[shalmanese]

That may be a theory but there's a much more mundane theory that explains the crunch of the last few years:

Tesla sold about 100,000 Model 3/Ys to Hertz for rental in 2021.

Hertz rented a ton of EVs to people who were only used to the acceleration curve of ICE cars.

A ton of those people unexpectedly crashed those cars [1].

This clogged up Tesla's repair channels and blew out the timeline for everyone else.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/18/business/why-do-people-ke...

[FireBeyond]

> Hertz rented a ton of EVs to people who were only used to the acceleration curve of ICE cars.

Maybe, but I am not as sure. I've not ridden in a private 3, but in a Y and S, and I had a Hertz Model 3 for a week.

I don't know if there was a firmware difference or such, or just my individual model, but the acceleration on it was garbage. I'd stop, put my foot all the way to the floor, and wait half a second or more for ANY movement, and when it did move, it accelerated like my girlfriend's A4, if not slower.

(Or, perhaps, things happened as you described, and as a result, they nerfed the acceleration - this was last year).

[ac29]

Tesla passed 1M sales of Model 3 alone in 2021, and cumulative sales of 3/Y are now well into the multi-millions. Unless Hertz drivers are orders of magnitude more crashprone than new Tesla operators in general, I dont think Hertz's 100k units should have made a major impact on Teslas repair pipeline.