frames don’t align and if you work in the industry and benchmark a Tesla you can quickly see where the cut corners
efficiency is when you have to recall your cars the most out of anybody because it’s more efficient to get them out the door and in to the suckers customers hands and then fix them later
100%, this number is skewed by the fact that tesla will basically “recall” for any minor issue because it’s a simple software update, I imagine a lot of companies try to avoid recalls as aggressively and for as long as possible because it’s a significantly bigger burden on them
I say this as someone who drives a Tesla but is still extremely judgemental of Tesla
As everyone who watched Fight Club knows, it’s a simple calculation. If the costs of the recall exceed the cost for the expected lawsuits, they don’t do it.
An OTA update has essentially zero cost, so it’s even easier.
Agreed. The concept of judging vehicle quality by number of recalls is severely flawed for this very reason. My Subaru Impreza has had a number of recalls for a variety of trivial things, but I’ve had only one actual issue with it in 65k miles and have spent relatively little on maintenance. Comparing that to the Audi A4 I had before this car which required maybe one recall in similar mileage but I was constantly fixing major items from leaks, broken drive related components, etc.
Neither had any motor related issues so far, aside from burning oil in the Audi. But by number of recalls? That Audi was great! But they also had a number of lawsuits filed in attempt to get them to actually recall the multitude of problems. The one that it actually had was the result of them losing such a suit, but so many years later it really didn’t matter.
So yeah, terrible metric to track. At this point, I’d rather see that the company has a dozen recalls on their vehicles than zero.
Edit: I should clarify. That being said, I do believe Toyota actually makes a solid car the first time. Boring, but quality is a huge focus for them. I’m still hesitant to trust recall counts though and I don’t think I’d trust Mercedes number as a valid quality metric.
that last edit you added is probably the worst part, because it takes away from how solid Toyota and others are because it ruins the entire metric, Toyota is likely crushing it, and entirely possible Tesla is actually really really bad, but without the RIGHT metrics we can’t actually draw any good conclusions, it’s not just bad for tesla but for the whole market
It should also be pointed out that the numbers in the articles are just projections covering the next 30 years.
I don’t know their methodology but I’m curious if they just took the current age and recall number and multiplied it out to 30 years. I don’t think this would be a fair assessment because a car would likely have all the kinks worked out long before it hits 30. Furthermore, I find it odd they projected out 30 years when the average age of a car on the road is 12.5 years.
Mostly no… and often when they do it’s a dealer install, or they can’t upgrade much because it’s all components from 3rd parties with their own software & can’t be upgraded - Tesla have a lot of vertical integration which means they can upgrade the software of even the smallest parts OTA.
That’s not to say the other manufacturers couldn’t work that way but when you’ve been doing the same thing for 100 years it’s a lot harder to change.
I need a citation for that for sure, I know until very recently all software updates were non-OTA, meaning you had to drive to a dealership to get the software applied, which means dealers were hesitant to issue them, that could all be incorrect now and it’s certainly incorrect for some of them, I’m positive there are car companies that put out OTA like tesla, i just don’t know who they are
I don’t know if it’s maybe a judicial thing or something or if they are technically required to do an official recall registered in some system, even if they can actually solve it OTA.
I would suspect the rules around required recalls are not really updated to reflect the extended amount of issues that a vertical system integrator like Tesla can solve OTA.
I’m not complaining about you, I appreciate your answer and am sorry about the confusion lol
I was complaining about the law and whomever made the statistics and wrote the article pretending that completely different things are the same, didn’t mean to shoot the messenger!
Legally they have to “declare” a recall, even when they can fix it with a couple of lines of code and an OTA. Recall doesn’t mean what you would expect it to me, it means “something the manufacturer needs to fix for safety reasons”.
Hence why 98% of Tesla recalls are OTA (not actual stat, I’d have to look it up but it’s definitely in the 90s)
Recall, an official recall, is a safety issue notice really. Its a legally defined thing in motor vehicle code. If manufacturer finds a defect, issue or feature affecting driving safety they have to notify safety authorities and get a recall issued. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with, whether the product goes back to service garage or not.
Important point: Not every Tesla OTA update triggers a NHTSA (or other national road safety agency) official recall. Tesla has updated their cars plenty without recall notice. Only safety related issues get recall issued along with the OTA update.
Thus it is meaningfully, that they have so many software related (and thus OTA fixed) safety recalls. Each of those times is Hey, NHTSA, gonna have to admit, our software has a safety oopsie on it. Here is the paperwork, could you please issue us the official recall campaign number. Yeah software team already developed fix for it, it’s all in the paperwork. We issue recall notice for drivers to check for the OTA to have gone through properly, that is all they need to do.
No maker wants to have safety recalls. It’s bad PR. Makers have been fined plenty times for failing to properly inform agencies. One of the most famous is the Takata airbags. Where Takata got fined millions by first knowing and not telling their airbags had extra spicy unstable propellant exploding way too violently. Plus after firstly admitting to it lying to for example NHTSA about the vast extend of the problem.
So it matters, that even on “just a software issue” recalls are issued. The main point is public is properly informed. Lot of time it’s resolved without great calamity. However this was exactly the lesson learned. Don’t let makers hide issued, make them admit immediately so public knows and can take appropriate mitigation, before someone gets hurt. Also makes makers fix things quickly. Otherwise other priorities might override, since What they don’t know can’t hurt our reputation, like this is marginal issue. We can take little more time with this. Oh it takes 6 months to design fix with that small team. No worries. After all, no one knows. We have time. Except during that slow roll someone bumps into that “marginal issue” and gets hurt. Having to publicly admit immediately puts fire under their hind quarters. “Whole design department, stop what you are doing. We have safety recall issue. It went just public. Everyday company sits without being able to say No worries, we have solution we take flack. This is now priority number 1. This must be resolved yesterday, says the company board. Whatever parts or equipment you need, order it. Whomever you need to call, call them.”
Agreed. Although we would still need a measure the severity of these issues. An OTA update is more convenient than a physical recall, but it doesn’t change that the car drove with those issues until the problem was discovered and fixed.
So the more important question is whether the underlying problem was something trivial like a minor comfort feature not working as intended or something affecting the safety of the car.
No they shouldn’t. since not every OTA update gets a recall. Only safety related issues cause recalls. What OTA recall means is software or algorhitm related to the drive train, driving or related systems had a safety related issue.
It is normal, that now that there is more software control, there is more software related recalls. The point isn’t to track how many times the car went to shop to be worked on. The point is to track how many times and how severe safety related issues there is. Just because the solution was simple to end user OTA update doesn’t mean the underlying safety issue wasn’t severe.
Before you had to go to garage to fix sticking accelerator cable. Now you have to update the power delivery mapping algorhitm, since it had a bug qnd didn’t properly cut the torque from the motor on accelerator lift. Both are uncommanded acceleration application issues. Equally severe and very serious safety issues. One just needs physical work, other software fixing.
That they have to update the software so often regarding safety says to me their safety verification procedure isn’t robust.
Also not like Tesla is the only one. Others also have had to update their software for bugs or ill behavior. Just not as often. I would hazard due to more conservative software updating.
Bunch of the recalls for Tesla have been caused by them updating software, introducing a bug and then having to pretty soon after safety recall for the update fixing that bug. If they had scrutineered the software more closely, they would have avoided the safety recall. Since the deployed software would be bug free on the first deployment.
Remember on modern EV, single bug in control software can send front and rear tires spinning in opposite directions. On 4 motor torque vectoring the software can send the car into uncontrolled tank spin with one side pulling forward and other backward.
The simple truth is the driveline control software is safety critical component of modern car and thus should absolutely earn safety notices on having problems. Mind you recall is archaic name for safety notice, but that is the name in legislations and use. On many other fields also there is archaic legacy terms in use and people learn to deal with it.
That’s odd that Tesla spends so much on its own battery R&D and manufacturing but they’re buying batteries from a Chinese company, and only for the RWD model but not the others.
Oh ok, I thought they did. I was told by the guy at the Tesla dealer that model 3s from 2023 onward had LFP batteries so I assumed they were made by Tesla.
And you think this somehow changes my assessment? how dare you assume I didn’t read the article. Fuck Ford and fuck Toyota, and fuck all car manufacturers.
Wouldn’t want one here anyway, our charging infrastructure is shit. Literally all owned by lord bazinga. Meanwhile in Shenzhen there are more ev charging stations than there are gas stations and 258 dc fast charging bays at the airport.
Amerikkka is done, planned economies are just superior. We will never admit to it, but we’ve already lost on the two major manufacturing technologies for the 21st century, evs and renewables
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