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Comment by hancholo | Hacker News Reader

Nope. Fun to drive sure... but overrated and quality has gone down. Those panel gaps, yikes. Source: Former engineer for Tesla.

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My 2021 Model Y LR has no panel gaps, inspected the entire vehicle before delivery using the Reddit-provided checklist. Quality is on par with my 2018 Model S and 2019 Model X (8/10 in aggregate, mostly minor issues), would begrudgingly complete my Cybertruck reservation into an order despite Musk’s highly distasteful antics. My Model S is at almost 100k miles having been driven US cross country over the last four years (mostly on EAP flavored Autopilot), and it has been very reliable (X and Y are around town cars). I know I can pull into a Supercharger stall anywhere in the US and it’ll work. No adapters, no down stations, no billing issues, it just works.

When you’re paying to be on the bleeding edge, you’re willing to compromise. Such is life. Thank you for your contributions to the products!

(former Tesla investor)

Reliable to 100k miles is not a feat. Asian car manufacturers have been making ICE cars that will reliably go over 200k and even 300k most times with just regular maintenance. I have driven two cars over 250k miles personally and sold them for a song and they are both going strong! (Hyundai and Toyota).

People brag about 70k and 100k on their Teslas like it is something impressive. It isn't at all.

There are folks with 200k-400k miles on their Model S and X, I admit my single 100k mile datapoint is n=1. OP asked for owner ground truth.

Here’s an S that has gone 900k miles: https://insideevs.com/news/559261/tesla-models-p85-1500000-k...

https://twitter.com/gem8mingen/status/1479108423685840905

There’s no more than 20 moving parts in the powertrain, of course it’s going to be reliable. Even the brake pads last the life of the vehicle now due to aggressive regeneration.

> As far as we know, the original battery pack had an issue after 290,000 km (180,000 miles) and was replaced under warranty. However, Tesla was initially figuring out the issue and installed a loaner battery, which was used for half a year or 150,000 km (93,000 miles). Then, Tesla installed a new, final battery. We don't have any info about any further replacements, so it might be the first 1 million km battery?

Yeah. Still not really impressive.

That is like saying, "My Toyota has gone 1m miles. Oh, I replaced the drivetrain twice. So what?"

Toyotas go 1m and you don't even notice: https://www.toyotaofnorthcharlotte.com/blog/the-million-mile...!

Great to hear the longevity of a legacy propulsion mechanism that countries are phasing in new sales bans of. Best wishes to Toyota.

My argument isn't that it is good that everyone drives ICEs - just that it is silly to be proud of the current electric drivetrain longevity. Getting upset about that is silly.

>There’s no more than 20 moving parts in the power-train, of course it’s going to be reliable.

Mazda called, they want their 1980s marketing BS back.

From a pure technical perspective, yes, less moving parts are more reliable. From the perceptive of some upper middle class consumer who has to pay some godawful price for any given part to be swapped out a simple minor oversight in the "systems that are common to all cars" portion of the system can easily make the simpler system "unreliable" in practice. Furthermore, mileage alone is not going to unlock the "inadequate design of plastic components causing failure as they get brittle" failure mode. That comes with age.

That said, you may be right. Toyota basically lied to these same demographics for 15 yr about "don't worry guys, we fixed the frames on the new ones" with no apparent reputational damage.

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