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

Impressed

[Excelcia]

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.

Re: Credit

[Rei]

100% of Tesla's recalls have been voluntary and arisen from internal rather than NHTSA investigations, which is not normal for "plenty of auto makers". Also, see this.

Some important information was also left out of this summary.

1) The corrosion-prone bolts are not in a component made by Tesla. It's made by Bosch.
2) Because the fault is Bosch's, Bosch has to cover the cost of the replacement.

Re: Credit

[rtb61]

Well yeah clearly you do not understand the free market, supply and demand, PR=B$ and greed. You are not charged a reasonable price based upon reasonable costs on anything what so you. You are charged the highest possible price, where increasing it further would actually reduce profit, due to significant drops in revenue as a result of diminished sales. If they could, rather than buying something and selling it with a reasonable market, they would via corruption demand to be paid to take it and them demand via that same corruption, that you pay for it at the price they demand, by regulation, fail to buy and be penalised example it's called "Obama Care", a far right medical system, dumped on the US by a whole bunch of pretend left corrupt corporate douche bags.

So in US terms, what will tariffs do, where the maximum possible price is already being charged, reduced profit margins and there goes the share price. There is so much crony capitalism combined with corruption of Democracy that you pay the fair price on practically nothing. The price of the food you eat has been enormously artificially inflated by futures trading on food, the profit from this goes to the banks, for doing nothing other than corrupting government, you pay more for food to feed the insatiable greed of those who own banks, banks being pretty much nothing more than corporate taxation system, corporations charging taxes on all transactions.

However tarrifs should not be random but reflect the impact of regulated costs on fair completion, those regulated costs, wages, worker safety conditions, environmental safety requirements, product safety requirements, local, state and federal taxes, fees and charges. They should not occur at random but in a national trade court, where companies can apply for fair competition relief and the appropriate tariff applied to reflect regulated costs of operation. Double plus bonus, to reduce the tariff the affected country need just apply the same regulations, and either spend that money locally or pay it at the border of another country.

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.