Wife was parking her car on Main St. Andover, MA, and suddenly she felt the car was rubbing on something and became immobile. After checking, the front passenger wheel was stuck on a 45% direction with entire body frame sitting on it directly (see picture attached). Initially she thought she had flat tire but police quickly came to scene and pointed out that the wheel (front right) was disintegrated with its arm control. This was at very low speed while trying to turn steering wheel to park the car. Driving the car from home to where the incident happened was no problem, there was no sign of issues and suddenly the issue occurred.
We visited Tesla Watertown in MA today. The service manager was polite but pointed out that there was scratches on the rim and he believed that it must be because she scratched a curbside and caused the wheel to disconnect. I insisted on the dealer to inspect the vehicle before drawing any conclusion. Even though rim may be scratched, nobody is expecting the control arm to break free. Moreover, it seems a latent safety issue: you don't know when it will happen because it is not a result of direct impact like an accident, or as the dealer say, scratching rim and right after that, you get a control arm broken free. This is quite bothering because we kept thinking about the vehicle safety issue, it's our family car and we must make sure it's safe to drive. The dealer was still talking about insurance and they don't want to cover the cost because it seems like we did something to the vehicle causing this to happen - we weren't even thinking about the same thing. Getting the issue fixed is one thing, get to the bottom of the incident is another and more important. I will update on what I am hearing back tomorrow from Tesla Watertown.