This Has Been Obvious for How Long?

My position has always been that if a company mistreats its employees, it will mistreat its customers as well.

So count me as not as all surprised that Elon Musk's Tesla has been found to be defrauding its customers by accusing them of mistreating the vehicles instead of addressing known design flaws. (See also here, (original Reuters investigation) here, and here.)

I need to be clear here, when I am talking about design flaws, I am NOT talking about poor fit and finish, leaking door gaskets, or trunks not latching.  I am talking about things likewheels falling off of the car:

Tesla cars are shoddily built pieces of shit liable to fall apart and malfunction in dangerous ways at inopportune moments. No, this is not a blog from 2012! It is also not a blog from 2015 or 2018 or 2022. It is not even a blog from two weeks ago about Tesla's self-driving systems killing people all over the place. It is a blog from today, Dec. 21, 2023.

On Wednesday, Reuters published a big, thorough investigative story documenting a pattern of major parts failures on low-mileage Tesla vehicles—and Tesla's organized years-long effort to obscure the pattern and offload its costs onto drivers, so as to sustain the illusion that it is a profitable company making cars that are not piece-of-shit death traps. By "major parts failures," I should specify here that we are not talking about, like, a faulty turn signal, or an unreliable trunk latch. We are talking about stuff like a whole-ass wheel falling off of your Model 3 while it travels at highway speeds, or the suspension collapsing while you make a left turn, causing the body of the car to crunch down onto the road, or an axle half-shaft f%$#ing snapping while you accelerate, or the power steering suddenly failing while you are zooming along at 60 miles per hour.

We are talking, in short, about engineering failures—failures that anyone would find alarming if they encountered them in a soap box derby racer made out of literally a soap box—happening, abruptly and without warning, to Tesla cars that are for all practical purposes brand new. Moreover, they're happening to lots of them, because of manufacture and assembly problems the company knew about, and hid, and lied about, and blamed on the poor suckers who bought its crappy cars.

(emphasis original, %$# mine)

………

Back to Tesla. The Reuters piece makes clear that the internal practice of blaming part failures on drivers themselves—others can fight over whether it's fraud in any legal sense—was a common tactic on Tesla's part, made explicit in company documents. In this way it fought off expensive recalls in Europe and the U.S.—it couldn't do so in China, where regulators were less eager to fall for its bullshit—and made its business appear more profitable to investors, whose calculations would look quite different if they assumed hundreds or thousands of dollars of repair liability for each Tesla vehicle sold. Given that regulatory arbitrage, not selling cars, is Tesla's real business, I suppose it makes a grim sort of sense that this would be baked into the front-facing, car-selling part of the operation.

In general I don't like spoiling the kicker of somebody else's article, but I'd like to call your attention to the following quote, which ends the Reuters piece and crystallizes, I think, something important. The context is: A Tesla driver has brought his wife's Model 3 in for servicing because the power steering ceased operating after the car went over a normal speed bump. The service manager (note that Tesla, unlike other car manufacturers, owns and operates all of its dealerships, so the workers there are Tesla employees) identifies the culprit: A system component has become corroded—probably, he says, because the car went through a car wash. The repairs will cost $4,400. The driver observes, reasonably, that he has never heard of a car's wiring being damaged by simply taking it through a car wash.

Lundeen [the driver] said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”

Reuters

Imagine offering this as a defense, as you charge a customer $4,400 to fix your own shoddy product. Look, pal, all I can tell you is that I don't know how to make the thing I sold you at great expense. Contained in this doofus Tesla service manager's quote is the ethos shared among all Elon Musk's ventures. It is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley.

……

Then the wheel falls off while you're driving, or the autopilot plows into a jersey wall, and you're meant to be thrilled.* Glad even. Grateful! This is proof: You were an early adopter. A beta tester, a brave explorer. You're helping to work out the bugs, mapping new territory. Who knows? In a hundred years this car's descendants might be as reliable as cars that by then will be 150 years old, and you will have played a part in making it so. Won't that be nice.

^*Assuming you lived through it.

This is post was too good not to share, which is why I added the original Reuters investigation as a supplementary link.

Read both in full, but the bottom line is that neither the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ nor Tesla, nor Solar City, nor Tesla Energy, nor Neuralink, can be trusted to even consider the best interest of their customers, so taking his products out on the road, or on the roof of your house, or (God forbid) inside your brain is a sucker bet.