"2 drive failures in 6000 miles is terrible, how is that reliable?" Very simple. THAT car has had one specific problem twice. That's not very good. But that tells us nothing about the other 999,999 Teslas. Nor about how THIS car will be doing over the next few years. There are about a million Teslas on the road. We, here, have no idea how many motor drives have failed overall. So there's nothing we can say about the failure rate. And "reliability" is all about numbers.
Now, the number of components in a Model 3 is much smaller than in a traditional car -- that's far fewer failure points. And the surveys are clear: Teslas have one of the highest overall satisfaction ratings.
But people love to bitch, and it seems quite fashionable to put companies down. We hear about 1 mm misalignments in panels and little paint defects on delivery, and that gets a LOT of press, so new owners are out there with their calipers and magnifying glasses. We've all heard about a couple dozen 12 volt batteries having to be replaced, and some people rushing to install substitutes, just in case. And about one or two main batteries burning up. Out of hundreds of thousands of Model 3s. And the display memory cards and the door handles on the oldest Model S's wearing out. And the guy getting decapitated under a truck in AP mode, and another hitting a divider. We get all the bad news, in bold print. And all about how Tesla is about to go bankrupt, and the stock is worthless. It stands to reason that if many people were having serious problems we wouldn't hear the end of it. But instead, Teslas are selling like hot cakes, word of mouth, people love 'em, and the company is doing great.
Most directly, I can only speak for myself, and the people I know. My 2018 Model 3 hardware has been solid, no issues. Friends and neighbors aren't having problems either. But ask me in 8-10 years, I'll know more. I expect my car to be running fine then, with about an 8-12% loss of range. Could I be wrong? Sure. We'll see. But nothing so far suggests we're driving an "unreliable car".
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