Annoyingly, I can't find the original report by J.D. Power. Ars Technica has a more detailed summary.[1] Apparently the study favors cars with fewer features, as that means fewer things can go wrong. The results contradict brand stereotypes. Honda and Toyota are below the industry average. Volvo is one of the worst, along with luxury brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Land Rover. The best rated are Dodge, Kia, and Chevrolet. Also this survey reflects initial impressions, not long term reliability.
Seriously though: I would pay money for a news organization that always linked to primary sources. Bonus points for archiving them at the time of publication. I don't need a journalist to play Chinese whispers with me.[2] I'm an adult and I can interpret the information for myself.
> Also this survey reflects initial impressions, not long term reliability.
I also find that a very weird measure, especially when you want to report on the quality of said vehicles. It'd also be interesting to know what kind of problems customers face. A not perfect paint job is annoying, but its certainly not as bad as motor problems in the early beginning.
I cannot prove this with numbers from the study, but I'd also assume that, depending on the car the customer buys, he usually has a diffferent idea of what can be considered good quality or not. I know people who were annoyed because the stitches of their drivers seat were off by a bit. On the other hand I know Ford owners that lost buttons on their infotainment unit and just hot-glued them back in.
But as you said, just reflecting on the initial impressions of a vehicle doesn't say anything about more important measures like long term reliability, TCO etc. Having a study evaluate the problems a vehicle sees within the first 75.000km would be a lot more interesting and would also allow better conclusions.
However, this study proves the several reports of automotive journalists around the world. Most people considered the Tesla vehicles decently good, but not matching the price tag Tesla puts on them quality wise. During the Model 3 production hell the quality problems became especially apparent with completely misplaced side-panels, the worst paint jobs I've seen on a mass produced vehicle among several other issues.
Well to be honest, I own a model 3, you just have to be a member of the subreddit if not any of the Tesla related sites to know that more than a few people have a nightmarish time with new car delivery. It isn't like these cars loaded with features, I have yet to read anyone having issues with the display and tech as it is always panel alignment and overall fit and finish.
Now if you also read the same you will find the Chinese side of Tesla apparently has an entirely different outcome. Their quality is superb with workers across the plant invested to the point no one wants to embarrass another. So what to do US side? Having had friends and family in the industry where they worked the line you get the same issues you have in any business. There are those who are just there to punch a clock and it is always some other person's job. Please don't try the tired retort of pay, myself and I am sure others here can attest to having worked with people who pay isn't going to fix them.
Well if Tesla cannot insure the people at all stations on the line think otherwise they need to invest heavily on the end of the line and make sure that their delivery centers have no reason to ever have to work on a customer's car. Those employees must be able to fail a car without question. The only acceptable issues at that point would be damage during transit.
I know my next EV will not be a Tesla, they have nothing in their pipeline I want; well let me be honest nothing I should buy but that truck is obnoxious enough to just have; and another fear is they are not concentrating on quality.
It’s always easy to blame the workers but, in the vast majority of cases, poor quality output is a management issue.
Other car manufacturers have managed to create production lines that churn out high quality vehicles every 90 seconds (or better) for decades now. When it comes to these fit & finish issues, panel alignment etc etc there is no excuse for Tesla not being able to reach the same minimal quality bar.
That seems like a reasonable excuse to me. Tesla's only been doing high volume manufacturing for 8 years, and these things take time to build up expertise for. If you buy a Tesla today you should expect you're trading off some fit and finish for their advantages.
No, that sort of continued excusing of the manufacturer is why Tesla, after 8 years of production no less, continues to deliver substandard quality. What pressure is there for them to do otherwise? Tesla accepts this, their customers, only occasionally grumbling, accept this, and their die hard fans go to the mat on social media to insure everyone else accepts this.
It seems very strange to claim that Tesla's sales aren't impacted by their lackluster fit and finish. I only vaguely follow Tesla news and I've heard this complaint a lot.
Even if this were the case, that prospective consumers didn't care about paint quality and panel fit... then what's the problem? Why should Tesla focus on a problem you say nobody cares enough to buy a different car over?
You can buy this expertise off the shelf: you recruit plant managers from the rest of the car industry & give them a free hand. Or alternatively you can put the time into reading some of the many, many publications that have detailed exactly how it’s done. None of it is secret.
You don't have to watch more then one YouTube video review of whatever Tesla model to know that there will be more then a few "issues" with a brand new Tesla, that we can all agree on.
We can also say that people who educate themselves on the brand first, go in knowing that there will be inconsistent gaps and possibly other problems as well with their brand new vehicle. Most will want the vehicle regardless and bet on Tesla Service being able to fix the issues at one point or another (ie when Tesla figures out why certain parts are not working as expected and create replacement parts to fix them).
The problem, from an outside perspective, is that Tesla is operating as close to the bone as possible on costs, so the accepted variances in manufacturing are larger than what Ford or Honda would have due to the economics of scale.
I don't want to say that this is necessarily a worker problem, because at the end of the day, when a vehicle rolls off the assembly line, (I'm assuming) Tesla has quality control people to verify the vehicle is meeting their requirements, so these are the people who are either not raising the flags on production, or the variances are "acceptable", which is what I think it tends to be. To create tighter variances usually means slowing down the process, which in turn will reduce the number of vehicles leaving the plant, thus lower sales, etc.
I have no doubt, in years time, Tesla's quality of build will improve. But as a recent video review I saw on a Tesla vehicle said, "if you have OCD, you might not want to buy a Tesla."
Pay doesn’t necessarily fix individual motivation, but it does create significantly more competition, as well as making the job itself more lucrative for the most passionate. (ie, attract and retain better workers)
>myself and I am sure others here can attest to having worked with people who pay isn't going to fix them.
Yes, but I don't blame my coworker, but the boss who hired them when I'm doing more work for the same pay. You're implying what, that Chinese factory workers have a better work ethic than American ones from your empirical review of Reddit formus/Internet, which may not be entirely unbiased.
> I don't need a journalist to play Chinese whispers with me.[2] I'm an adult and I can interpret the information for myself.
I up-voted your comment due to your succinct comment about how newspapers 'hide' their sources. It seems totally unnecessary to me and not how the internet is supposed to work. If every news article linked to the original press release then we would see what a sham it is - a 'Chinese Whispers Game'.
After voting your comment up I then remembered the time I got called out for using the phrase 'Chinese Whispers'. A guy on my team who was ethnic Chinese but with a fully developed sense of British humour had called me out. He wasn't entirely serious but he did ask me why I used the phrase, by which time the penny dropped that he was Chinese and that I was in a spot of bother!
In America they have 'The Telephone Game' which means the same as 'Chinese Whispers'. This is all well and good, a drop-in replacement phrase, however most British people have no idea what the Telephone Game is. Chinese Whispers is a phrase that a British child can understand even if they have never met a Chinese person or played the game before.
There is nothing on your linked Wikipedia page about how the phrase 'Chinese Whispers' might be considered harmful. However, after the one time I was confronted partially in jest about the phrase, I would recommend using the phrase sensitively.
Newer Volvos (since being acquired by China) have had notoriously bad reliability, and as far as I know, this is established. An anecdote: a couple each purchased a certain Volvo model (same car), one turned out to have severe engine problems, while the other was fine. Turns out that the problematic car was made in China, whereas the other was manufactured in Europe.
Kia and Hyundai have really stepped up their game recently. Excellent value, safe and reliable cars, and very good quality, so I'm not surprised there.
This is not news. Every Tesla owner knows that if they spent the same amount of money on a Mercedes or even better a Volkswagen that they would get better finish.
But quality isn't just about finish. It's about having the features you want: mind bending acceleration in what is essentially a family or executive car, a good electric car before anyone else had one, a better driver assistance package, a simpler ordering process, a service organization that comes to you to fix things, a user interface built for this century not the one before, a charging infrastructure that not only works but is nearly ubiquitous.
The old car companies could have done all those things but they chose to protect their existing product lines instead.
When they finally get their act together then Tesla will have a hard time, until then, I'll stick with my five year old Model S and to hell with the fact that the finish isn't quite as good as a Mercedes E class.
I think the order process thing was basically a US thing where Tesla could sweep in and disrupt an archaic system.
In many other places you could order a new custom built car online fifteen years ago. That this is somehow revolutionary in the US still is pretty unique.
> a service organization that comes to you to fix things
Even if they come to you to service your car, aren't there still issues with actually getting fixes in a timely manner? I recall reading about customers who needed replacement parts and having to wait weeks/months to get it fixed.
Yes, it sometimes is a a problem. I have had two mobile service visits. One to replace the 12 V battery that was done under warranty and happened quite quickly and on time; another to replace a smashed door mirror that was delayed by a week because of a mistake in their internal processes.
The biggest problem I have with Tesla (the company not the car) is that they are very bad at communication. Unlike the supercharger network, which is very nearly ubiquitous in northern Europe, their telephone service is almost impossible to use because it is simply permanently overloaded. This is a major problem if you are trying to call them from a mobile phone in an area with poor coverage such as when one has blown out a tyre by hitting a pothole on a rural road in north Devon in the pouring rain.
> Tesla isn’t officially part of the study because it doesn’t allow J.D. Power access to customer vehicle registration data.
Interesting quote. Does that mean if I buy a non-Tesla car in the US, that my personal details automatically get passed on?
I'm not always a Tesla fan, and you could always claim this is because 'they have something to hide', but I very much like the sound of it from a privacy perspective.
"J.D. Power asks vehicle buyers about their experience during the first 90 days of owning a newly purchased car or truck. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker avoided past scrutiny by the 34-year-old survey because of a quirk in some state laws that require an auto maker’s permission to use new-vehicle registration data to contact customers. Tesla hasn’t provided that permission, according to J.D. Power."
It goes on to say that the data was collected from 35 states that do not require Tesla's permission.
There’s a company called RL Polk that Hoovers up basically everything you could imagine about car sales and resells that information for very high prices. Don’t know where they get their data but they have a row of data for each car sold.
My company Cross-Sell Reports does the same thing. We buy the registration data from each state. But it's a job to secure contracts from each states DMV. Sort of like securing licensing from nba or mlb teams.
Having priced warranty insurance products in the past, the relative cost of repairs standardised by new vehicle value at the time of sale, JD power ranks were not bad proxies but bit and miss for their mid-field. Toyota being below average in reliability? Not in warranty claims it isn’t. Porsche usually does well on JD power but their actual warranty bills (again, standardised for their price) are very high. JD is mostly based oN subjective impressions and electrical niggles in the first 90 days of ownership (niggles including difficulty of operation not necessarily failures). If they have changed the method since I last checked my apologies for spouting nonsense
As far as I remember, this was already stated in early assessments by European car manufacturers about Tesla, too. But then again, there is an obvious bias why such statements would come from the competition.
No bias required; you can eye-ball a Tesla and immediately see the panel fitting and paint defect tolerances are much higher than say a Jaguar/BMW (for the panels) or a Toyota (the paint).
These are the defects that consumers seem to be complaining about.
> Inside the car there are plenty of rich feeling materials, but Tesla still hasn’t quite worked out how to put them together yet. There was the odd squeak from the interior trim when on the move, and some very large gaps around a cubbyhole’s lid.
It looks to be another data point, and that's generally a good thing IMHO. There's a comment above somewhere that casts doubt on its methodology, but reports of Tesla quality issues certainly aren't anything new [0][1]
To be fair to Tesla in the above article [0] they legitimately question the sample size and some later articles point to improvements [2].
Personally, I'm wary of the quality issues but I still want a Model X. Make of that what you will.
So you complain the previous assessments had "an obvious bias" but this new one, which isn't from a car manufacturer or a journalist, "brings nothing new to the table" ?
I think it's because 10 years ago, clicking on a PDF would result in your computer loading an external program like Adobe Acrobat, Foxit which would normally be very slow. These days, PDFs will normally load in the browser which is much faster and more convenient.
Chrome does and it may be one of the most popular viewers currently in use. If you've never seen it, I encourage everyone to try breakout.pdf [0]. I know it doesn't work in Firefox's viewer, but it does in Chrome's. And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like: an implementation of the classic Breakout game in PDF.
Slightly joking: Since PDFs can contain links, we could actually build a www with just PDFs. A www that has no trackers, no JS frameworks, just content. A content-first, prettily type-setted and gorgeously layout-ed web.
Is it possible that owners of certain brands are less likely to notice certain classes of car problems? For example, are people who purchase Kias less likely to care about a squeaking seatbelt?
If I buy a car that costs $70k, I'm going to complain about every minor defect.
Whilst that might apply in some cases, I don't think its universal.
my 2009 kia rio has a superior paint finish, and more consistency in fit for doors and windows compared to a showroom tesla. This genuinely surprised me. I wish I had taken some photos to prove my point, because without it its all going to be put down to subjectiveness.
The Kia rio has "generous" gaps around doors, boots and bonnets. However they all have consistent distances, its not like one door sits higher than the other.
The showroom model 3 had one door higher than the other. The weather seals are going to be asked to do a lot there.
Then there is the paint job.
In the showroom all the model exhibited paint issues. Stuff like uneven coating, or incorrect ratios of pigment/mica to binder, so that where there are sharp corners there is bunching, lumps or roughness.
So yeah, whilst I agree, people who own low end models are going to complain less, having seen (and wanted to buy) a tesla, I'm not surprised that fit and finish is such a problem.
It is all about expectations I would say. For example, I had a car that was worth 3k Euros at that time and I was happy with it, even though its quality was bad, it was running without problems and accomplished the task of getting me to work.
The story would be much different in that case if my car had been worth 30k Euros.
There was a study which showed that Skoda (or was it Dacia?) owners in the UK are very happy with their cars, far happier than the owners of premium cars. It confirms that happiness/contentment in a large degree is about mindset and expectations.
Probably it's ture and it isn't. You will be surprise to see how many average car buyers pay more attention to details than those that spend 10 times more.
Isn't this what a pre-delivery inspection is for? Most days the only time I hear about PDI is when people advise other people to try and get their PDI fee waived, because it's literally the salesperson checking boxes on a clipboard.
> “Unlike other manufacturers, Tesla doesn’t grant us permission to survey its owners in 15 states where it is required,” Doug Betts, president of the automotive division at J.D. Power, said in a statement. “However, we were able to collect a large enough sample of surveys from owners in the other 35 states and, from that base, we calculated Tesla’s score.”
... and we're letting Tesla do this exactly... why?
“When surveying computing device owners we found that an average abacus user reports 14 problems in the first three months and a laptop user reports 18”.
Seriously though: I would pay money for a news organization that always linked to primary sources. Bonus points for archiving them at the time of publication. I don't need a journalist to play Chinese whispers with me.[2] I'm an adult and I can interpret the information for myself.
1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/06/teslas-are-the-most-unr...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers