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Consumer Reports No Longer Recommends the Tesla Model 3 (cnn.com)
Consumer Reports is pulling its recommendation of the Tesla Model 3, citing reliability issues with the car. "Tesla buyers are more likely to be satisfied with their car than customers of any other brand, according to Consumer Reports," reports CNN. "Yet the publication says many customers reported problems with the Model 3, including loose body trim and glass defects." From the report: "Consumers expect their cars to last -- and not be in the repair shop. That's why reliability is so important," said Jake Fisher, senior director of automotive testing at Consumer Reports.
Tesla pointed to its overall customer satisfaction rating from Consumer Reports and said it has corrected many of the problems found in the survey.
"We take feedback from our customers very seriously and quickly implement improvements any time we hear about issues," said the company statement. It said the survey was conducted from July through September, "so the vast majority of these issues have already been corrected through design and manufacturing improvements, and we are already seeing a significant improvement in our field data." Last May, the product testing website failed to give the Model 3 a recommendation due to issues with braking, but ultimately reversed its decision after Tesla released a firmware update improving the car's breaking distance by nearly 20 feet.
touchscreens should not be used when a car is in motion - with this knowledge, anyone who gets hit by a Model 3 can now sue the driver and the manufacturer - tactile controls were invented for a reason - if you hire only millennials, you'll end up reinventing things that were standard for a reason and end up with stupid things like wiper controls on a screen
I'm not sure where CR ranks the 3-Series, but the 5-Series was one of six models (including the Model 3) that CR pulled their "Recommended" ranking from in this latest update. But of course, if there's something negative to say about Tesla, it drowns out all other news.
When was the last time you ran anywhere? I mean with your own legs, not by pressing 'X'?
Exactly. This should be obvious to everyone except for people like Rei who think it is normal ("Agile") to build cars in tents.
Nope, it's a permanent beta problem. Elon is very proud how they "improve" their cars every 2 weeks. They are using agile software development model but applied to the hardware+software product, i.e. ship minimum viable product asap, fix and add new features as you go. They've been making the Model S 7 years now, still has problems whenever they decide to upgrade hardware, and with over the air updates you always have to check what broke this time, though some things get fixed or added. They've had the only viable EV on the market, plus I consider myself an early adopter, so I am a customer, but mature product Teslas are not. I got my wife into one 2 years ago, she is not an early adopter, so for example she didn't read the release notes one morning which stated somewhere in there that in their wisdom Tesla decided to auto-unfold mirrors as soon as the car starts moving. So when my wife folded the mirrors manually, as she did many times in the past, and started backing up, crack, the mirror unfolded and broke off on a wall. Yes, they fixed it on next release, but too late for my wife's mirror - there goes $600, just another cost of driving a beta car Then there are features which Tesla sells but delivers to future cars only. One good example was the highly touted P85D which was supposed to produce 691hp. It didn't at first, but Tesla assured owners a software update is coming. Eventually they delivered a car which can produce that power, but it took 3 redesigns of the battery so only available for new cars. The original owners got an excuse "your motors can produce that power, and the car can handle it, but with your battery the most you will see is 463hp, which is about 50hp more than the non performance car you could have bought for $25K less". They offered a retrofit to 500hp for an additional $5K, but to get the advertised power it would require an upgrade to a brand new P100D, which would cost roughly $80K. They sold cars in 2014/2015 with "blind spot warning" which was supposed to come via software upgrade, turns out Elon was smoking something when he decided it can be done using nothing but parking sensors (who knew when going down the highway parking sensors don't work, eh?), so they quietly removed the feature from the website. Current cars, 4 years later have better blind spot monitoring, but that requires 8 cameras and a powerful computer (simple, reliable radar based solution is too boring for Elon), so again, they delivered but only to new cars. Anyone heard of Full Self Driving sold in 2016 through 2018? It does absolutely nothing today, and chances are it never will for those who bought the cars back then. Oh, but the car can play fart noises through the speakers on demand - a breakthrough feature on one of the recent over the air updates. Welcome to agile development for cars.