I bought a brand new P-90D. It was very fast. Teslas dirty Secret is that the battery is completely unprotected. ANYTHING on the road, pothole or random garbage on the road will ruin the battery. I was going 20 mph down Riverside Drive in Los Angeles, didn't see anything the road, but I heard a ka-chunk. Wow, what was that? Looked in my rear view mirror and saw nothing. So I put it on autopilot™ and it drove all the way home about 5 miles. I put it on the charger. Next time I went to use it it made this horrible noise. I look at the front end and the passenger side is almost on the floor. The steering control rod had broken. A tow truck came the next day. Something on the road (my guess it was a chunk of concrete) destroyed the battery, steering and suspension. The battery is a toxic mess and costs $45.000.00 to replace. My insurance adjuster told me all he does is super expensive repairs. He said he will testify in court how extensive this is. The Tesla company has been horrible. They refuse to even speak to me now.My insurance company paid off $100.000.00 and I have Zero. Less than Zero actually. The trauma of this has caused untold trouble. It's OK I got them on blast. You see I play in a rock band. I made a video, so I have a grass roots campaign to show the public the truth. It's a riot. OH, I reported them to Consumer Reports. Can you say Class Action Suit?
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[Unverified] Defective Design- A Disaster
- Thread starter MartyFrasu
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AMPUP
Member
The battery is protected by a titanium shield on the front which is well documented from incidents that occurred in 2013/2014. This is the first incident I have seen since then (doesn't mean there hasn't been any). I suspect whatever hit your car came from the wheel area, damaged that first and then struck the battery beyond the forward protection. Rare and unlucky maybe? Sorry about your troubles..
Do you have any photos of the underside of the car where the battery was punctured through the shielding?
If you are running over objects big enough to destroy cars without knowing it, I think it's time to surrender your driver's license before you kill somebody's child. I'm serious. You do not know how to operate a vehicle safely. If you cannot see where you are going, you reduce your speed until you can, even if that means pulling over and stopping with your hazards on.
Cars hit things all the time. They get totaled. How is this different? Something like a chunk of concrete tall enough to even touch the pack should have been visible... do you have a picture of it or the damage?
Jays200
Member
habanero69
I Dont Need Cialis. I Drive an EV.
I don't agree. It is entirely possible to strike something large enough to do considerable damage to ANY car without being able to see it as you drive. He didn't indicate if it was at night, but that still is not a requirement for hitting something you did not see. Concrete blocks blend into the road pavement very well in my area,so I can see how that could have happened.
Now on the other hand, I don't see any fault of Tesla. It is strictly between the OP and their insurance company. Unfortunate yes, but Tesla's fault, NO. You will get NOWHERE with suing or defaming Tesla. In fact, the dirty little secret might be Tesla is waiting for the OP to act in their childish manner and then sue them for defamation. Tesla has a enough legal horsepower to handle such inappropriate behavior.
Sir Guacamolaf
The good kind of fat
Tesla did add the under body titanium shield to protect against exactly such occurrences.
Have they stopped including that in newer cars? Given your 1 post history, I'd love to see a picture of the under body or more pictures to prove your case.
Have they stopped including that in newer cars? Given your 1 post history, I'd love to see a picture of the under body or more pictures to prove your case.
bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
@MartyFrasu - all I can say is how fortunate you are. If you hit something big enough to cause that kind of damage to a Tesla, just imagine what would have happened to you had you been driving a car without that large shield underneath! Count your blessings.
Some pictures of the damage would be helpful. so far it sounds like whatever happened to your car was a freak accident.
Edge problems happen to cars all the time. When I was a kid I riding in the car in a parking lot and we heard a loud bang and my mother started panicking because she had no steering at all. Fortunately she had just straightened out and there was an open handicapped spot directly in front of us. I suggested she take it and she started arguing she wasn't handicapped, but I pointed out the car was!
Our mechanic said the housing for the power steering unit split in half. Something he had never seen in over 30 years of repairing cars. It was one of those freak things. If it hadn't happened at low speed in a parking lot, I might not be here.
If the sort of damage you had was in anyway common, I'm sure we would have heard about it by now. When someone tried to make a case Tesla had a serious problem with their suspension when the suspension on his high mileage early car failed on a rutted dirt road, it started with a post here, but was international news around the car industry in less than a week. Somebody who was kind of a Tesla troll wrote an article showing Teslas in junk yards that broke axles in accidents as "proof" his situation was not unique.
The world eventually concluded what most of us did from the start, his suspension failed in an unusual way and nobody else had a documented case of the same failure.
I am sorry to hear that hitting something you didn't even see caused to much damage. The titanium "armor" on the battery pack is well documented, but it sounds like something got in around the armor. From your description I can't quite picture the damage, as I said above pictures would help me understand.
Edge problems happen to cars all the time. When I was a kid I riding in the car in a parking lot and we heard a loud bang and my mother started panicking because she had no steering at all. Fortunately she had just straightened out and there was an open handicapped spot directly in front of us. I suggested she take it and she started arguing she wasn't handicapped, but I pointed out the car was!
Our mechanic said the housing for the power steering unit split in half. Something he had never seen in over 30 years of repairing cars. It was one of those freak things. If it hadn't happened at low speed in a parking lot, I might not be here.
If the sort of damage you had was in anyway common, I'm sure we would have heard about it by now. When someone tried to make a case Tesla had a serious problem with their suspension when the suspension on his high mileage early car failed on a rutted dirt road, it started with a post here, but was international news around the car industry in less than a week. Somebody who was kind of a Tesla troll wrote an article showing Teslas in junk yards that broke axles in accidents as "proof" his situation was not unique.
The world eventually concluded what most of us did from the start, his suspension failed in an unusual way and nobody else had a documented case of the same failure.
I am sorry to hear that hitting something you didn't even see caused to much damage. The titanium "armor" on the battery pack is well documented, but it sounds like something got in around the armor. From your description I can't quite picture the damage, as I said above pictures would help me understand.
I don't agree. It is entirely possible to strike something large enough to do considerable damage to ANY car without being able to see it as you drive. He didn't indicate if it was at night, but that still is not a requirement for hitting something you did not see. Concrete blocks blend into the road pavement very well in my area,so I can see how that could have happened.
Now on the other hand, I don't see any fault of Tesla. It is strictly between the OP and their insurance company. Unfortunate yes, but Tesla's fault, NO. You will get NOWHERE with suing or defaming Tesla. In fact, the dirty little secret might be Tesla is waiting for the OP to act in their childish manner and then sue them for defamation. Tesla has a enough legal horsepower to handle such inappropriate behavior.
Dunno. I've logged over a million miles. Yeah, I've hit chit. It was never by surprise, only by stupidity. If you find yourself hitting chit by surprise, hang up the keys.
I'm dubious that you could drive a car 50 feet, much less 5 miles with the steering arm broken on an AWD car. They pigeon-toe so bad, you can only move backwards. I suppose it's possible, but I'd have to see it to believe it. Every case I witnessed required a tow truck, and I've witnessed about a dozen.
I don't believe in this story... (at least in quite a few details)
Too many "holes".
And "me sue! you pay!" attitude doesn't help at all.
Kind like the one with "AP smashed me into a wall"... then a few days later video from behind is released...
Tesla Autopilot crash caught on dashcam shows how not to use the system
EDIT:
Here's how thick the bottom of a Tesla's battery pack is:
(the flexing part is a plastic frunk's shroud)
Too many "holes"
.And "me sue! you pay!" attitude doesn't help at all.
Kind like the one with "AP smashed me into a wall"... then a few days later video from behind is released...
Tesla Autopilot crash caught on dashcam shows how not to use the system
EDIT:
Here's how thick the bottom of a Tesla's battery pack is:
(the flexing part is a plastic frunk's shroud)
Last edited:
steve841
Active Member
This reminds me of the scene in "Wolf of Wall Street" ..... doped up on ludes, drove his Lambo home without a scratch!
habanero69
I Dont Need Cialis. I Drive an EV.
I would have to agree that driving any distance with a broken steering arm would have been nearly impossible. Unless it basically, finally broke at/near the destination. I'd like to see more pics too. The 1 provided doesn't show us anything.
This is something that seems odd about this. I suppose if you were going straight and there was nothing to turn the wheel that is now loose, you could continue to drive straight for a bit, but as soon as you try to turn even a little bit the car is going to have some serious steering problems.
Just for my own curiosity I want to understand this one better.
On a RWD, the steering 'trail' (the geometry that keeps a shopping cart's front wheel going straight) can allow the wheel to follow the path of the car. But AWD/FWD cars pull. Even a very small amount of pulling force will slightly toe in the tire, and in an instant, it folds.
It's possible the car sensed there was something up with the front wheels and disabled the front motor, but I would expect the driver to get all sorts of warnings about that.
I had the AP camera crash on my car once due to glare in just the wrong way when the car was booting and the instrument cluster lit up with all sorts of warnings about AP being disabled. I happened to be 2 blocks from the service center (the only time since I bought the car I was in the neighborhood for something non-Tesla related too), so I took it over there and the service manager got it rebooted correctly. Basically if any system involving driving has a problem, the car makes a nuisance of itself until you do something about it.
There are some people who don't believe the OP, but I am willing to hear him or her out. Whatever happened sounds very odd it might be exaggerated, but it might also be some bizarre accident that somehow allows them to get home before catastrophic failure.
llavalle
Member
I'm with you on that one. There's a couple of keywords like "full of toxic mess"... price quote that's over the part price, mention of autopilot for no apparent reasons and a lawsut + consumer reports.
Unless the OP has a picture of the damage from under, I don't really understand how this could have happened.
Why is your location Mercer Island, WA yet the damage was done near your home in LA?
I suspect the 'tell' is in the subject title "Defective Design - Disaster" and the prospects of a law suit.
It sounds like the insurance company made him whole ... so it is the "untold trauma" where restitution is sought.
Road projectiles and obstacles are an ever-present problem to every occupant in any vehicle .... especially at the speeds we now travel. I hit an angle iron that had fallen off a truck in front of me in my brand new 2010 Prius; people deliberately drop objects from overpasses; wheels come-off trucks from time to time and ram anything in their path; here in the mountain west we have rock slides that suddenly and without warning obscure the road; even drive by shootings occur way to often. Driving requires constant attention .... that is one reason I am not an advocate for autonomous cars.
To declare the design "defective" is argumentative .... BTW ... gas tanks are more vulnerable, and generally unprotected in virtually every ICE vehicle.
It sounds like the insurance company made him whole ... so it is the "untold trauma" where restitution is sought.
Road projectiles and obstacles are an ever-present problem to every occupant in any vehicle .... especially at the speeds we now travel. I hit an angle iron that had fallen off a truck in front of me in my brand new 2010 Prius; people deliberately drop objects from overpasses; wheels come-off trucks from time to time and ram anything in their path; here in the mountain west we have rock slides that suddenly and without warning obscure the road; even drive by shootings occur way to often. Driving requires constant attention .... that is one reason I am not an advocate for autonomous cars.
To declare the design "defective" is argumentative .... BTW ... gas tanks are more vulnerable, and generally unprotected in virtually every ICE vehicle.
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