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Tesla Issues Its Largest Recall Ever Voluntarily Over Faulty Model S Steering (theverge.com) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the whoopsie-daisy dept.
Tesla announced today that it is recalling 123,000 Model S vehicles around the world over a power steering issue. The company said via an email that it was a proactive move and none of the company's other vehicles are affected. The Verge reports: The automaker said 123,000 Model S vehicles built before April 2016 were affected. No injuries or crashes have been reported in connection with the problem. In the email, Tesla said it had, "observed excessive corrosion in the power steering bolts," but that the problem was most prevalent in colder climates where road salt is used. "If the bolts fail, the driver is still able to steer the car, but increased force is required due to loss or reduction of power assist," Tesla wrote in the email to customers. "This primarily makes the car harder to drive at low speeds and for parallel parking, but does not materially affect control at high speed, where only small steering wheel force is needed." Tesla said owners do not need to stop driving their cars if they haven't experienced any problems. The company said it would inform Model S owners when a retrofit, which is estimated to take an hour to install, is ready in their area.
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Tesla Issues Its Largest Recall Ever Voluntarily Over Faulty Model S Steering More

Tesla Issues Its Largest Recall Ever Voluntarily Over Faulty Model S Steering

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  • Impressed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Thursday March 29, 2018 @09:20PM (#56350909) Homepage Journal

    I'm actually impressed. While I will never own a Tesla, unfortunately, because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control and which materially affect the performance of the vehicle, this is actually perhaps the most responsible way I've seen a recall handled. In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA. For the most part, auto manufacturers don't wait until the NHTSA actually orders a recall, but generally the writing is on the wall that they need to voluntarily recall or the NHTSA will step in. In this case, it wasn't even on the NHTSA's radar.

    This might make me rethink my stance on Tesla.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Par for the course. With the Model X rear seat recall, for example, not only wasn't it not on the NHTSA's radar, but there hadn't even been a user complaint. Same with the Model S seatbelt pretensioner - no customer reports, no injuries..

    • Re:Impressed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Thursday March 29, 2018 @09:44PM (#56350979) Journal

      because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control and which materially affect the performance of the vehicle,

      You should buy a new car soon, then, because I suspect that in 5-10 years time, all cars will do OTA updates.

      • Not if yank out its antenna or SIM card or whatever it's using to do so

        • You won't be able to rip out the SIM card because either it will be an eSIM, or it will be buried so deep behind the dash that you will never find it.

          You can remove the antenna, but then you won't have a functioning radio in the car. Modern cars use only one antenna for all radios.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA. .

      NO they are not, most recalls are voluntary and issued by the manufacturer, most don't make the press though. Nothing special happening here at all. incidentally both my Mercedes and my wifes mini have had voluntary recalls for defects since we bought them (mini was also for the power steering)

    • The biggest problem here is that nobody is regulating what Tesla can do to your car remotely from one day to the next, and the security is entirely up to them with no outside audit required. This can't really be allowed to continue as most automobiles get the remote update capability.

      And yes, buying and keeping up a pre-1973 vehicle (emission control computers came in about then) doesn't look like so bad an idea, even given the safety advancements made since '73.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Tesla are probably headed for a lawsuit over their self driving option soon. They already sold full self driving capability as a $4000 upgrade, with the promise of delivering it by software update one day.

        At the rate they are going it won't be delivered in the lifetime of many of the vehicles, and certainly not the lease period many people are on. So maybe that will trigger some regulation.

        • All they need to do to avoid litigation is transfer the license to any new vehicle someone may buy, or offer a refund.

      • "The security is entirely up to them with no outside audit required."

        This isn't just a tesla issue. GM and others were found to be doing OTA updates using HTTP instead of https a while back and then there was the issue of unsigned USB updates.

        It's not just software issues either. The whole keyless entry system has been fatally flawed by manufacturers cheapskating and beginning with expensive rigs in the early 2000s to steal high end vehicles like mercedes that rapidly spread downmarket to the point today wh

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And you only need to go to our local dealership to have the issue resolved under warranty. Oh, no Tesla dealership in your area? Oh well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You don't have to accept the updates. Installing them is optional. However, you cannot pick and choose among the updates. It's all or nothing.

      A bigger concern is that all Tesla's phone home with all sorts of information about the car. Tesla uses it to improve the software, especially the self driving portion. However, it's a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.

      • "A bigger concern is that all Tesla's phone home with all sorts of information about the car. " - people should be used to that by now with Microsoft OSes, Android and Apple Apps, new smoke alarms, IoT.... etc etc etc

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zwede ( 1478355 )

      While I will never own a Tesla, unfortunately, because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control.

      When there's an OTA update the car displays a message on the screen asking if you want to update. You can refuse indefinitely if you want. Some years ago a feature was removed, many Tesla owners refused updates for over a year and Tesla never forced them. The feature (auto lowering of the car at highway speeds) was eventually put back in.

    • "In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA"

      WRONG. Only the most serious recalls are forced by safety authorities.

      For any given model there are usually dozens or recalls which are best described as "errata tweaks" such as fixes for bad earths, corrosion problems, fit, finish or details issue or other minor items (I saw one recall for a problem relating to the operation of interior courtesy lights as an example)

      This power steering issue is certainly higher up on the level of seriousness and that's why th

  • Rampant histeria will now ensue (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday March 29, 2018 @09:49PM (#56350987) Homepage Journal

    There are a lot of businesses that would like to see Tesla fail. There is an entire country's worth of short-sellers who need to get Tesla down below their expected price. There are all of the auto manufacturers who failed to make good electric cars for us even when they certainly knew how. There are the oil companies and everyone who services them. There is every existing auto dealer. There are companies that make parts that aren't in Teslas. The list goes on.

    So, you will now see the same crazyness as the claims that the Falcom 9 made a huge hole in the atmospehere! Run and scream! What actually happened was that ionization of plasma in the ionosphere diminished for two hours due to a shock wave, and thus GPS signals might have been about a foot off in some areas near the launch, and there might have been interesting (though yet undetected) changes in HF radio propogation that hams might now notice if they look hard.

    So, now we have hundreds of thousands of Teslas on the road with rusty bolts that happen to have not hurt anyone. Hide under the bed! Tesla to go bankrupt any moment!

    They seem to make pretty good cars, and nobody took electric seriously until they came along. Nobody else can compete with them yet, although they all talk up a storm about what they're gonna do real soon now.

    Do you remember when Prius was the propaganda target? It was only a few years ago.

    • Nobody else can compete because people treat Elon like a cult leader. He can do no wrong.

      • Re:Rampant histeria will now ensue (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday March 29, 2018 @10:23PM (#56351101) Homepage Journal

        Well, the thing is that Elon is pretty clear about his own mistakes. For example he made a film compilation of SpaceX crashes [youtube.com].

        So, it's not really that he can do wrong. It's that he owns his mistakes in front of everybody else, and still dares to innovate, and wins reasonably often although sometimes it's after great effort (as in the film above).

        He is also about the only big company CEO who will dare to post silly stuff. Like this [twitter.com]. And the guy was five when Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out. So, it seems to me that he's going out of his way to convince people that he is a human rather than someone faultless.

        So, why shouldn't people like him?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Okay, that was mildly amusing... but I literally LOLed at this [twitter.com]. ;) See it on a live map here [marinetraffic.com].

          • They've just caught on to their Reddit fan club [reddit.com]. Note how long it takes them to start talking about KSP, and how popular that is with them. Probably half of them do live with mom, and she can't get time alone no matter how many sailors come by :-).

      • I'd call myself an admirer of his, but I certainly don't think he's infallible, nor do I treat him like a cult leader. I think his views about living in a computer simulation are borderline nuts, and the sky-is-falling AI doomsday warnings are ignorant paranoia.

        But there's little doubt he's doing great work with his rockets and electric car companies. We'll see about the Boring Company. The man certainly has the charisma and vision for inspiring others to make great products.

        I don't think I'm necessarily

        • Yes, I am not buying into the AI thing and the simulation thing either.

          OK, he flies around more than I do, and I have a travel-specific prescription, but it's not Ambien and I am concerned by his tweet regarding wine and ambien [twitter.com]. Maybe he is wealthy enough that someone is always making sure that nothing bad happens when he is on that stuff. But alcohol and Ambien together make it even more likely that you will drive while sleeping and do other bizarre and dangerous stuff. Ambien alone is sometimes enough to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Nobody else can compete with them yet, although they all talk up a storm about what they're gonna do real soon now.

      Here's a great example of what happens when supposed "Tesla-killer" meets reality [model3ownersclub.com]. Or take the Kona electric. Funny how a "$30k-ish 290-mile crossover" turns out to be in actuality a "hypothetically 150-mile $31k** vehicle the same size as a Bolt or Leaf that does 0-60 in 9,3 seconds", and if you want to get Bolt-style range and not as horrible acceleration (0-60 in 7,6s) you have to add on s

      • Question for you, Rei:

        I'm considering buying a used Model S, but I'm not seeing many D versions available, and I'm concerned about how a RWD vehicle fares on snowy roads. I realize it will be better than an ICEV RWD, since their weight distribution is forward while the Model S is more balanced front to back.

        How do RWD Teslas do on snow and ice?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          I think Björn Nyland from Norway put it best: when initially only the RWD versions were available, everyone he knew couldn't stop raving about how awesome they were on snow and ice, how they was no need for AWD, how it'd be a waste of Tesla's time and money to make an AWD version. But once Tesla came out with AWD, and people started getting a chance to drive those, one by one, all of those people eventually ended up switching over to AWD.

          Take from what what you will. :)

        • I used to drive a RWD pickup truck. When I got FWD, I hated it in the snow. I still hate FWD. :|

          • I used to drive a RWD pickup truck. When I got FWD, I hated it in the snow. I still hate FWD. :|

            All due respect, you're nuts :-)

            I drive a FWD car and a RWD pickup. The pickup does okay in the snow, but only because I keep a thousand pounds of rock salt in the bed during the winter. Without that, the rear end is all sorts of squirrelly. You do have to understand the effect of FWD on traction while turning. You can't both turn and accelerate very well, because you are using the same patches of tire to do both. Only so much friction to go around... and on slippery roads, not much of that. But once you

            • I made it up a hill in a 1991 Nissan hardbody light pickup with nothing in the back. Generally, loss of traction means slow going; and errant steering is oversteer, easily fixed with countersteering.

              Front wheel drive just gets stuck. When you accelerate, all the load goes onto the back wheels: the weight is no longer on the front wheels. Think about how many rear-wheel cars you've seen accelerate with the front pitching up; now think about what happens when you accelerate hard in a front-wheel drive

              • I made it up a hill in a 1991 Nissan hardbody light pickup with nothing in the back. Generally, loss of traction means slow going; and errant steering is oversteer, easily fixed with countersteering.

                I'm rarely worried about getting stuck in a passenger car. If I'm going somewhere that's likely to be an issue, I take the pickup and put it in 4WD. My concern about passenger cars on snow and ice is control, and insufficiently-weighted wheels lose control easily.

                When you accelerate, all the load goes onto the back wheels

                Only if you're accelerating really hard, which you can't do on slippery roads anyway.

                The normal weirdness is understeer, and the response is to turn harder and hope it works; it might not work.

                No, if you're understeering, the solution is to let off the gas and slow down.

                AWD solves all of this anyway.

                True, but at a cost. In the case of a Tesla Model S, the cost difference between a ne

                • No, if you're understeering, the solution is to let off the gas and slow down.

                  Don't forget you're steering, so you're probably not going to have a good time going in a straight line or wherever your car is now going. You may have entered that curve only to find you were going too fast, despite letting off the gas. You now have to hope you can brake, or get back under control; sometimes, the answer is to turn more and give it more acceleration, although that could just make it worse.

                  In any case, with a Model S the weight is almost evenly distributed (48% front, 52% rear)

                  Nice thing about electric cars: they usually have the batteries spanning across the center of mass

            • "You can't both turn and accelerate very well, because you are using the same patches of tire to do both. Only so much friction to go around... and on slippery roads, not much of that."

              Same on gravel roads. I used to do about 600 miles a month on unpaved roads and learned very quickly that in FWDs opening up the throttle on bends meant the car would start making a beeline for the ditch.

              The importance of that observation is that the historic preference for RWDs is far more noticeable in countries with more r

    • Necessity and Need (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Thursday March 29, 2018 @10:31PM (#56351145)

      I would like to see Tesla succeed as well. However, they have been running on borrowed time for a while now. They've never turned a profit. They have persistent quality issues. They have a huge service backlog. They have supply chain issues. They have launch issues (the 3 is their fourth product launch, they should have this stuff nailed down by now.)

      Tesla shipped around 100,000 cars last year and lost $2 billion dollars. Ford shipped roughly 2.5 millions cars last year and made $6 billion dollars. Tesla's market cap is $4 billion higher than Ford.

      This sounds like bean-counter nonsense, but it's critically important. The only way Tesla can continue to operate is to keep it's stock price up so it can fund operations by selling this expensive stock (and bonds.) This is entirely based on it's ability to continue to grow it's sales by double digits year after year. They can't get their numbers up if they can't build cars.

      The critics are right. They are dropping the ball on their fourth launch, which is inexcusable. This isn't a minor point. If one of the big three botched a launch this badly, they'd be torched by wall street and executives would be flung into the Detroit river.

      • Yes, Tesla is worth more than Ford although Ford is profitable and shipped many more cars than Tesla. The problem with Ford is that nobody sees much possibility of their being as innovative as Tesla, making cars of the same quality, or in general taking an interest in the driver who buys their stuff and the health of the world around them.

        Old companies get replaced by new ones after the old guys get ossified. That's just a fact of life. People see a lot of potential for Tesla doing that to Ford.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          unfortunately the potential in Tesla has so far failed to materialise and they are running out of time. Investment money is getting harder and harder for them to get and they are still burning through huge wads of cash each quarter with no sign of profitability in sight. No matter how great the potential you have to actually survive first, many companies with huge potential have died.
          • Although I don't think that Musk will be putting in more of his $20B, he's got plenty of billionaire friends and lots of people see the value in Tesla. The company (and potential) certainly will survive even if they have to go through a round of bankruptcy. The *current* investors may lose their shirts, but somebody will buy the bankrupt company, raise fresh cash, and keep going. There's too much potential here to ignore.
        • I was with you until you said same quality as Tesla. Ford has plenty of issues, but their vehicle quality is quite good these days. The established players have really gotten their manufacturing to the point where they are within amazing tolerances. Now maybe some of the cars are boring, but they are quite well made and durable.

        • I forget details-- you look it up but the Tesla plan is a solid one which will put it on par with Ford in REAL numbers soon.

          Ford only makes about $1000 per car they sell. It's quite low, look it up. They make more on higher ones but it's mostly a profit by volume (and support fees.) Other profit goes to the car dealers. Ford makes about 5 million cars or so per year. So thats about 1 billion profit (on new cars, not all the tons of other stuff they are doing.)

          Tesla's plan is to make about 1 million cars p

      • That sounds like every car manufacturer, except most have turned a profit. They all have persistent quality issues.
        • Quality issues seems to have a new definition. There was a time when you got 50-100k miles out of a car and it was ready for the scrapyard. They were considered "good" quality. Now if you get only 250k, it's considered "bad" quality. Or even if you get 500k but maybe the breaks squeaked a little when the car was new and an interior lamp switch fell off after only 50k miles then it would be considered "bad" quality. In reality, cars are now so good that it's getting harder to sell new ones. People can j
  • To the question of who's fault it is and should pay for replacement, Bosch made the bolt but was it to Tesla's spec? And isn't it so fortunate Tesla has plenty of service center capacity to handle the recall?

  • I personally think most investors are idiots. Most of Tesla's cars are required to be serviced in their shops. Their motivation isn't for "profit" but rather because it's a new platform and they are looking to spot problems like this. Your required to take your Tesla into the shop something like every six months. So this factory recall probably affects 200 owners that refuse to get their cars serviced for good or bad reasons.

    • And I have seen so many people claim EVs are almost service-free. Taking it into a specific service center whether they need service or not is the exact opposite of that.

  • Is there an autopilot in model S? (Score:3)

    by DrTJ ( 4014489 ) on Friday March 30, 2018 @02:05AM (#56351723)

    What happens if the bolts go when in autopilot mode?

    • In case the question wasn't rhetorical, I assume that auto-pilot would detect that it can't properly maneuver the vehicle and disengage.

  • Ford Focus and Fusion got a recall about the clutch pressure plate, should I submit that story?

  • The Tesla is to electric cars what the iphone was to mobiles when it too launched. Its a game changer, everyone else has to play catch up now, but in ten years there will be viable competitors, probably for less money.
    Kudos to Musk, he damn near perfected an idea that a lot of people had a crack at, and all pretty well failed, miserably. That said, he's going to need to 6 Sigma the hell out of this product as its a whole new sub genre of automobile, and fair enough, he seems fairly proactive in his recalls.

  • Tesla needs to break down the actual root causes - including all management failures. This kind of defect doesn't just show up in a finished product without warning from someone on the line seeing shoddy practices due to overwork or other bad pressures, or some engineer doing backend checks finding structural flaws overlooked previously. How far up does the failure go? The NHTSA will surely find out.

    • Somebody picked the wrong kind of bolt... a standard bolt of the wrong kind metal. I'm no engineer, but I know I'd forget about something like that while thinking about everything else... including mixed metal contacts.

  • A defective power steering pump isn't a life-ender by any means, but something that I would be pretty pissed about on my $90K luxury car.

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