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Consumer Reports Expects Tesla's Model 3 To Have 'Average Reliability' (cnbc.com)
There may be only a few hundred Tesla Model 3s on the street, but Consumer Reports already has an opinion on the new car's dependability. From a report: "We are predicting that the Model 3 should have about average reliability," said Jake Fisher, director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. Average may irritate Tesla fans and the nearly 500,000 people who have reserved a Model 3, but Fisher believes people should understand what Consumer Reports expects from the new car. "We don't go around recommending that people buy cars that are below average, so if it is average or better, that is not a bad thing at all," said Fisher. "But let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks. We are saying it is basically par for the course." Consumer Reports has yet to buy a Model 3 and put it through a battery of tests, as the magazine does for dozens of vehicles. In addition, so few Model 3 cars have been delivered that Fisher and his team have yet to get a sense of how owners feel about their new Tesla.
pay to play.
As a Model 3 fan, I'm actually hear to say that I find it weird that you can rate the reliability of a car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles.
Nothing, more, nothing less. Just strikes me as odd.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
How can you possibly rate anything not produced ? I know that Tesla is inside the Reality Distortion Field. Jobs left it to Musk in his Will, but how can you rate a car in beta, er, pre production ? Do CR writers have some Tesla in the 401 (k) ?
Yes this is weird. Any journalists that "pre-report" what they expect their future articles to say, have some serious integrity issues.
Consumer Reports stakes their reputation on their reviews being above reproach on an ethical basis. They don't accept freebies from manufacturers. They don't use affiliate links. They don't accept sponsorships. Instead, they buy all of their products from the same stock that any other consumer would (rather than the hand-picked ones that oftentimes get sent to reviewers) and they make their revenue by charging people a fee to have access to their content. Sadly, in the Internet era, that business model has pushed them towards clickbait headlines designed to increase their membership, as evidenced by their very public-yet-baseless jabs over the last few years at whichever companies are popular (e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.).
This is yet another of those jabs designed to drum up revenue. They don't even have a Model 3 in their hands yet, so when they say, "let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks", what they're actually saying is, "we have nothing meaningful to say at this moment, and we expect that the actual review we post won't make headlines, so instead we'll say something outlandish about the popular product now in the hopes that some suckers will sign up to read our final review". They're certainly not faithfully performing their duty to review things in an impartial manner based solely on the facts. Rather, they're sacrificing their integrity for the sake of a quick buck, as has sadly become par for the course with them.
Whatever reputation they still had in the circles I move in died years ago.
It's basically an indication from CR that Tesla should go ahead and pay them some money for better reviews. You can see that in a number of reviews they do on anything from cars to computers, they are the ones "recommending" Microsoft products like the Surface, until widespread issues came up that any tester would've found and after enough publicity they pulled their recommendation.
Consumer Reports is to consumers what Gartner is to businesses, at least Gartner is up front about the $250k startup fee.
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I find it weird that you can rate the reliability of a car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time,
I suppose a lot of people here have not had much experience in manufacturing products. At my companies we have often had to declare to prospective customers the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of products we hadn't gotten to production yet.
Typically one of our circuit assemblies (with large chips) will have an MTBF of 50K to 100K hours these days. Certainly we can't run a bunch of them in the test lab for that length of time to determine this. The product would be too old to ship before the tests were done!
The answer is that there are a number of accepted models (with vendors of software for them) that are used to do this. Telcordia/Bellcore, MIL-217, and so on. You gather data from the each of the components (resistors, LEDs, chips, DC-DC converters, etc.) and put them into the model and it calculates the predicted MTBF result. OEM customers will accept that value as long as you worked the model correctly.
It is actually kind of interesting to play with the model to see what happens when you change the product. If you add a fan component or a rotating-media disk drive you see a big impact in the MTBF.
Can you do this for a whole car? Yes it is possible but some components won't have MTBF figures established. For that you can substitute similar parts and make a judgement call. I would be surprised if Tesla hadn't done this already but I would also be equally surprised if CR had. Not in any rigorous way at least. It is a lot of work.
So I am pretty sure that they are just doing SWAG on most of it which I wouldn't trust much. Sure Tesla models do have their problems because they are damn near prototype units they are shipping. Things go wrong with them that has to be fixed but Tesla takes that in stride and fixes them. But it doesn't make for good-looking reliability predictions.
One thing about CR that I had noted ever since I started reading them back in the '70s. When it comes to American-made cars they always seem to have a bias against them. If Dodge or Chevrolet does something that Mercedes or BMW or Honda do they will shave the score off the American car but not the foreign car. I think they are better about this than they used to be (decades ago when I last paid attention) but it was very pronounced then and they could be taking it out Tesla now.