Enough is Enough

[Teamds]

After 2.5 days of ownership had to get Tesla to come and collect my 2021 M3P. Quite unsafe to drive and very disappointed they can let a car be delivered in this condition.

The most expensive car I have ever purchased and by far the worst defects of all combined.

 

[Monkeyworld]

After 2.5 days of ownership had to get Tesla to come and collect my 2021 M3P. Quite unsafe to drive and very disappointed they can let a car be delivered in this condition.

The most expensive car I have ever purchased and by far the worst defects of all combined.

More info???

 

[kelvin 660]

What were all the problems you had?

 

[Teamds]

More info???

Steering wheel off centre, car pulls to the right - need constant anti lock wise pressure to keep car driving straight, shudder through wheel at speed. Lane assist autocorrecting when in the middle of the lane, Autopilot and FSD disabled, both B pillar cameras steamed up. Headlamps misted, roof glass miss-aligned.

 

[Vegas]

That is terrible! I don't blame you for returning. I can image how p*sed off I would be if my delivery was like that.

I hope you''ll get a second chance, cause they really are a great car.

 

[ACarneiro]

Oh, man! Sounds like you got a lemon, really sorry to hear.
I too hope you give it another chance. I’ve had mine 18 months and still in love with it...

 

[adsheff]

Bad luck - but happens with all makes of cars. Anything manufactured at high volume will get the odd lemon. I've had mine 18 months and never had a thing wrong with it.

 

[Teamds]

Bad luck - but happens with all makes of cars. Anything manufactured at high volume will get the odd lemon. I've had mine 18 months and never had a thing wrong with it.

Must have been a rare good one then. Judging by the sheer volume of cars in service and the lack of service slots available for a month, I doubt it’s in isolation.

 

[Killer_Catz]

Mine had a steering wheel fault which caused it to shut down everything, been repaired and no issues since. Out of curiosity, how many miles had you done? My understanding is Autopilot/FSD needs >100 to calibrate and is disabled till then.

I feel I was lucky with body panels, as mine seems to be built OK, but I nearly gave it back when I had the safety features fault. Now it is fixed it really is a great car.

Hope you manage to get it all resolved and sorry to hear it went so wrong for you!

 

[GeorgeSymonds]

I was reading about a guy who has an MX and he daren't sell it because its taken him 3 years to get it fault free and for the first time since he bought it its gone 6 months without needing warranty work although slightly ironically he booked it in anyway to have the MCU upgraded.. I know other makes of car have issues, and we know people vent on forums about issues more than they praise, and we also know when the cars work well they are amazing. I can't help feeling there are plenty of other rogue cars out there where the owners don't really care about panel gaps and wheel alignment given you see enough people with filthy uncared for cars and people showing pictures of low tyre pressure or badly warn tyres asking for help to realise that some people have no idea of the health of what they're driving.

We're looking to get our 3rd Tesla, an M3, and I'm struggling to know what to do. Tesla have a bunch of newish cars at good discounts including a P3D- at a great price which would be ideal, but there's a nagging doubt that any newish car for sale is because the previous owner has got fed up with it and rejected it. A guy on FB showed his rejected M3 for sale at a dealer and the list of issues (3 motors in 4 months and Tesla had seemingly given up on it and sold it at auction) and he said you'd be mad to buy it. I know they have warranty but I don't want the aggro, not when you hear stories of taking 2-3 years plus to get it working right!

For context our first car was a 65 plate and was fine except constant reboots due to dodgy software. Our second was a 66 plate facelift P90DL and rear camera, steering rack, door card, it chewed the edge of a set of front tyres in 6k miles, seat coming apart, MCU starting to fail, autopiliot driving hard left whenever activated and other issues all needing attention which was bad enough but the attitude of Tesla fixing things has changed noticeably over that time making it a challenge to get them to agree. There's still an argument over the drivers seat that rocks slightly and the tesla mechanic suggested moving it forward a bit and having the backrest more tilted... is that really a fix on a car that the first buyer spent £115k on and has done 47k miles?

 

[White Eusebio]

Must have been a rare good one then. Judging by the sheer volume of cars in service and the lack of service slots available for a month, I doubt it’s in isolation.

Mine's in for service on Friday, booked the day after delivery day (Dec 21). It's in because the boot is slightly misaligned, which a fleet firm manager who I got chatting to in my 5 minute wait noticed when he offered to help me out on panel gaps. There's a tiny scratch on the paintwork where the boot shuts that I would never have noticed. I did notice that the lights on the boot and the body aren't quite flush.
I also reported the left side camera not working, but that warning disappeared a day later and hasn't reappeared since.
Given how many cars they were delivering at the end of December then even if mine were typical (and I accept I may have been slightly lucky) it's no surprise the SCs are busy

 

[Glan gluaisne]

In the past 15 years I've bought 4 new cars and one two year old car. 3 of the new cars were Toyotas. None of them ever had any warranty work, all were as close to perfect when delivered as it would be reasonable to expect. The one second hand car was a 2016 model year BMW i3, and that too was pretty much faultless. The contrast between any of those cars and the Model 3 is pretty stark. Despite the Model 3 being around, or more than, double the price of the Toyotas, it is easily the worst built new car I've ever bought.

The annoying thing is that most of the defects are stuff that should be easy to get right. With the exception of the broken ball joints (caused by a wrongly calibrated torque wrench, apparently), all of the problems with my car are just exceptionally poor attention to detail during assembly. The phrase "ruining a ship for a ha'pence of tar" comes to mind, as the core design of the car is very good, it's just let down by a plethora of problems that seem indicative of a disregard for attention to detail.

 

[Haydj]

I have had (new to me) second hand cars that pull left or right, my E class merc was particularly noticeable, as was my Lotus. Both were fixed quite easily with tracking and suspension adjustments. I wonder if your car had a knock to a wheel during transport which has either buckled it or caused some weights to come off, and /or has knocked out the suspension. On a normal car, this would be relatively straight forward to fix - Id hope its the same on a Tesla. It would also explain why the autopilot is struggling if its having to overcome a suspension problem. So I wouldn't write it off yet.

My 2021 LR also has steamed up B pillar cameras, but it seems to have dried out with use.

When I was taking my Lotus onto track, and then started racing it, I used to get adjustments made all the time to the suspension - we went too far once and I had a car which snap over-steered and pulled to the right and under-steered to the left. Horrible to drive on that qualifying session.

Most of my cars have had problems especially the German ones, the only one which was perfect was my Honda Integra Type R. I miss that car, I'd have another tomorrow if they were still in production.

 

[Zakalwe]

In the last 10 years I've had three new cars (inc the Tesla). An Audi A4 was OK, back twice to the dealers for little bits of warranty work. A Peugeot 508 was similar, though the cabin rattled. Nothing major though. A Merc C-Class had to go back to the dealer 3 times in the first 6 months for various sensor replacements. The NOX sensor threw errors up regularly, but getting an appointment at the dealer was nightmare with wait times as long as 6 weeks. Invariably I'd spent a few weeks driving round with the Check Engine light on only for the damn thing to disappear the day before the scheduled repair. In 4 years of ownership it had one software update and that took the best part of a day.

Outside of that period I had a Jag which was a nightmare. Boot and bonnet lids wouldn't latch correctly. It blew all 4 headlamp bulbs in the space of 40 minutes, leaving me with a two hour long motorway drive at 8PM on a December night to be done on sidelights. The driving steering pump started to get noisy and before the scheduled appointment it failed, virtually locking the steering on a 30MPH road. I nursed it home to wait collection. The next morning I came out to find it had dumped the power-steering oil all over my drive...the same drive that I had freshly block-paved 2 months earlier. I hated that bag-of-sh1te with a passion.
The most reliable cars that I had were Honda Accord Executive. I had 3 of them and did nearly 250K miles in them. The only fault I had in three cars was a cracked air conditioning pipe which leaked the gas out.
Build qualitywise, the worst that Ive had was my first company car- a repmobile Vauxhall Vectra SR thing. It had a 6 CD sound system (loaded via a cassette in the glovebox) that you could make skip to varying degrees by sharp braking, acceleration or by hitting a bump. Lots of toys, most of which were cheap'n'nasty and only worked part-time!

My Tesla had a couple of minor panel alignments and the RH repeater camera wasn't working. It took a morning to sort, though I didn't have a great SC experience. When they told me the car was fixed I walked out and found the new camera hanging from the panel- they hadn't clipped it back in correctly. They took it back and after another inspection the boot hinge was more badly aligned than when I brought it in. Back in it went for another go at it. Fairly minor stuff in the great scheme of things.

I'm not obsessive about cars....they are a tool to me. I certainly am not bothered about poring over them to document tiny scratches.

 

[TomD]

Bad luck - but happens with all makes of cars. Anything manufactured at high volume will get the odd lemon. I've had mine 18 months and never had a thing wrong with it.

We need to stop being apologists for Tesla QC and build quality. Until then we won't get improvements. Yes, these things can happen with all car makers but they are very rare, with Tesla they aren't.

We would all have better cars if Tesla had licensed their drive train and battery tech to Audi or Mercedes.

 

[doats1]

Steering wheel off centre, car pulls to the right - need constant anti lock wise pressure to keep car driving straight, shudder through wheel at speed. Lane assist autocorrecting when in the middle of the lane, Autopilot and FSD disabled, both B pillar cameras steamed up. Headlamps misted, roof glass miss-aligned.

Even by Tesla's standards, this is quite bad. Whoever QA'd your car was clearly on one.

 

[Kenners]

A guy on FB showed his rejected M3 for sale at a dealer and the list of issues (3 motors in 4 months and Tesla had seemingly given up on it and sold it at auction) and he said you'd be mad to buy it. I know they have warranty but I don't want the aggro, not when you hear stories of taking 2-3 years plus to get it working right!

That is more of a boomerang isn't it? The new owner will be right back at their door, unless they hope it'll end up at a different service centre!

 

[Kenners]

I don't think this an exclusively Tesla problem, but more of an issue with US auto plants in general, which have always been renowned for inconsistent quality - BMW X's built in the US have suffered similar criticism. This is how the Japanese got their foot in the door in the first place. It seems the China made M3s are much better and I would expect the German built ones to benefit from similar attention to detail/pride in work.

I know this doesn't help us!

 

[Peteski]

I don't think this an exclusively Tesla problem, but more of an issue with US auto plants in general, which have always been renowned for inconsistent quality - BMW X's built in the US have suffered similar criticism. This is how the Japanese got their foot in the door in the first place. It seems the China made M3s are much better and I would expect the German built ones to benefit from similar attention to detail/pride in work.

I know this doesn't help us!

Perhaps in the same vain as our UK build Nissan was built like crap too

 

[Peteski]

We would all have better cars if Tesla had licensed their drive train and battery tech to Audi or Mercedes.

They already did that previously with Mercedes B class EV. A seriously dull car in comparison to a Tesla. It would be better if Audi, Mercedes etc made a serious effort to design and build an exciting EV to compete with Tesla.