I'll say it again. I think Consumer Reports does a terrible disservice by lumping things like paint swirls and panel alignments with things that leave you stranded like engine and transmission failures. There should be a sharp demarcation when it comes to quality rating. Consumer satisfaction ratings for Teslas are always very high, which reveals the high level of nuisance proportion in the reliability ratings. For instance:
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I did take issue with the way things like Consumer Reports classified some major repairs. Back when Tesla was having problems with the motors, I recall seeing something where someone at CR was liking Tesla replacing those motors with the equivalent of replacing the entire engine on a new ICE, which would be a major repair.
But it's also an apple to oranges comparison. The engine on an ICE is the most expensive component of the car and it's extremely expensive to remove. A dealer is going to do everything they can to keep the engine in the car and fix it in place if there is a problem. Removing the electric motor on a Tesla is no more difficult than removing an alternator and probably easier than an alternator on a lot of ICE.
At the time Tesla was trying to figure out why the motors were having problems so they wanted to take them apart and analyze them. The motors were not all that expensive compared to an ICE motor and relatively easy to replace, so they did. It a new ICE had a problem with alternators or a fan mechanism, they would replace the entire mechanism too because the part is not that expensive and it's relatively easy to replace.
At this point Tesla has gotten the drive train quality improved to a point where problems in the drive train in the first few years is very rare. But there are still panel gap and alignment issues and everyone complains about paint, so that sounds like it's an industry wide problem.
Agree with more physical controls for often used and safety important functions. Further improvements in voice commands are also needed.
I live in southern Vermont and there are places along my frequently used routes where there is no cell service. Voice commands don't work when the car is driving through these. Turns out the task of figuring out what the driver is commanding is farmed out to the mothership rather than one of the vehicle's processors! Seems like an odd design choice when many physical controls have been removed.
There is a Southern California mindset to a lot of Tesla's design decisions. All car makers have design groups in Southern California because of the car culture there and it's close to the Pasadena Art School of Design which has the reputation for turning out the best car designers in the world (my father went there before it got famous, his degree was in photography). But all the legacy car companies are based somewhere else. The Big 3 based in Detroit and the European makers based in countries that have real winters give a lot more thought to the problems of winter driving than Tesla did. I have found that my Model S's handling in snow in ice is outstanding, but I think that's more an accident coming out of the design than a design goal.
In other ways they are not great in the winter. Where I live there are a lot of hills and cell coverage is spotty. AT&T coverage is particularly bad here. I think it was last winter Tesla moved all the HVAC controls after an update. As I was leaving home one day shortly after the update the windows started fogging up and I almost drove off the road trying to find the defroster button on the touch screen. I had no cell service there so voice commands wouldn't have helped.
My dentist is on his third Model S. He had the original, the 2016 refresh, and now the second refresh. He said the yoke is annoying, but did say that the new landscape oriented screen is easier to access the controls. On the portrait oriented screen you really have to look down there to see the HVAC controls. So it has improved, but physical controls would be an improvement for some things you need for safety.
On the refresh MS/MX, the horn is a capacitative touch button on the yoke. Worst design ever, followed closely by the elimination of all stalks. Not exactly a quality issue, but still frustrating compared with other vehicles.
For the first ~8 years after the Model S was introduced, Tesla was the only viable option if you wanted an electric for anything more than commuting to work. most other electrics looked weird and had poor range. Long distance driving was a painful experience because of the lack of good charging stations.
Now that is all changing. There are good looking EVs available with decent ranges and access to DC charging stations is improving. As manufacturers start to adopt Tesla's standard plug and can use superchargers, that starts to move the buying decision to the creature comforts inside the car. The spartan interior common to Teslas is going to turn off a number of buyers who want more physical controls.
Great point. Speaking of fog, Tesla's used to be able to identify if there was an animal in the road ahead when driving through thick fog.
I'd guess that was based on a camera sensitive to IR. It would be a safety plus to have that again. Maybe one of the new 4K forward facing cameras
could include one with sensitivity into the IR frequencies.
That was probably due to the radar. Tesla has quit using it and I think it's now disabled in the cars that have the equipment (may still be active in AP1 cars because they have fewer visual sensors).
