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To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

myteslaexperience.com

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Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#401

Post by darkerside »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #384
ddalex wrote: post #72

I'm sorry to have to say this, but buying a Tesla in 2024 is a terrible choice - the car is horrible to drive, not to mention customer satisfaction, reliability and ethical concerns. Hyundai and Polestar are way better electric options that are actually enjoyable and comfortable to drive

While I understand the trepidation of supporting an organization whose leader openly makes Nazi salutes, I would not assume that South Korean chaebol leaders or Chinese conglomerate business owners have any better ideals. Volvo’s owner is a front man for the Chinese government, who are supposedly not averse to ethnic cleansing, as far as I have read.

You are comparing a factual observation with tenuous connections and vague conspiracy theories. False equivalence.

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#402

Post by jdietrich »

leoedin wrote: post #363
dan-robertson wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to note the trade-off here: modern cars are much safer in crashes than even cars from ~20 years ago, and the less computer you want, the further back in time you need to go to find suitable cars. There are nuances to the safety thing: some brands were/are safer, more popular car designs today tend to have some features that may worsen safety (taller cars are less stable, heavier cars handle worse, big heavy cars…

How much safer are they? I can totally believe that the crash safety of cars improved hugely in the 90s - that's basically when large crumple zones, computer modelling of crash performance, airbags, seatbelt pretensioners etc were all developed. But 20 years ago was 2005. What's changed on a modern car since 2005? There's obviously a lot more safety features (and these have increasingly been part of the crashworthine…

>How much safer are they?

A lot. Probably the biggest single change was the introduction of the small overlap crash test by the IIHS. It turns out that the standard frontal crash tests are quite unrealistic; in most frontal accidents, the driver swerves to avoid something but clips the corner, rather than just slamming into something head-on. Cars designed to perform well in the standard frontal crash test often performed miserably in the small overlap test.

Compare the same model before and after the small overlap test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0Oq2SPu48

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE_EUa3VC48

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#403

Post by randomcarbloke »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #20

I had similar experiences with a modern Volvo. (XC40 T8 EV). Modern cars seem to be absolutely terrible. It's like all those Single Page Applications on the web that are just downgrades over the classic Server-Side Rendered apps. Sure, you have more features, but at what cost? Reliability. I think the last generations of cars before the touch buttons and screens were the last "okay" generation. Somewhere in 2010s, al…

Ineos Grenadier, they make them like cars used to be made with real buttons and stuff.

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#404

Post by Loughla »

rs186 wrote: post #385
lccerina wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error was to buy a second one after "the first one was just poor manufacturing". I never saw manufacturing quality improve over time from car companies.

This. After my Nissan car started to have transmission problems that would cost thousands of dollars to fix (among various other small issues), I sold it as quickly as possibly and swore I'll touch the make again.

Subaru burned me on this. I bought my wife an outback. It started to have transmission issues with a full transmission failure at about 145k miles. This is after a life of small problems here and there that didn't really impact performance.

It was a known issue between 125 and 150k miles. Subaru's solution was to extend the warranty to 100k, as if that did anything at all.

We got rid of the broken one, and the one that I drove as well. I'll never go back. I loved those cars, but that's so shady.

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#405

Post by marcyb5st »

AgentK20 wrote: post #265
marcyb5st wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is a lot, but it is the same in "fully working" cars. Additionally, once you to the math things look bad: 8% of a battery pack of 60kWh is around 5kWH. 5000 Wh / 24h = 208 W. 200W to keep few cameras on and a small CPU/GPU to run the logic seems a lot. Especially considering that you don't need to analyze every frame of every camera. In fact, you could easily run one frame every 5 seconds making it ~ 1FPS an…

From my understanding the problem is that the computer just....doesn't sleep if you have Sentry mode running. It's not that it's sleeping for a few seconds and then waking up, it's just fully awake drawing it's normal base load, which for HW4 [1] appears to be ~300W. A good way to verify this if you've got a Tesla is how long it takes for the car to acknowledge commands sent via the mobile app. If they're near-instan…

Thanks for point that out, but I then believe it's a combination of the two.

I don't believe that an embedded PC that allegedly has the same power as a PS5 consumes 200/300W idling. Even if it doesn't sleep it should consume in the order of 10s of W, not 100s. For reference, my PC here has a 3070, a ryzen 7 7xxx (I don't remember the exact model) and consumes like 40W at the outlet when idling.

So I am willing to assume that yes, the onboard PC doesn't idle when sentry mode is active, but the 200+ W draw is due to it running terrible software, and not just not entering CPU states that are energy efficient.

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#407

Post by starbugs »

wesselbindt wrote: post #398
starbugs wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2025/ This is about what cars made it through the German TÜV. Not about reliability.

To me it seems like a perfectly sound proxy measure of reliability. Why do you believe otherwise?

Have you ever brought a car through the German TÜV?

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#408

Post by halifaxbeard »

musikele wrote: post #165

Let's remove Musk from the equation, because you can like or (most probably) hate him, but I own a Tesla and I have the opposite experience. Everything worked out of the box. Just one piece of hardware started to fail (the charger plug making some noise) and they changed it in warranty. First: has the author tried a tesla before buying one? I'd never buy a car without trying it. Because comparing it to a Clio just be…

"first gen" Model 3s didn't have an emergency rear door release for when the electrical one failed. they've since added that to more recent generations.

but- a car company that doesn't see the need to have emergency rear door releases has systemic issues. someone, anyone involved in approving that design could have said "no. i will not sign off on this", but they didn't.

it makes me wonder what other corners they cut, and whether those cut corners could kill a driver or passenger- because they're not going to cut corners on anything that would be immediately apparent in daily use: it would be detrimental to sales.

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#409

Post by [deleted] »

starbugs wrote: post #382
mschild wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding another source: TÜV Report 2025 (in German) In Germany you have to get your car checked every 24 months for its road worthiness (think general doctor checkup but for your car). If it fails, you are not allowed to use it until it's fixed. At the first general inspection after purchase 2-3 years out, 14.2% of all checked Tesla Model 3s had issues. Comparing that to other models that are on record in sufficient n…

> https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2025/ This is about what cars made it through the German TÜV. Not about reliability.

[deleted]

Re: To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

#410

Post by ivan_gammel »

usr1106 wrote: post #364
theshrike79 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have less panel gaps and other minor flaws, because the people putting them together in Germany actually care (and have unions and proper working hours so they're not exhausted).

I am not sure how much unions are present in German Tesla factories. They are certainly very present in every other German car factory. Tesla does not accept unions. In Sweden, which is unionized to a higher degree than Germany, Tesla's service (no factory there) is in continuous labor conflict with Tesla who thinks they can act as irresponsibly as their owner.

IG Metall is there (at least 10% of total staff) and of course there's a workers council, where they have seats.
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