A few days ago we said that repairing the windshield wipers of the new Tesla Cybertruck could cost as much as a new motorcycle. Now we know that a factory car valued at $55,000 can come with a breakdown that costs you as much as a car.
Buying a new car and receiving a $14,000 repair bill less than 24 hours later seems like a nightmare scenario and frankly highly unlikely. It could even ruin you.
However, this is exactly what happened to an unfortunate buyer of the Tesla Model Y, highlighting one of the several quality issues that the car manufacturer is more aware of than it seems.
A story that scares Christmas shoppers
Shreyansh Jain explained to Reuters that his Tesla Model Y stopped working one day after paying $55,000 for the new electric vehicle, which had only 115 miles on the odometer at the time of the breakdown.
After slowly turning in his neighborhood, the front right suspension of the vehicle sank. Jain lost control, some parts of the car scraped the road loudly and it stopped.
The vehicle repair took almost 40 hours of work in the workshop. Among other things, the suspension had to be rebuilt and the steering bar replaced. Initially, a worker sent a text message to Jain to tell him that they had not found “evidence of external damage” and hinted that Tesla would pay for the car repair, which would be expected in the case of a new car.
The final cost amounted to $14,000 and the company refused to pay attributing the incident to a “previous” damage in the suspension.
Jain had to pay a deductible of approximately $1,250 for his insurance company to cover the work, which dramatically increased the rates of another car he owned after the accident.
The experience led the former Tesla lover to sell his recently repaired Model Y for $10,000 less than what he paid for it.
A Tesla problem called quality control
Reuters writes that it reviewed Tesla documents and interviewed more than 20 customers and nine former Tesla service managers or technicians. And it was discovered that Jain’s incident was one of thousands of similar cases related to relatively new vehicles dating back at least seven years. They cover the entire range of Tesla vehicles worldwide.
Elon Musk has admitted that Tesla vehicles can leave the factory with quality issues, many of which were detected in the Model Y during 2020.
It’s especially common when production ramps up. “When you go faster, you discover these things,” Elon Musk told engineer Sandy Munro in 2021. “If we knew them beforehand, we would fix them beforehand.”
The agency announced this month a recall of all vehicles that the company has sold in the United States due to failures in the autopilot system.
