Tesla Vision fails as owners complain of Model 3 cameras fogging up in cold weather::A number of Tesla owners have taken to Reddit after their front cameras fogged up and stopped working in cold weather, leaving several features, including the US$10,000 FSD Beta, inoperable. Tesla has declined to assist to these customers, despite many of their vehicles being covered under warranty.
What irks me about this is I own an ev (not a Tesla obviously fiat 500e) and I slog/bash that thing through mud/snow/rain/several inches of water on the regular and even do what id consider rally driving with it at times and it’s fine. You know why? Because this was always a Tesla engineering failure and not an ev failure. But it sucks because people will think ev= unable to get wet which just is not true.
Teslas do not suck for core feature of the car. They get undue attention because of what they are and what Musk does, but the core features the car is supposed to do work very well.
I own a 3, so bias called out here, but do not own it for the auto drive. I don’t even really use it, just lane following. When I push go, it goes. When I want to get great range, I get great range. When I need it to rapidly charge and find me a route that charges as I need it, it does. It fills up enough to get to my destination at superchargers faster than I can check out at the gas station for my apple fritter.
All of the other crap aside with self driving, it does what I bought it for. I look forward to the day someone can sell me the same range for the same money, with the same charge rates, with the same rapid charger population across the US. When they do, I will gladly switch.
I don’t think Tesla is an engineering failure, in fact I think it is an engineering success for their motors and batteries (both of which get sold to other EV manufacturers as licensed products), but a marketing failure largely resulting from Musk’s push or outward statements he should never have made. With a decent filtering PR firm and letting this engineers run the development runway, Tesla would still be lauded.
The quality control is seemingly nonexistent though. The sucker that had theirs kick the bucket after getting rained on probably doesn’t care how well the core features work.
There is still nothing I have seen to date that proves to all of us they didn’t drive through and submerge the battery.
I don’t doubt Tesla’s shitty practices on customer service, and I don’t doubt the possibility of a WC failure letting rain be the cause. It could.
I just haven’t seen anything conclusive to reinforce they didn’t drive the vehicle in a manner that could be expected to cause water issues.
Once that gets produced, I will happily agree.
So why wouldn’t the battery be sealed? Why is this a mode of failure that you believe is somehow acceptable? Short of the car going the route of a particular 500k P1… Why wouldn’t we expect the batteries to be sealed if they’re that sensitive to water ingress?
You realize that outside has a lot of water? And it’s pretty normal for some of that to get on the underside of your vehicle… Why wouldn’t tesla as a car design/manufacturer account for that and take reasonable precaution to stop water ingress on the battery? You even hear of an ICE car doing this short of driving into a lake?
All the core features, eh? Try your door handle when the battery’s dead then say that again with a straight face.
I heard of so many gaps in the bodywork, fogging up of the headlights or even the interior, stiff like that. It seems like there is a huge range of quality, even with the same model.
Some of that (not all) is anti EV propaganda, both funded by competitors or exaggerations and sometimes outright fabrication by people who (justifiably) dislike Musk.