100% drive unit failure rate??

[ecarfan]

OK, lots of problem reports. But without solid data on how many DUs in the field are operating in spec, it's hard to put context on these numbers... from these anecdotes, I can't even make a broad-brush assertion about the trend line on DU problems. Up? Down? Sideways?
I don't know how to turn these reports into solid projections of pretty much anything other than... well... the issue is real.
Does anyone have better data

No one outside of Tesla has useful, reliable data on this issue, not even Consumer Reports because their data relies on owner reports,mis not a random sample, and is not specific enough about how a drive unit "problem" or "failure" is defined. One person will call a minor noise a "failure" and another person will not.
What we have on TMC are anecdotal reports that are not sufficient to draw any conclusion from beyond "Some owners are having a range of issues with their drive units." But that won't stop some people from drawing unwarranted conclusions.
We also have Elon's statement in the most recent earnings call that drive unit reliability has improved and that Tesla's goal is for their drive units to last one million miles. And in about a decade we will hopefully know whether or not that goal has been met.

 

[apacheguy]

Very, very few of DU replacements have been necessitated by outright DU failure (ie. car does not move).

 

[wdolson]

CR also equates replacing the DU with an engine change on an ICE. While it is roughly analogous, Tesla does swap DUs in part because it's far easier than pulling the engine on an ICE. Most DU replacements wouldn't have happened with an ICE, the service center would have tried to fix the problem without pulling the motor.

 

[PRJIM]

CR also equates replacing the DU with an engine change on an ICE. While it is roughly analogous, Tesla does swap DUs in part because it's far easier than pulling the engine on an ICE. Most DU replacements wouldn't have happened with an ICE, the service center would have tried to fix the problem without pulling the motor.

The DU comes out with a few bolts and removal of HV cables, it is much easier to pull out than most ICE's. With that being said, there is an inherent design flaw in du that I don't think Tesla themselves have pin-pointed. Better to replace the DU and get another 30k miles out of it than have the old one fail in 5k miles after the complaint was received. I believe that is the logic Tesla is taking with these replacements.

 

[wdolson]

The DU comes out with a few bolts and removal of HV cables, it is much easier to pull out than most ICE's. With that being said, there is an inherent design flaw in du that I don't think Tesla themselves have pin-pointed. Better to replace the DU and get another 30k miles out of it than have the old one fail in 5k miles after the complaint was received. I believe that is the logic Tesla is taking with these replacements.

At least with the early SU replacements, I've read Tesla's engineering department wanted to analyze problems in the field and wanted the DUs back for analysis. That is fairly common with any new product introduction.

There is a story Ford was getting 1/2 of its transmissions for the Ranger pickup from Mazda and the other half from an American supplier. They found the American transmissions were failing, but the Mazda ones weren't. When they took a bunch of transmissions apart and compared them to a Mazda transmission, they found all transmissions had been built within tolerance, but the Mazda transmissions hit the exact middle of the tolerance range on every single part and the American transmissions were all over the map. Because the Mazda transmissions were essentially built to much tighter tolerances (tighter than Ford thought possible), their transmissions didn't fail.

According to Elon in the investor's call they did figure out the problem and it was with the grease injectors. On at least some DUs, the grease units sometimes would squirt too much grease and sometimes too little. They fixed the problem with the current DUs so grease injection is much more consistent. Dry bearings will wear faster, which is what the milling noise is from.

Assuming there are some people out there who just live with the noise because they don't want to go through the bother of taking the car in (human nature being what it is), the low rate of actual drive failures says this is more of a noise than a real failure problem.

It they are putting re-manufactured DUs in, sometimes those may have problems that didn't get fixed the first time, which may be why people keep going back time and time again.

 

[islandbayy]

Just picked up my car today after getting my 4th drive unit, all in less than a year. It is 60.1 miles from the service center to my driveway. Between leaving the service center with my new drive unit completely silent, to arriving home, the "new" (manufactured) drive unit developed the milling noise. My luck is just getting worse with this car It's still quiet, but, unlike drive unit #2, that had milling noise under acceleration power only, this one is getting it at any speed above 35 regardless of power level.
This drive unit is a Revision "Q" and is fresh from Fremont (ordered just for me).

Each drive unit I get, is living a shorter and shorter life. First one was roughly 48,000 miles, though, I had been complaining about excessive clunk for most of that drive units life until I had enough of it (Loud enough to echo between houses). It was replaced in January. Drive unit 2 developed Milling noise while on my West Coast road trip. By the time it was replaced, the milling noise was loud enough to be heard by my neighbors INSIDE their homes as I drove by, that one lasted roughly 15,000 ish miles. #3, intermittent power loss, it would literally just act like someone pulled the power plug, and then plug it back in. That one had issues almost immediately, though I thought it was bumps in the road, until it got worse, and started cutting out in intersections. That one lasted, well, technically, 0 miles before issues, though didnt realize it at first, so replacement was ordered, and had that one in for about 5,000 miles. And new one, made it 60 miles before milling noise has started.

I personally don't think these re-manufactured units are getting repaired properly...... This is getting tiresome, and rather discouraging

 

[JRP3]

According to Elon in the investor's call they did figure out the problem and it was with the grease injectors. On at least some DUs, the grease units sometimes would squirt too much grease and sometimes too little. They fixed the problem with the current DUs so grease injection is much more consistent. Dry bearings will wear faster, which is what the milling noise is from.

Actually Elon said the spline was not getting proper grease, and I believe that was in reference to the batch of cars that went to Norway, though maybe it was more widespread than that. In any case we aren't getting the full story, and they either have not solved the issue or they don't have enough of the revised units available.

 

[wdolson]

Just picked up my car today after getting my 4th drive unit, all in less than a year. It is 60.1 miles from the service center to my driveway. Between leaving the service center with my new drive unit completely silent, to arriving home, the "new" (manufactured) drive unit developed the milling noise. My luck is just getting worse with this car It's still quiet, but, unlike drive unit #2, that had milling noise under acceleration power only, this one is getting it at any speed above 35 regardless of power level.
This drive unit is a Revision "Q" and is fresh from Fremont (ordered just for me).

Each drive unit I get, is living a shorter and shorter life. First one was roughly 48,000 miles, though, I had been complaining about excessive clunk for most of that drive units life until I had enough of it (Loud enough to echo between houses). It was replaced in January. Drive unit 2 developed Milling noise while on my West Coast road trip. By the time it was replaced, the milling noise was loud enough to be heard by my neighbors INSIDE their homes as I drove by, that one lasted roughly 15,000 ish miles. #3, intermittent power loss, it would literally just act like someone pulled the power plug, and then plug it back in. That one had issues almost immediately, though I thought it was bumps in the road, until it got worse, and started cutting out in intersections. That one lasted, well, technically, 0 miles before issues, though didnt realize it at first, so replacement was ordered, and had that one in for about 5,000 miles. And new one, made it 60 miles before milling noise has started.

I personally don't think these re-manufactured units are getting repaired properly...... This is getting tiresome, and rather discouraging

The number of areas where you can have problems is pretty limited. The power comes out of the battery, through a bit of cabling in the car, and into the drive unit. That said, if one car is having problem after problem with drive units and other cars aren't seeing the same problems, I would start to suspect something up within the car, outside of the drive unit.

I'm an electrical engineer that does mostly software (usually something hardware related), but when a problem crops up like that, you have to follow the data, even if it intuitively doesn't make sense. One time when I was working for an aircraft electronics company they had a weird problem that some units wouldn't boot if they were hot. If the customer waited until the electronics cooled off, it was fine. It worked fine once booted. It took two of us a couple of weeks to find it, but one chip had a bad initialization circuit that only failed if it was hot and they traced it back to one batch of those chips.

It sounds to me that something is going on in your car that's damaging drive units. It may be killing them faster because whatever it is is getting worse. My gut says you have a weird ground path that's sending current around in some weird way. Maybe something that should be insulated wasn't built right and always had a little bit of bleed through, and that bleed through has gotten worse as the insulation has deteriorated. But that's just a guess, finding it would be difficult. It would probably take disassembling the car and examining every spot to look for electrical burns.

 

[JRP3]

If there was shorting that caused enough current flow to create burns you'd be getting high voltage readings where they shouldn't be, like the body or suspension parts. I'm also pretty sure Tesla would be looking for electrical faults throughout the vehicle to eliminate the possibility.

 

[kort677]

Yeah, that's why I wanted to point out that it's on me right now. It is noisy, but they tell me (and I have no reason to doubt

therein lies your problem, your accepting their claims. I hope things work out well for you

 

[Neech]

Just picked up my car today after getting my 4th drive unit, all in less than a year. It is 60.1 miles from the service center to my driveway. Between leaving the service center with my new drive unit completely silent, to arriving home, the "new" (manufactured) drive unit developed the milling noise. My luck is just getting worse with this car It's still quiet, but, unlike drive unit #2, that had milling noise under acceleration power only, this one is getting it at any speed above 35 regardless of power level.
This drive unit is a Revision "Q" and is fresh from Fremont (ordered just for me).

Each drive unit I get, is living a shorter and shorter life. First one was roughly 48,000 miles, though, I had been complaining about excessive clunk for most of that drive units life until I had enough of it (Loud enough to echo between houses). It was replaced in January. Drive unit 2 developed Milling noise while on my West Coast road trip. By the time it was replaced, the milling noise was loud enough to be heard by my neighbors INSIDE their homes as I drove by, that one lasted roughly 15,000 ish miles. #3, intermittent power loss, it would literally just act like someone pulled the power plug, and then plug it back in. That one had issues almost immediately, though I thought it was bumps in the road, until it got worse, and started cutting out in intersections. That one lasted, well, technically, 0 miles before issues, though didnt realize it at first, so replacement was ordered, and had that one in for about 5,000 miles. And new one, made it 60 miles before milling noise has started.

I personally don't think these re-manufactured units are getting repaired properly...... This is getting tiresome, and rather discouraging

What @dwolson said makes sense. Something else must be going on with your car. Would the Lemon Law apply here?

 

[apacheguy]

Weird. -Q is supposed to be the reengineered million mile DU.

 

[ohmman]

Weird. -Q is supposed to be the reengineered fifty mile DU.

FTFY.

 

[JRP3]

What @dwolson said makes sense. Something else must be going on with your car.

There are other cars that have had multiple drive unit replacements.

Weird. -Q is supposed to be the reengineered million mile DU.

Is that confirmed by a credible Tesla source?

 

[Mike Tuccelli]

My nov 14 build , had the unit swapped at 11k, and is gearing up for another 20k miles now. Its not failure, its the milling sound- - -



Could be a power and weight problem, purhaps reducing the torque and hp of the motors allows the gears to last longer. Which is where I believe the milling sounds come from.

This scares me as I'm deaf and won't know if I have a bad drive unit. Are there other indications I should be aware of in lieu of not being able to hear a milling sound?

 

[islandbayy]

What @dwolson said makes sense. Something else must be going on with your car. Would the Lemon Law apply here?

Would if I could, but since no MAJOR defect within the first year (The first MAJOR defect (Battery failure) happened just weeks after first year of ownership, and Major is considered to be a defect that causes vehicle to not be operational. A UMC Failure would be non major, as vehicle still operates and could be charged by other means, charge port failure would be a Major as it would prevent vehicle from being re-fueled, just to give example, otherwise just in UMC failures my first year I'd have been able to lemon...) it is unlikely I would win the lemon case. And if it went to court and I lost, the lawyer fees would bankrupt me. As well as the only real winner in cases like this, are the lawyers....

 

[Tony8489]

How many DU failures have you seen in the 85D now that they are hitting the 20k mark? I haven't read about any on here *yet*.

Well, that's part of the reason that's what I reserved at the end of October for delivery in April 2016.

My original thought a year or two ago was that by early 2016 the first Model S cars might be coming off lease and I could get a good deal. Once I starting reading about the DU's I changed my view and would only consider buying new. The AWD version was the tipping point as it allows me to use the car for skiing, but there seems to be some belief that the DU's on the 70D and 85D models will be less stressed, as well as being a new (or patched?) design.

In view of this and other early adopter reliability issues, I'm quite surprised that resale prices for 2012's and 2013's are so high. With a new car only being a little bit more (especially with tax credits), why expose yourself to those issues to a much greater degree?

I know the polling mechanism is limited, but what's needed is a two dimensional poll counting DU failures by both time period of purchase and mileage at time of replacement. Maybe put up 4 polls by year of purchase with cross reference to direct viewers to the other years?

 

[wdolson]

If there was shorting that caused enough current flow to create burns you'd be getting high voltage readings where they shouldn't be, like the body or suspension parts. I'm also pretty sure Tesla would be looking for electrical faults throughout the vehicle to eliminate the possibility.

The problem sounds like an unintentional ground path rather than a short. It sounds like something is breaking down the insulation. If the motors are going faster now than originally, then it sounds like the current is increasing. Finding odd ground paths can be very tough. Shorts are usually pretty easy to find.

- - - Updated - - -

There are other cars that have had multiple drive unit replacements.

If it was an engineering problem, it would be universal or almost universal. Manufacturing problems are more scattershot.

Is that confirmed by a credible Tesla source?

Elon Musk said it on the investor's call last week with JB Straubel there. I would call that credible.

 

[yobigd20]

What @dwolson said makes sense. Something else must be going on with your car. Would the Lemon Law apply here?

Lemon law would definitely apply here since the car has been in for the same repair multiple times to no avail.

 

[yobigd20]

Weird. -Q is supposed to be the reengineered million mile DU.

Well, ****. So much for that.