The Toyota EV also had tires falling off and recent Hyundai/Kia cars were catching on fire because the engine was overheating from the automatic stop/start when you stop. Jeep has transmission issues where theirs cars would go to neutral on their own, which ended up with Anton Yelchin dying at 27 years old crushed against a fence by his own car. I believe Honda has problems with manual transmissions going out of gear while you were driving and just refused to address the problem for a long ass time.
They're all bad. There's a whole scene in the Fight Club movie where they explain every car company will refuse to fix a deadly problem unless they calculate the lawsuits will cost them more than the fix, and I believe it.
Isn't the world filled with crap being sold in crazy amounts purely for marketing and branding? It seems to me like the only surprise is that somehow, generally speaking, the car industry had some correlation of cost:quality until Tesla came about. Other industries (I'm thinking fashion/food) had lost that correlation long ago.
Not really until tesla - Mercedes has been excitedly shipping creaky piano black plastic for years and I'm sure there are many other brands cutting corners to reduce price. (Porsche doesn't seem to care which is good)
My BMW X5 just was driven back to me yesterday after nearly 3 weeks away for 1) a puncture and 2) a recall of some sort. 3 weeks because they decided run flats would save them money, and also got rid of the garages courtesy car fleet, also tyre sizes which are near unobtainium and never in stock anywhere.
This is my second X5 G05, and this one is definitely of lower quality than the first. Removed bits here/there, replaced aluminium parts inside with coated plastic, replaced leather with synthetic-like thing and plenty of other cost cutting markers.
Don't tell me 'oh don't buy another one' as demonstrated by this article (and others), they all do it to pretty much the same degree, all you can hope is not to run out of warranty before something mind bogglingly expensive breaks.
Sad to see. I had an X5 from 2002 with manual 5-speed transmission (had to search hard), and it was excellent. Still somewhat regret trading it in after 287,500 miles, with very few issues. The only issue was that the brake calipers would start to drag slightly and warp the rotors, but I discovered that it was because I was using them too lightly; occasionally doing some serious braking (not quite as hard as bedding new race pads) was enough to get >100k miles out of a set of rotors & calipers. Similar with an E36 that I used for track days & time trials.
I found it really sad to see that Mini (owned by BMW) and BMW are pushing hard on run-flats. Hard NOPE from me, as I drive a good amount in fairly rural areas, and driving 50mi from a random point (the flat-driving range spec of a run-flat tire) still leaves me at a random point with no service. And the quality is just gone way down, as you've noted. Too bad.
BMW X models are special. Manufactured in the USA. I’m driving an X3 now. Front carpets disintegrated after 500km. BMW cars built in Europe (non-SUVs) are of a much better quality.
Aslo, this list is based on owners reporting everything from nuissances to serious stuff. That alone is highly subjective, and we didn't even get into the root causes for each reported issue...
Because issues with other cars are not given wide media attention like Teslas. And HN is far worse in that regard.
> According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ford issued 55 safety recalls in 2023, down from 67 last year. The repair campaigns affected 5.9 million vehicles, down from 8.6 million in 2022, which put the automaker in second place for the total number of vehicles recalled. Honda’s 19 recalls affected 6.3 million cars.
> Chrysler issued the second-highest number of recalls, at 45. Kia came in third for the total number of recalled cars, with more than 3 million affected by its 20 repair campaigns.
Tesla hired extremely talented engineers to design their cars. You can't really say the same for e.g. Ford. Tesla tackled the engineering problem from a hardware and software perspective. You can't say the same of really any traditional automaker.
Got it, all those automotive engineering PhDs were unemployed before Tesla showed up. And given bad Tesla's buold quality is, maybe Tesla should have all thise specialized teams as well.
But yes, this hyperspecialization is the main reason I didn't fo to automotive. Benefit of mounting the same light so, the guy doesn't mount it in a way that doesn't light the intended area or causes cable fires.
There's a gap between extremely talented and whatever Ford does. It's like comparing IBM and Open AI. IBM is full of smart people but we're kidding ourselves by drawing an equivalence.
True. One is a sustainable company employing thousands of people, the other is a hyped company kept alive by investor money with dysfunctional leadership.
All cars have these issues. The article is more hit peice than real journalism which would include statsitics from all automakers. Remember we have lemon laws? Writing negative things about Tesla just gets more hits.
A failure while driving is very different from a recall. Especially if the brand in question knows about the issues for years!
Edit:
From your own links:
>> Jeep Grand Cherokee SUVs Recalled Because Suspension Parts Might Fall Off
Might =|= did fall off, pro-active =|= waitimg for four years until being forced to do a recall
>> Honda is recalling nearly 564,000 of its older model CR-V sport utility vehicles because road salt can cause the frame to rust and rear suspension parts to come loose.
Emphasis on older, rust and can cause -> recalled before suspension parts broke, and definitely not on brand new cars
>> Subaru is recalling nearly 875,000 cars and SUVs in the U.S. because the engines can stall or a rear suspension part can fall off.
Again, can, and not did fall off.
Sometimes it seems reading comprehension, or the lack thereof is directly linked to technical understanding, or again lack thereof.
Not if the recall is safety relevant, the don't. Because there is only one car maker out there that intentionally plays with the lives of its customers and everyone who happens to be around one their cars.
Despite this hit peice they still make some of the best BEVs when you consider range, price, charging speed/network and software. These are things customers care the most about. Every brand has reliability and quality issues and tesla is in the middle of the pack statistically.
You might want to study the issues with the non-tesla fast chargers in the United States to see what customers really care about.
A couple years ago I was routinely down voted on here and other social media sites for making fun of Teslas emergency vehicle homing feature. Then Musk bought Twitter and I stopped hearing all the justifications for them and former defenders of Tesla started saying what I was saying years ago.
I can’t say anything about the down votes but from what I saw, I the criticism was always there but it grew over time as the stuff Musk promised customers drifted years and years further away, and his increasingly unhinged social media antics made it harder and harder to give him the benefit of the doubt. It felt a lot like what happened with President Bush where some people who really wanted democracy in the Middle East or Afghanistan kept coming up with these 5-dimensional chess theories based on the assumption that he shared their goal and must have some deeper plan where it all made sense, only to eventually accept that it was just as disorganized as it appeared on the surface.
While HN was rather _late_ to figure out that Naughty Old Mr Car was full of shit (people defended him for the Thailand diver thing!) it does finally seem to have figured it out. HN’s hive mind tends to be rather slow on the uptake, but gets there eventually; see also Bitcoin (the savior of the world on this website until 2019 or so).
They're all bad. There's a whole scene in the Fight Club movie where they explain every car company will refuse to fix a deadly problem unless they calculate the lawsuits will cost them more than the fix, and I believe it.