You know what they say about statistics right? I just don't think that chart is a fair comparison with other EVs and since Tesla makes no gas cars, it's almost a meaningless report. Again, I own an EV and am pro-EV, but this type of report is meaningless I believe for any real EV shopper.
This is like if I posted a graph of what manufacturer has the best gas mileage and Tesla/Rivian wins because they make no gas cars and use 0.
Interesting comment you've got there.
As regards Consumers' Reports: Yeah, I've been a subscriber, for decades. And, for the purposes of this reply, I'm going to separate CU's reportage into two pieces:
- Reports and such that depend upon individual persons' evaluations.
- Reports and such that are based upon actual measurements.
With the first, CU has been known to express what is sometimes termed, "Editorial discretion". We have freedom of speech in this country which, essentially means, that if you have an honest opinion, you can express that opinion. So long as you're not making up stuff with malicious intent, the courts have ruled that you can say what you like. It's for
everybody, not just magazines and reporters.
So, if some CU evaluator of speaker systems, listening to the operation of said speakers, and says that, "The audio appears to wander around" gets sued by the speaker manufacturer for Not Saying Nice Things about their product, CU goes to the mat in court and gets, invariably, gets said lawsuit tossed. Many have tried to sue or intimidate CU for what they've said in this regard; invariably, they have
all lost.
Now, this doesn't mean that CU doesn't get things wrong, at least in my opinion. There was this one time, early on with FSD-Beta, where a CU evaluator was strongly recommending against anybody using the software; the guy was literally shaking when he made these pronouncements. Given that the Beta
was a Beta and had that serious warning about Doing the Wrong Thing at the Worst Time in the release notes, I fully understand where the CU evaluator was coming from.
And there was that infamous time back in the 1960's when CU declared that putting automotive light switches on a stalk, rather than on the dash (with the floor mounted dimmer switch, natch) was a Horrible. They eventually did change their minds on that one.
Speaking to the second: If There's One Thing That CU Gets Absolutely, Positively Right, It's Statistics and Data. Yeah, there's Disraeli and his comment about, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics". Which makes for a good chuckle. And, no question, liars will often bury their claims in statistics that, when opened up, don't withstand the light of day. But, as a working engineer I can tell you that statistics with its ANOVAs, correlation functions, and all that jazz is how one takes sometimes hard-to-work-out noisy data and uses that data to figure out How The World Works. CU
never lies about this stuff or tries to spin it: They tell it as they see it.
And there's obvious reasons why. On straight results, if CU gets sued, having hard, solid, replicable data defuses lawsuits. An example: The Suzuki Roll-Over debacle. For those who don't remember, CU had reports from the field that the relatively new for the time small SUVs were getting involved in accidents where they'd react badly to swerves on the highway. So, they started testing. And the Suzuki of the day, a narrow, high vehicle, had an alarming tendency to raise wheels off the ground during the tests; so much so, CU bolted outriggers onto the rear of the SUV to keep it from going over, and continued testing. The car got a Don't Use Under Any Circumstances; Suzuki sued. It took a couple of years of Suzuki trying to bankrupt an American Publisher, but Suzuki lost that one.
Basically: If CU says they have data from questionnaires in statistically significant numbers reporting on how much it costs to keep vehicles running, you can bet your bottom dollar that their numbers are straight. And aren't one of the Disraeli class.
Finally: There have been complaints around here that CU's reliability numbers for Teslas haven't been as shiny as posters here think they should be. That's mainly because of the old, but consistent adage: Never buy a vehicle during its first model year. I had a 2018 M3 until last year: I can report that
lots of interesting things went wrong with that car, mostly covered by warranty, some of which weren't. When the first couple of CU annual auto issues showed up with Teslas in them, people complained loudly around here that CU must have been doing something wrong. I don't think so: It was Just The Data, All The Time.
Clearly, CU's latest report indicates that, reliability issues or not, the Total Cost of maintenance for Tesla's cars are lower than everybody else's is, and broken out by years 1-5 and 6-10, even. I expect that every year this chart comes out Tesla's numbers will get even better, as the older, less-well-designed cars fall off the chart.
Fun.