Tesla Issues Its Largest Recall Ever Voluntarily Over Faulty Model S Steering (theverge.com)
Tesla announced today that it is recalling 123,000 Model S vehicles around the world over a power steering issue. The company said via an email that it was a proactive move and none of the company's other vehicles are affected. The Verge reports: The automaker said 123,000 Model S vehicles built before April 2016 were affected. No injuries or crashes have been reported in connection with the problem. In the email, Tesla said it had, "observed excessive corrosion in the power steering bolts," but that the problem was most prevalent in colder climates where road salt is used. "If the bolts fail, the driver is still able to steer the car, but increased force is required due to loss or reduction of power assist," Tesla wrote in the email to customers. "This primarily makes the car harder to drive at low speeds and for parallel parking, but does not materially affect control at high speed, where only small steering wheel force is needed." Tesla said owners do not need to stop driving their cars if they haven't experienced any problems. The company said it would inform Model S owners when a retrofit, which is estimated to take an hour to install, is ready in their area.
You have to give credit where it is due. Most auto makers and other big companies would wait until there are lawsuits first. Tesla is doing the right thing here.
and when u sucked on them
I'm actually impressed. While I will never own a Tesla, unfortunately, because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control and which materially affect the performance of the vehicle, this is actually perhaps the most responsible way I've seen a recall handled. In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA. For the most part, auto manufacturers don't wait until the NHTSA actually orders a recall, but generally the writing is on the wall that they need to voluntarily recall or the NHTSA will step in. In this case, it wasn't even on the NHTSA's radar.
This might make me rethink my stance on Tesla.
what kind of chinesium potmetal did they make that shit out of that they're seeing this already...
Oh yeah we're gonna have self driving! And they can't figure out bolts...
HA!
You may have heard of them - they are known as BOSCH. They make the electrics and much of the mechanics of just about every car on the road.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
There are a lot of businesses that would like to see Tesla fail. There is an entire country's worth of short-sellers who need to get Tesla down below their expected price. There are all of the auto manufacturers who failed to make good electric cars for us even when they certainly knew how. There are the oil companies and everyone who services them. There is every existing auto dealer. There are companies that make parts that aren't in Teslas. The list goes on.
So, you will now see the same crazyness as the claims that the Falcom 9 made a huge hole in the atmospehere! Run and scream! What actually happened was that ionization of plasma in the ionosphere diminished for two hours due to a shock wave, and thus GPS signals might have been about a foot off in some areas near the launch, and there might have been interesting (though yet undetected) changes in HF radio propogation that hams might now notice if they look hard.
So, now we have hundreds of thousands of Teslas on the road with rusty bolts that happen to have not hurt anyone. Hide under the bed! Tesla to go bankrupt any moment!
They seem to make pretty good cars, and nobody took electric seriously until they came along. Nobody else can compete with them yet, although they all talk up a storm about what they're gonna do real soon now.
Do you remember when Prius was the propaganda target? It was only a few years ago.
Bruce Perens.
BOSCH isn't even mentioned in the article. This is a mechanical problem because someone bought cheap shit from China.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The manufacturer of the power steering in a Tesla is written right on it. It's no mystery who made it. No, it's not in the article, but it is widely known. It is stated on other forums, like Electrek. Knowledgeable users on forums state categorically that Tesla won't even be paying for it - it's a fault with a BOSCH part, and BOSCH will be footing the bill for the repair.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
BOSCH isn't even mentioned in the article. This is a mechanical problem because someone bought cheap shit from China.
10 seconds worth of googling later ...
"The bolts, made by German supplier Bosch, can begin to corrode after contact in cold temperatures with road salt."
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Back to the drawing board! Next you're going to tell Elon that his rockets are supposed to land without expelling.
To the question of who's fault it is and should pay for replacement, Bosch made the bolt but was it to Tesla's spec? And isn't it so fortunate Tesla has plenty of service center capacity to handle the recall?
I would like to see Tesla succeed as well. However, they have been running on borrowed time for a while now. They've never turned a profit. They have persistent quality issues. They have a huge service backlog. They have supply chain issues. They have launch issues (the 3 is their fourth product launch, they should have this stuff nailed down by now.)
Tesla shipped around 100,000 cars last year and lost $2 billion dollars. Ford shipped roughly 2.5 millions cars last year and made $6 billion dollars. Tesla's market cap is $4 billion higher than Ford.
This sounds like bean-counter nonsense, but it's critically important. The only way Tesla can continue to operate is to keep it's stock price up so it can fund operations by selling this expensive stock (and bonds.) This is entirely based on it's ability to continue to grow it's sales by double digits year after year. They can't get their numbers up if they can't build cars.
The critics are right. They are dropping the ball on their fourth launch, which is inexcusable. This isn't a minor point. If one of the big three botched a launch this badly, they'd be torched by wall street and executives would be flung into the Detroit river.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The biggest problem here is that nobody is regulating what Tesla can do to your car remotely from one day to the next, and the security is entirely up to them with no outside audit required. This can't really be allowed to continue as most automobiles get the remote update capability.
And yes, buying and keeping up a pre-1973 vehicle (emission control computers came in about then) doesn't look like so bad an idea, even given the safety advancements made since '73.
Bruce Perens.
So BOSCH bought them from China. You think they machine them one at a time paying competitive wages in Germany? China melts down whatever is laying around and labels it steel.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I personally think most investors are idiots. Most of Tesla's cars are required to be serviced in their shops. Their motivation isn't for "profit" but rather because it's a new platform and they are looking to spot problems like this. Your required to take your Tesla into the shop something like every six months. So this factory recall probably affects 200 owners that refuse to get their cars serviced for good or bad reasons.
Nothing stopping you from retrofitting a car with one of those, and suddenly you're in full control of your car if it actually matters that much to you.
Hell folks do that to older cars just to get the massive fuel econ and repairability benefits if nothing else. And if safety is a concern you can always get a proper roll cage added in while wiring in the new fuel injection system? :)
So BOSCH bought them from China. You think they machine them one at a time paying competitive wages in Germany? China melts down whatever is laying around and labels it steel.
You're obsessed. Before you go to sleep at night do you check for China under your bed?
Well, it is kinda under my bed, pretty far under though...
What happens if the bolts go when in autopilot mode?
Note the username and signature of the poster.
Ford Focus and Fusion got a recall about the clutch pressure plate, should I submit that story?
The Tesla is to electric cars what the iphone was to mobiles when it too launched. Its a game changer, everyone else has to play catch up now, but in ten years there will be viable competitors, probably for less money.
Kudos to Musk, he damn near perfected an idea that a lot of people had a crack at, and all pretty well failed, miserably. That said, he's going to need to 6 Sigma the hell out of this product as its a whole new sub genre of automobile, and fair enough, he seems fairly proactive in his recalls. Too many people get hung up on the cult of Musk, and forget he's just a guy, with drive, ambition, and a plan. He will fail at some things, but he has managed to disrupt two entire industries, autos and LEO transport, thats no small thing...
Finally, a good reason for the BFR!
I can get bolts made out of soft steel, hard steel, zinc-plated galvanized steel, 440, high-chromium stainless steel, molybdenum-vanadium high-chromium stainless, and so forth.
Different steels will flex more without deforming, or will hold more-rigid under strain. A flexible steel in a roll bar or even a frame will improve vehicle handling, whereas a high-grade hard steel might actually sheer under stress (outright break) instead of flexing like a spring. Molybdenum lowers the energy state in the lattice, so it's more-difficult to substitute oxides--even resisting electrolyte pressure which could cause normal high-chromium stainless to just rust.
Your car has dozens of types of steel in it. If you have a high-end combustion engine, you probably even have one of the many grades of inconel--an extremely hard steel that keeps its anti-corrosion and work-hardening characteristics even up around 1850 degrees. If you put regular steels in the turbocharger turbine, they practically melt (Inconel sheds heat like crazy, too, so any blast of hot-then-cooler spots in the exhaust will keep it cooler instead of heating it up toward peak temperatures).
A lot of good grades of steel will rust out if you park them within half a mile of the ocean.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
with no power steering and no power brakes, you don't have a significant other, either
those strong arm muscles from steering will help you to jerk off better
Yes, He does know what we want.
Praying isnt just asking for things, it is supposed to be communication from us to God.
emt 377 emt 4
Tesla needs to break down the actual root causes - including all management failures. This kind of defect doesn't just show up in a finished product without warning from someone on the line seeing shoddy practices due to overwork or other bad pressures, or some engineer doing backend checks finding structural flaws overlooked previously. How far up does the failure go? The NHTSA will surely find out.
Computers are more complex but they also could leave out unfinished features or leave in lesser bugs by the shipping date. Assembly was easier than a car; all the hard components were made by others.
Main difference-- building a large complex machine that costs 10x as much as a computer. Complex in engineering, manufacturing and in regulations. Infrastructure investment is considerably higher too. Also keep in mind they have their own more computer as part of the car and it's more sophisticated than Apple's computers were (and like Apple, they use off the shelf parts-- but unlike apple they probably didn't design their out circuit boards.... although they did that for the car's other electronics.)
It takes longer to pay off the debts from any growth to meet demand. They simply can't hire factories to make what they need for many of the parts. For the batteries they are working with panasonic but nobody can output the volume required so they are making that product too.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Somebody picked the wrong kind of bolt... a standard bolt of the wrong kind metal. I'm no engineer, but I know I'd forget about something like that while thinking about everything else... including mixed metal contacts.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I forget details-- you look it up but the Tesla plan is a solid one which will put it on par with Ford in REAL numbers soon.
Ford only makes about $1000 per car they sell. It's quite low, look it up. They make more on higher ones but it's mostly a profit by volume (and support fees.) Other profit goes to the car dealers. Ford makes about 5 million cars or so per year. So thats about 1 billion profit (on new cars, not all the tons of other stuff they are doing.)
Tesla's plan is to make about 1 million cars per year. They make 5x the profit per car, part of that profit comes from NOT having to share profits with dealers etc. That means when they reach 1 million cars per year (which is not far away) they will have about equal the profits of Ford. Since they don't do all the other stuff Ford does, you can't compare with those... plus Ford doesn't do solar or power storage (yet.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
SpaceX = technology provided by NASA
PayPal = thieves who confiscate your money and freeze your account for no reason
Tesla = meme that's about to be bankrupt
A defective power steering pump isn't a life-ender by any means, but something that I would be pretty pissed about on my $90K luxury car.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... that Musk is a product of Silicon Valley.
I guess he represents the last of the old school.