Amid Stock Slide, Tesla Issues Largest Recall to Date
Tesla’s once sky-high share price has taken a serious hit in recent days, so news of the electric automaker’s recall of 123,000 Model S vehicles couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Describing the recall as voluntary, Tesla sent emails to owners of all Model S electric cars built before April 2016 to warn of an issue affecting the car’s power steering system. The issue involves corrosion impacting the bolts holding the power steering motor to the rack, which can then shear off — leading to a loss of power steering.
The automaker claims it noticed the issue in vehicles operating in cold climates, with calcium and magnesium road salts playing a role.
“Tesla plans to replace all early Model S power steering bolts in all climates worldwide to account for the possibility that the vehicle may later be used in a highly corrosive environment,” the automaker said in its email.
“If the bolts fail, the driver is still able to steer the car, but increased force is required due to loss or reduction of power assist.”
In this case, Bosch supplied Tesla with the affected parts. The issue seems identical to a problem reported last October by a Tesla Motors Club forum poster from Massachusetts, who reported his car’s steering woes to the automaker. The poster wasn’t too pleased when Tesla got back to him, quoting him a price for a new steering rack ($1,920).
After taking the vehicle into a Tesla service center, the poster said, “[The technician] said he’s seen this quite often. Sometimes the assist motor is just hanging there.”
As we said, the recall comes at a bad time for Tesla. The company is pulling out all the stops to reach its already pushed-back Model 3 production goal, even going as far as calling up workers from the Model S and X assembly lines to voluntarily work on the smaller sedan. Bloomberg reports CEO Elon Musk attempted to fire up his factory’s workforce with an appeal to prove the “haters” wrong. (The Reddit-like language is very apropos.)
Musk told workers that hitting a Model 3 output of 300 vehicles per week at its Fremont, California plant would represent an “incredible victory.”
After Musk’s promise of reaching 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of 2017 came and went, the CEO pushed the goalposts further back. The company’s goal is now a production rate of 2,500 Model 3s per week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. So, right now. The 5,000 target still stands for the end of June.
In the last two-and-a-half weeks, Tesla has seen its stock slide 23 percent. At the close of trading Thursday, Tesla shares stood at $266.13 — a major comedown from a peak of $383.45 in June of 2017.
[Source: CNBC] [Image: Tesla]
More by Steph Willems
Latest Car Reviews
Read moreLatest Product Reviews
Read moreRecent Comments
- Redapple2 Love the wheels
- Redapple2 Good luck to them. They used to make great cars. 510. 240Z, Sentra SE-R. Maxima. Frontier.
- Joe65688619 Under Ghosn they went through the same short-term bottom-line thinking that GM did in the 80s/90s, and they have not recovered say, to their heyday in the 50s and 60s in terms of market share and innovation. Poor design decisions (a CVT in their front-wheel drive "4-Door Sports Car", model overlap in a poorly performing segment (they never needed the Altima AND the Maxima...what they needed was one vehicle with different drivetrain, including hybrid, to compete with the Accord/Camry, and decontenting their vehicles: My 2012 QX56 (I know, not a Nissan, but the same holds for the Armada) had power rear windows in the cargo area that could vent, a glass hatch on the back door that could be opened separate from the whole liftgate (in such a tall vehicle, kinda essential if you have it in a garage and want to load the trunk without having to open the garage door to make room for the lift gate), a nice driver's side folding armrest, and a few other quality-of-life details absent from my 2018 QX80. In a competitive market this attention to detai is can be the differentiator that sell cars. Now they are caught in the middle of the market, competing more with Hyundai and Kia and selling discounted vehicles near the same price points, but losing money on them. They invested also invested a lot in niche platforms. The Leaf was one of the first full EVs, but never really evolved. They misjudged the market - luxury EVs are selling, small budget models not so much. Variable compression engines offering little in terms of real-world power or tech, let a lot of complexity that is leading to higher failure rates. Aside from the Z and GT-R (low volume models), not much forced induction (whether your a fan or not, look at what Honda did with the CR-V and Acura RDX - same chassis, slap a turbo on it, make it nicer inside, and now you can sell it as a semi-premium brand with higher markup). That said, I do believe they retain the technical and engineering capability to do far better. About time management realized they need to make smarter investments and understand their markets better.
- Kwik_Shift_Pro4X Off-road fluff on vehicles that should not be off road needs to die.
- Kwik_Shift_Pro4X Saw this posted on social media; “Just bought a 2023 Tundra with the 14" screen. Let my son borrow it for the afternoon, he connected his phone to listen to his iTunes.The next day my insurance company raised my rates and added my son to my policy. The email said that a private company showed that my son drove the vehicle. He already had his own vehicle that he was insuring.My insurance company demanded he give all his insurance info and some private info for proof. He declined for privacy reasons and my insurance cancelled my policy.These new vehicles with their tech are on condition that we give up our privacy to enter their world. It's not worth it people.”
Comments
Join the conversation
Turns out AutoPilot was engaged on the car that crashed into the dividing barrier: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident Surely this will help Tesla's stock price and funding problems.
Manufacturing and selling cars in volume is a serious, exacting business which requires excruciating attention to detail by many thousands of people. Tesla has not demonstrated its capacity to behave accordingly. Tesla routinely releases unfinished, incompletely tested products to the market to be sorted out later ... just like software and internet companies have gotten away with for decades. What Musk & Co. don't understand is how much higher the stakes are for vehicles than they are for a website.