Tesla’s Model 3 has quality issues, but do buyers care?
Mark Schey of Morristown, N.J., stepped into his garage eager to hop inside his shiny new car — the much desired Tesla Model 3 electric sedan. The one with the 15-inch touchscreen on the bare-bones dash.
He flashed his electronic key card to unlatch the door, but nothing happened. He tried the iPhone app, but that didn’t work either. There was no way to open the doors. There’s not even a backup metal key.
Schey figured he’d need to jump the 12-volt battery needed to power the doors open from the outside. But the hood was locked shut, too.
It turns out there’s a waferthin plastic cap flush with the front bumper covering a hole the size of a silver dollar. The Tesla technician sent to Schey’s home reached his fingers in and pulled out two thin cables. He clamped the cables to a portable battery and switched on the juice. The hood popped open.
That’s how you jumpstart the most high-tech, cutting-edge automobile on the market today.
And Schey couldn’t be happier.
“The Tesla service people were great,” he said. “I see this as growing pains.”
Whether there are tens of thousands of patient and forgiving customers like Schey or only a few early adopters who look at the Model 3 as a fussy but desirable new tech toy may determine how much leeway Tesla has as it struggles with snail’s-pace production on its Fremont assembly line and faces early criticism over a variety of quality problems.
Tesla started making the Model 3 last July. CEO Elon Musk at one time forecast the company would achieve a rate of 5,000 per week by the end of 2017, or 260,000 a year. From the car’s introduction in July through December, however, only 2,685 Model 3s were manufactured.
The assembly line and the company’s battery factory in Nevada remain mired in what Musk has called “production hell.” According to Tesla, the company is turning out about 1,000 Model 3s a week.
The manufacturing woes appear to be causing a wide variety of quality issues in early versions of the Model 3. Online Tesla forums are rife with comments from some of those who have the car in hand. They’re griping about dead batteries, leaking tail lamps, protruding headlights, door rattles, and body panels that don’t line up.
In a written statement, the company said: “Tesla’s customer satisfaction scores for Model 3 vehicle quality and condition are at an all-time high of 94 percent — the best scores we’ve received from customers for quality and condition ever, across all of our vehicles, during early ownership. In the rare case a customer does have an issue, we take it very seriously, working closely with each owner to proactively address it.”
It’s not possible to determine yet how pervasive the quality problems are — and they may be difficult to quantify in the future. J.D. Power, the preeminent automobile quality research group, would like to include Tesla in its rankings, but “Tesla has not granted J.D. Power access to owner’s information so that a large enough sample of Tesla models can be included in the Vehicle Dependability Study,” said David Amodeo, a J.D. Power executive.
All the major automakers participate in the J.D. Power quality surveys.
In the most recent ranking, released Wednesday, Lexus, Porsche and Buick came out on top. Tesla cars were not rated.
Consumer Reports ranks reliability through surveys of subscribers. In October, it predicted “average” quality for the Model 3, due to improvements Tesla had made in the Model S, but didn’t yet have data from Model 3 owners. That’s the latest information available, a spokesman said.
Professional reviews are mostly glowing, especially about how the car rides and drives. Still, investors in Tesla’s high-flying stock will be watching to see if quality issues continue, and, if so, what effect they might have on sales.
But the enthusiasm of early adopters complicates earnings forecasts, said Efraim Levy, analyst at CFRA. “Tesla buyers are a patient bunch,” he said. “Not just for the quality, but for the delivery.”