Pointless door handle wear

[hcoon2000]

I got lucky with my door handles. I was at the service center for the recent seat belt recall. When the technician handed me my key the door handle no longer auto-presented. It literally broke the last time the service tech closed the door. The Sr. tech evaluated the situation and asked if I minded waiting one hour while the driver door handled was replaced. I agreed. While I waited I scheduled a time the following week to drop the car off to have the other three door handles replaced. Both times the service center detailed my car. I cannot say enough good things about Tesla service. Four door handles - Zero Dollars, Two Auto Detailings - Zero Dollars, Tesla Service and Support - Priceless.

 

[scottm]

Here's an overview of the broken handle issue (won't open when pulled), showing what wires are likely to break on the mechanism:

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/48051-door-handle-retraction-mechanism


From an August 2014 built car.

These are the second generation of handles.

 

[jcaspar]

You must not have ever owned a BMW (lucky you!) My friend owns a local European repair shop and pays his rent on repairing BMW window modules. I suspect and hope the Tesla is much better built.

I think you guys worry too much. My dad, upon his first car with power windows (a 1993 Blazer) (Now called Tahoe)... thought we'd wear our the power windows... when I sold my 1995 Tahoe, it had 263,000 miles on it, over 13 years. Guess what. Windows still worked fine.

Stop worrying, and just enjoy the car

 

[cwerdna]

You must not have ever owned a BMW (lucky you!) My friend owns a local European repair shop and pays his rent on repairing BMW window modules.

On that note, I do find it funny that often BMW i3 (REx version seems very unreliable) drivers often make comparisons to the reliability of Mercedes or Audis. None of the are known for particularly good reliability either, although surprisingly, Audi somehow improved quite a bit (in Consumer Reports) recently. And, it seems amongst those BMW folks, they equate BMW and/or high price to reliability when there's no correlation at all.