Consumer Reports Expects Tesla's Model 3 To Have 'Average Reliability' (cnbc.com) 63
There may be only a few hundred Tesla Model 3s on the street, but Consumer Reports already has an opinion on the new car's dependability. From a report: "We are predicting that the Model 3 should have about average reliability," said Jake Fisher, director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. Average may irritate Tesla fans and the nearly 500,000 people who have reserved a Model 3, but Fisher believes people should understand what Consumer Reports expects from the new car. "We don't go around recommending that people buy cars that are below average, so if it is average or better, that is not a bad thing at all," said Fisher. "But let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks. We are saying it is basically par for the course." Consumer Reports has yet to buy a Model 3 and put it through a battery of tests, as the magazine does for dozens of vehicles. In addition, so few Model 3 cars have been delivered that Fisher and his team have yet to get a sense of how owners feel about their new Tesla.
Re:the Church of Elon will be here soon to complai (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Model 3 fan, I'm actually hear to say that I find it weird that you can rate the reliability of a car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles.
Nothing, more, nothing less. Just strikes me as odd.
Re:the Church of Elon will be here soon to complai (Score:5, Informative)
Yes this is weird. Any journalists that "pre-report" what they expect their future articles to say, have some serious integrity issues.
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Only if they report it anything other than average. In the absence of data average is a pretty good estimate.
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I think it's more of a reaction to:
A) The hype surrounding the M3, and the hype surrounding MS/MX failures
B) The fact that they gave the MS really high marks initially but then had to reduce them due to reliability problems
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As a Model 3 fan, I'm actually hear to say that I find it weird that you can rate the reliability of a car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles.
Nothing, more, nothing less. Just strikes me as odd.
What's even weirder is they are using the term 'predicting' and not 'rating'. Why would they call it a prediction if it were a rating?
But, yes, you can use past performance information from companies and the fact that they have admitted production line issues to predict the reliability of the first x number off the line. How accurately you can do that is up for debate, but that's what CR does.
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It's basically an indication from CR that Tesla should go ahead and pay them some money for better reviews. You can see that in a number of reviews they do on anything from cars to computers, they are the ones "recommending" Microsoft products like the Surface, until widespread issues came up that any tester would've found and after enough publicity they pulled their recommendation.
Consumer Reports is to consumers what Gartner is to businesses, at least Gartner is up front about the $250k startup fee.
Re: the Church of Elon will be here soon to compla (Score:1)
Hahahahaha
Holy shit you actually believe that...
RTFA (Score:2)
"So how can Consumer Reports predict the cars reliability?
"What we have is a lot of data from the Tesla Model S," said Fisher. "That gives us a little more confidence in the Tesla Model 3."
In addition, Fisher expects the simplicity of the Model 3 compared with Tesla's other vehicles means the car should have fewer problems."
they are saying it should be more reliable than model S...
I find it weird to place a $1000 deposit (Score:2)
on a "car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles."
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Stats, looks, experience with the company's other models, professional reviews, amateur reviews, and interactions with owners online.
One thing I can't, however, say is how reliable it will be.
That's a strange contradiction in thinking (Score:2)
You make prediction, a projection of how satisfied you will be with a future purchase of a new Tesla model, based in part upon current owner's experience and reviews of prior Tesla models.
When Consumer Reports advises its readers on what to expect their satisfaction with a new Tesla model will be, influenced by what Consumer Reports values in cars and other products they report on, they are "making stuff up"?
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on a "car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles."
I did it. I may or may not buy the car. I'll see what people think when there's some experience with it, and when I've been able to test drive it. If I decide not to buy it, I get my money back. If I decide to buy it, having put my deposit in gets me one earlier than if I hadn't (my deposit was late enough that I'm still looking at late 2018 or early 2019).
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I find it weird that you can rate the reliability of a car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time,
I suppose a lot of people here have not had much experience in manufacturing products. At my companies we have often had to declare to prospective customers the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of products we hadn't gotten to production yet.
Typically one of our circuit assemblies (with large chips) will have an MTBF of 50K to 100K hours these days. Certainly we can't run a bunch of them in the test lab for that length of time to determine this. The product would be too old to ship before the tests were
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Even after you test a Model 3, how do you rate its reliability against any car with an internal combustion engine?
Take a look at the top 10 car repairs of 2015: (From http://blog.credit.com/2016/04... [credit.com])
Replacing an oxygen sensor – $249
Replacing a catalytic converter – $1,153
Replacing ignition coil(s) and spark plug(s) – $390
Tightening or replacing a fuel cap – $15
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A few problems here:
1. You mentioned spark plugs twice. If you have coil-on-plug design, you replace them with the coils, else you replace them with the spark plug wires. It's one or the other.
2. You mentioned coils twice. See above.
3. If you get your car repaired at the stealership, you pay the prices you mentioned. That stuff is a lot cheaper at an indy mechanic, cheaper than that as a DIY.
4. I drive a BMW 528, 9 years old with 120,000 miles. Of all the repairs you mentioned, the ONLY one I have EVER h
Re:the Church of Elon will be here soon to complai (Score:4, Interesting)
Consumer Reports stakes their reputation on their reviews being above reproach on an ethical basis. They don't accept freebies from manufacturers. They don't use affiliate links. They don't accept sponsorships. Instead, they buy all of their products from the same stock that any other consumer would (rather than the hand-picked ones that oftentimes get sent to reviewers) and they make their revenue by charging people a fee to have access to their content. Sadly, in the Internet era, that business model has pushed them towards clickbait headlines designed to increase their membership, as evidenced by their very public-yet-baseless jabs over the last few years at whichever companies are popular (e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.).
This is yet another of those jabs designed to drum up revenue. They don't even have a Model 3 in their hands yet, so when they say, "let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks", what they're actually saying is, "we have nothing meaningful to say at this moment, and we expect that the actual review we post won't make headlines, so instead we'll say something outlandish about the popular product now in the hopes that some suckers will sign up to read our final review". They're certainly not faithfully performing their duty to review things in an impartial manner based solely on the facts. Rather, they're sacrificing their integrity for the sake of a quick buck, as has sadly become par for the course with them.
Whatever reputation they still had in the circles I move in died years ago.
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What? It's actually the rich people cars with the more complicated equipment that tend to have the expensive maintenance. My '98 Ford Escort still runs great and cheap.
And Consumer Reports said in the article that they expect the Model 3 to be more reliable than the Model S, for similar reasoning.
looks like a Yelp review (Score:3)
Re:looks like a Yelp review (Score:4, Funny)
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In short, don't talk about things you don't know about.
Oh, the irony is palpable!
Consumer reports has not performed any testing. They do not have a Tesla Model 3 vehicle to test... and yet they are talking about the quality and reliability.
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Based on past results from the company - they aren't speaking totally out of their asses. They've done the same for years....next Toyota Camry will probably be above average for reliability, and the next Dodge Ram will be below.
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Unicorn Farts ? (Score:5, Funny)
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how can you rate a car in beta, er, pre production ?
Through a number of methods. Tesla's suppliers are well-known, and one can estimate about how much they will spend on the parts for the Model 3; knowing these things, and what the interior looks like, you can make a reasonable guess at the quality of the components. A small number of vehicles are in the hands of customers; it's possible that CR has had more than a passing glance at one of them.
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Are you serious??? You can judge a car's reliability from the suppliers? Trolling or imbecility?
You can find out all kinds of magical through analysis of cost accounting. Such a report on the BMW i3 was close enough to where the BMW guys wanted to know who their sources were — the answer was that they took apart a car, and crunched the numbers. But doing that involves an understanding of the business — namely, what you get when you give a certain supplier a certain amount of money for a certain type of part. And you can figure that kind of thing out from a combination of public statements
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How can you possibly rate anything not produced ? I know that Tesla is inside the Reality Distortion Field. Jobs left it to Musk in his Will, but how can you rate a car in beta, er, pre production ? Do CR writers have some Tesla in the 401 (k) ?
Same way we get a MTBF on products that haven't been out for that length of time. It's not accurate, but that's why it's called a "prediction" and not a "report". It's not totally pulled out of thin air, hence "prediction".
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He isn't rating it, he is saying that his expectation is that when it is rated it will have average reliability. Tesla's other models have had a lot of issues, and there are always kinks with new models from any manufacturer.
He is just setting expectations because he was asked about it by a journalist looking to make a clickbait story about the Model 3 hype machine.
GM is that you? (Score:2)
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Speculation (Score:2)
>"Consumer Reports has yet to buy a Model 3 and put it through a battery of tests, as the magazine does for dozens of vehicles"
And even if they did, how are they supposed to know how "reliable" it is based on that? A day? A few weeks? A month? Knowing RELIABILITY comes with at least many months, if not years, of use and observation. The ONLY thing they can do is SPECULATE based on their hunches about the technology and materials, and SPECULATE based on OTHER models. So hopefully people won't freak
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The Tesla goggles are off (Score:2)
Consumer Reports gives each car it tests a score that falls within a scale of zero to 100.
When the 2013 Model S came out, it got a score of 99 -- which has never been exceeded before or since -- with one Consumer Reports representative gushing that "If it could recharge in any gas station in three minutes, this car would score about 110." Ridiculous to say, when the scale only goes up to 100. But such were the Tesla goggles voluntarily donned by the staff of CR back then.
And it's accurate too! (Score:1)
To improve the accuracy of their prediction they will survey 1000 people, each of whom have never seen a Model 3, and average the results. Seriously, given that they have no data to work with, betting on "average" is probably they best prediction they could make.
No tests done (Score:2)
If I read the article correctly, Consumer Reports has not tested any Tesla Model 3 yet.
Why do they have the need to predict anything then? They have no data at alll.
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Overhyped (Score:2)
Tesla will always have the credits for starting to make the first usable electric cars, but now that other manufacturers are making electric cars they are getting way overhyped. There are already cars out there that are put together better and that I would rather have than a Tesla. So let's please not worship the company.
What does "average reliability" even mean? (Score:2)
It should be very obvious to all but the most blinkered that the model 3 has and will continue to have a lot of issues with quality control until they sort their production out and discover how their car breaks in the field. That is going to take a few years and the chances are the vehicle will be reliable after that.
As the adage goes, never buy version one of anything. This is true for software and should
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As the adage goes, never buy version one of anything. This is true for software and should be double underlined and highlighted for cars.
Software has no [meaningful] warranty, especially in the USA but also in many other places, so your decision should be 100% based on your expectations of how well the software will work. For cars, it's all about warranty since they all have one. How long will you own it, what is covered, and how well do you expect the manufacturer (and dealer) to do at actually meeting their obligations under the warranty. I've got all the service records on my Audi A8 parts car and the first owner had the transmission repl
Average keeps getting better (Score:2)
Thinking out loud (Score:2)
Given no data points whatsoever, "average" seems a reasonable data point for the quality of a manufactured item. It is, by definition, the mean of the field.
Given that an electric car has dramatically fewer moving parts than an IC car, and that the technology for charging and motor controls is very mature, I'd expect above average.
Given that the company is manufacturing their own battery cells, a key failure point, and they have not been in that business for very long, I'd expect below average.
Given that t
uhm... (Score:2)
This is very unresponsible of them, they haven't seen or tested the car, so how on earth can they even remotely comment on the reliability of the car. It seems to me, they are provoking Tesla into giving them a car to test.