Tesla Knew Critical Parts Were Faulty, Investigation Claims

Tesla for years has been blaming drivers for the dangerous failure of vehicle parts that it knew suffered terminal faults, a wide-ranging investigation claims.

The investigation by the Reuters news agency says it has unearthed a litany of cases where engineers knew mission-critical parts such as suspension, steering and half-shaft assemblies, were faulty but, when they failed, the automaker tried to evade compensation claims by accusing owners of abusing their vehicles.

Reuters says it can back up its claims following scores of interviews with Tesla customers in the U.S., Europe and China where the automaker has been forced to recall its vehicles for essential repairs. The news agency also has  obtained thousands of engineer reports dated between 2016 and 2022, including repair reports from Tesla service centers globally, analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty.

One such part failure highlighted in the investigation cites an extreme case with the suspension collapse in Shreyansh Jain’s car, which luckily happened at low speed. However, he had owned the car for less than 24 hours. The automaker told him the suspension collapse was caused by the separation of a lower control arm from the steering knuckle, which connects to the wheel assembly. Jain had expected the automaker to cover the damage.

Indeed, a Tesla service representative had texted that an initial inspection found “no evidence of any external damage” that caused the incident and implied Tesla would pay for the repairs, according to a copy of the text provided to Reuters.

About a week later, Tesla sent Jain a letter denying responsibility, saying it had inspected the vehicle and determined that the cause was “a prior external influenced damage to the front-right suspension”. Jain insists he was the only driver of the car during the one day he owned it and had not suffered an accident before the suspension failure. He says: “I was like, ‘Bloody hell, how can metal just snap like that when I know for sure the car has not hit anything?’”

The repair took about three months and Jain paid a deductible of about $1,250 to have the work covered by his insurance company which, after the claim, sharply increased his rates on another car he owned. Exasperated, Jain sold the repaired Tesla for about $10,000 less than the $55,000 he paid for it. He says: “I lost complete confidence in the car.”

Reuters claims he is one of tens of thousands of Tesla owners who have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts. The chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, stretch across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, according to records and interviews with more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians.

It claims its review of the engineer documents offers the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called parts “flaws” and “failures”. The records and interviews suggest the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators.

Reuters reports that neither Tesla nor founder and CEO Elon Musk responded to detailed questions for the investigation. However, Musk has acknowledged some build-quality problems with Tesla vehicles in the past, particularly the entry-level Model 3.