My 2010 Roadster, over 7 years and 57k miles, had the solder on a battery rivet fail (handmade packs back then). That was it. (Well, OK, the cloth top leaked a little, but I think that was expected).
My wife's 2012 Model S, over 5 years and 88k miles, did have a few problems - maybe 4? Although Tesla got us a loaner (more than once bringing it to our house!) and fixed them all fast, free and friendly.
My 2015 Model S (a year old and 14k miles when I got it in 2016), over 2 years and 35k of my miles, had no problems at all.
My wife's 2017 Model X, over 1 year and 10k miles, had the windshield wiper fluid filler neck crack. They fixed it in our garage. That's been it.
My 2018 Model 3, over 6 months and 2k miles, had a sticky glovebox latch. I haven't bothered to have it fixed. That's been it.
That's over 15 years and almost 200k miles. There have been a few problems, but the cars have started every time and never failed to get us where we wanted to go. The failures have generally been very minor.
Does the CR report break them problems down to "cosmetic/noise" versus "powertrain" problems?
Does the CR report give the % of each type of car that has a problem...or only compare cars to others in its class? CR has changed it system over the years, but I know at one point several years ago all the colored dots just compared cars to each other. It turned out that you could get the worst, black-colored dot if as few as 3 to 5% of your vehicles had that problem, depending on the problem type. So yeah, one car might be 50% more likely to have a failure than another, which could be the difference between the best dot and the worst - but that could mean that 6% of owners had a problem rather than 4%. (I am not saying that is the case here; I haven't seen the numbers. Maybe 85% of recent Teslas have headlight failures; I don't know. I'm just saying that a black dot is not necessarily a significant problem; you have to look at the numbers behind it)
A lot of people like to rag on CR, but I think their comparative system is not really that bad when comparing reliability is what you want to do. But: IMO they way overplay the importance of the comparisons, and often make it difficult to find the real numbers behind it. Things like safety, efficiency, utility, cost, and even driving joy mean more to me than, say, a 4% greater chance of encountering a problem.
I have a new Tesla arriving next week.