Tesla blamed customers for misuse of the vehicles and previous damage to the suspension components and denied responsibility for the malfunctioning parts, although it knew from the beginning that some components were faulty.
This is discussed in a major Reuters investigation.
The investigation begins with the story of a customer from the UK who bought a new Tesla Model Y 2023. Only a day after he received his first electric car, he was driving at low speed to his neighborhood when he suddenly lost control of the steering wheel while making a slow turn. The front right side of the electric car’s suspension failed after driving less than 200 km.
It took about 40 hours of work to repair the suspension and replace the steering column, as well as perform other repairs, bringing the total cost to more than $14,000. Tesla refused to cover the repairs under the warranty, blaming the accident on “previous” damage. This is just one case where suspension problems have affected cars that have barely left the assembly line, as well as Tesla electric vehicles that are less than two years old.
Another story happened with a Model 3 customer in the United States. Having driven less than 25,000 km in about a year of ownership, the electric car ended up in a Tesla repair center in Brooklyn, New York, after the accident. In the repair report, the technician wrote: “The front wheel fell off while driving on autopilot at 90 km/h.”
The Reuters investigation does not mention whether the car was repaired, but it eventually became known that the customer refused to pay for the repair, given that the electric car was sold at auction a few months later without the front right wheel.
Between January 2021 and March 2022, Tesla replaced the upper suspension arms on about 120,000 vehicles worldwide, according to a Reuters analysis, with the American automaker paying for most of the repairs under warranty. However, approximately 31,000 owners of old cars that had suspension problems had to pay for repairs out of pocket.
In Norway, a country known for leading the electric vehicle adoption race, former Tesla service managers and technicians said the manufacturer advised them to pass the cost of frequent and repeated failures onto customers to reduce warranty and goodwill repair costs starting in 2017 year.
“Now we need to stop talking nonsense,” said one service manager who claims to have been forced to leave the company. The service technician quit his job a year later because of this problem. “I have done nothing but keep replacing these control levers,” he told Reuters.
In addition to the control levers, Tesla had problems with axles and steering columns, with customers sometimes having to pay more than $4,000 for repairs, although the cars were still under warranty.
