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

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.