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.

Comments

Rampant histeria will now ensue

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Necessity and Need

[JBMcB]

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.