From The Mobilist Inbox This Week
A 24th Tesla investigation, 1884 EV design, dry batteries
The Tesla safety and quality problem: Last weekend, two Houston men took the family Tesla S out for a spin, failed to turn in a cul-de-sac, sped into some woods, and crashed into a tree. No one was at the wheel at the time, police said, and both men were killed. Confusing the situation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Autopilot wasn’t engaged at the time.
It’s the latest of 24 Tesla crashes under investigation by the NHTSA, the U.S. auto safety agency, many involving Autopilot. At the cusp of a new era for electric vehicles, in which EVs seem headed for a massive market share battle with conventional vehicles around the middle of the decade, Tesla will be increasingly assessed not by friendly early-movers and status seekers, but by unsentimental mass-market buyers. These ordinary buyers will be much less forgiving of Tesla’s erratic quality performance: Last November, Consumer Reports stopped recommending the Model S and criticized Tesla’s Model Y crossover SUV as one of the least reliable vehicles it tested. In short, Tesla needs to hire a first-rate quality control SWAT team, and get every detail of its vehicles completely right.
In a note to clients yesterday, Barclays analyst Brian Johnson suggested that, in last week’s crash, Tesla…
