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Model X Owner Files Lemon Law Suit Against Tesla, Claims Car Is Unsafe To Drive (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BGR: When designing the Model X, Tesla went more than a little bit overboard in trying to trick out its crossover SUV with as many bells and whistles as possible. Not only did Tesla's overly ambitious development delay the launch of the Model X, it has arguably resulted in a noticeably higher number of quality control issues than we're accustomed to seeing. Hardly a controversial point, even Tesla CEO Elon Musk has conceded that the company was far too zealous when developing the Model X. While some customers with frustrating Model X issues have noted that Tesla has been quick to fix any problems, one Model X owner from California has had enough. According to the Courthouse News Service, via Teslarati, Barrett Lyon recently filed a Lemon Law claim against Tesla, arguing that the car's problems are unfixable and that it's ultimately unsafe to drive. In addition to finding that the front door would often slam shut on his leg, Lyon's suit details a slew of other problems, including Auto Pilot problems, touch screen freezes and more. A Tesla Model S owner, on the other hand, reported that his vehicle went rogue causing an accident all by itself.
I want to buy the newest toy on the market, but don't want to be bothered with the inherent problems that may come up from pushing new tech.
This makes me think of the guy that insured his storage of cigars, then smoked them and sued for damages when the insurance company didn't want to pay for them. The insurance company turned it around after they lost and charged the guy with arson.
Tesla's vehicles are likely the safest on the road, but getting sued over issues is just par for the course with auto companies. Tesla seems like a company that would buy back (at market price) the vehicle if he doesn't want it that badly.
I thought it hadn't yet gone into production series, so it's still prototypes.
Personally, I would like a simpler electric car, without all the touchscreens and bells and whistles. Partly because it generally makes the car much easier to work on, and partly because it makes for fewer failure modes. As much as many people have been asserting that the reliability of electric cars will far exceed that of traditional ICE cars, so far it hasn't happened. The Tesla Model S comes out average or worse in most reliability studies (beaten by the more reliable ICE cars, such as the Toyota Camry or the Honda Civic). I suspect part of the reason for this is that there's simply too much stuff in the Tesla, resulting in too many failure modes. For example, I should be able to open the charging port without a functioning touchscreen. That's just silly.
But couldn't it be some FBI goons testing out those various vaunted "kill switches" they've been demanding for so long?
It's rather clear that "you're not allowed that's illegal" has not come close to stopping them. What's a few "brand new electric cars we can say are full of bugs" if not the perfect chance to test some wireless highway murder box?
Taking deposits for future cars and spending the money for day to day expenses? Government grants and tax credits? Selling stock all the time? That money flow is going to dry up sometime soon, and all those gimmicky cars will be unfixable orphans rotting away in a junkyard.
I thought Tesla had refuted the claim of the car going rogue by checking the car's logs and confirming it was DFU error.
Minimizing the seriousness of these issues will ultimately be destructive to Tesla. These could be the result of a flawed engineering process that needs to be highlighted and repaired before it gets to the level of Fords. A competent engineering team does not a let a car go out if the doors don't work.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'll take that dangerous un-fixable lemon of a Tesla off your hands. I'll even give you $300 for all the emotional trauma the car caused you.
Got pics?
The jury is still out on whether pressing the shift lever button twice as you exit the car can really be condidered 'F'ing U'.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
My S has a constant center screen crashing problem. Absolutely horrible. One day I had my cell phone plugged in to charge when the screen was crashed and kept needing to be rebooted, and I noticed that the charging shut off and on every five seconds. That led to my discovering that the screen crashing problem was due to having a flash stick plugged in for listening to MP3s. Apparently having more than 8GB of music is more than the system can handle. When I reported this to the service center, they said they were already aware of the bug.
So yes, there is a screen freezing problem. It's a known bug, and Tesla needs to fix it. But the MP3 player is so horrible that most people tether their phones and play music from there instead of using flash sticks.
And I agree that more cupholders would be nice, as would more USB ports and door pockets would be nice (the X at least has them in the front).
But despite the shortcomings, it's still the most amazing vehicle ever, and I have no regrets in purchasing it.
Although I admit I don't know every feature of the model X, I was under the impression that you have to actually tell it to close its door, preferably AFTER you are inside. Does that mean that the owner was slamming the door on his own leg and then blaming Tesla?
I am surprised that Tesla would allow things to get to the point of needing to file a lemon lawsuit against the Tesla X. Given Elon Musk's statements regarding the Tesla model X and their willingness to fix all things I am quite surprised they just did not buy the thing back from the guy to avoid the bad publicity and the potential that a finding against them would require them to recall all of the model X cars for safety issues. Just reinforces the point that buying the bleeding edge of technology does come with potential issues.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Sheesh, it closed on my ankle, getting my penis wedged between door and ankle.
Watch this space.
http://imgur.com/E3joXpL
Jamming untested code into a release and sacrificing quality for quantity is NOT being zealous!
Tesla is good at fixing obvious things. What they are not good at is fixing intermittent software or hardware bugs because they're not set up to do the long duration testing and logging required.
I had a problem with my model S dropping the network connection on a sporadic basis. About every 2-3 weeks, I'd get in the car and the network (3G) wouldn't connect. Since the bug report process requires a network connection, that raises a problem. Sometimes reboot would fix it, sometimes not.
My personal suspicion is that it was an intermittent hardware failure in the 3G modem - maybe the antenna connector was a bit off, maybe it has a crack in the PWB that is temperature sensitive, etc. But they have no real way to monitor this sort of behavior. And it's really, really annoying to have to schlep your car into the shop, have them look at it for a day or two, and, of course, not see the failure (because it's' a 2-3 week kind of recurrence).
Nor do they have a good way to test the radio behavior: it's not like they have an shielded chamber with a calibrated signal source at the shop. They just look at the "number of bars" (or, presumably, some RSSI measure available through a service menu)
Furthermore, the service staff, while wanting to help, does not have the technical "explaining" expertise (nor would I expect them to) to deal with a complex network physical layer problem. I'm sure that Tesla has plenty of customers who are technology people, and there are probably people at the factory who are technology people - but it would be insane to let customers talk to the engineer at the factory - the engineers wouldn't get any work done. So the service people at the pointy end of the spear are left to say "it's probably a software bug and there's probably a patch in work" but without any more detail.
I notice that the problem seems to have gone away - either they finally jiggled the right wire from the passenger side mirror to the center console, or the software has changed in some way that the problem doesn't reoccur. There was a theory expressed to me that when the car wakes up, it only tries to connect with the modem a few times before assuming there's no 3G service available and not trying again (e.g. like the battery saver in a phone, so it doesn't drain the battery flat if you go into a no-coverage area).
You program the car to charge to a particular level, starting at a particular time.
If your daily commute is 100-120 miles, you set it to charge to 80% (say, 180 miles of 235 max range) You drive to work and back, and you're down to 60-80 miles when you get home, which is above 20%.
When you go on a long trip, the night before, you set it to charge to 100%, either inside the car, or using the mobile App.
Easy.
Every time some cool thing is too expensive, only available to the very rich, or shown at shows but never actually makes it into the market, thank a trial lawyer. Every time you wonder why the future we were always promised never arrived, thank class action lawsuits, "consumer advocates", and Ralph Nader and the army of anti-future, anti-technology, anti-freedom, nanny state acolytes he mentored and groomed and then injected into our society like a terminal virus.
We used to be a nation of people who explored, experimented, tried things and failed and learned from both the trying and the failing. If you bought a product that was "too good to be true" and then you had problems with it you tried to deal with it, or you tried to negotiate with the vendor for a remedy, or you sold it to somebody willing to buy it.... and then you considered the experience a lesson and you were more careful with your money and expectations in future purchases.
Now, people whine like little children, throw tantrums, grab a lawyer run to court, etc ..... and learn NOTHING from the experience other than to go on being stupid and reckless and depending on the courts and the government to make everything right and protect us from ourselves.
Lawsuits like this add huge costs to all of us. Products cost more because the vendors must carry large insurance policies and have lawyers on retainer or payroll. Products cost more because they must be over-designed to reduce the risks of lawsuits. Products cost more because the manufacturers pay more for access to cash because investors perceive higher financial risks and therefore demand reduced risk and higher returns on their risky investments.
Had these sorts of lawyers and their lawsuits existed in the past, we'd all still be living in mud huts and walking everywhere barefoot; ships, trains, planes and automobiles would never have gone into production or widespread use.
That their data show one thing does not nessesarily mean that the driver was lying. Sensors has been know to malfunction, I/O has been know to malfaunction, software has been know to malfunction, computer hardware has been know to malfunction. The "my software did not fail because my software tells me so" argument does not hold. I want a second opinion; an independant data logger from all sensors while a system is in "beta" and until the "drive by wire" or automated drive system has been approved for general use by an governing body. FAA or peer review?
I guess he will lose his case though. He hasn't got a leg to stand on.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
1) All the sensors, logs, and systems malfunctioned in such a way that made it look like driver error.
2) It was driver error.
If you had to lay down money and bet on one possibility, which one would it be?