We’d like to take a moment to welcome Tesla to the club…the club of car makers who have been taken behind the woodshed by Consumer Reports over the performance of one of their models during the magazine’s famed objective testing regimen. The club consists of every company that has sold an automobile since the inception of Consumer Reports. CR is the kind of publication that enthusiasts like us love to hate, right? They are so dispassionate and they are often accused of leaning one way or the other in their reviews but with this outright pan job of the Tesla Model 3, no one can accuse them of cutting the electric car company an inch of slack. When they announce that the vehicle falls short of a recommendation because of the braking system and the driver controls, that’s big news. News that Tesla did not ignore.
This line of the story is the most damning in many ways, “The Tesla’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup.” OUCH. The testers were so interested in being fair, they borrowed another car from an acquaintance and it did virtually the same thing with regard to braking performance. Tesla’s response was that they would update the car’s firmware and “fix” the issue. Consumer Reports said that when the firmware update is made, they will test another car to see if it improves.
That’s pretty cool, to be able to update the cars like that from anywhere in the world, right? The huge question here though surrounds the fact that the cars left the factory with horrid braking performance and a “do over” in their calibration should help improve that but the fact that however many thousand of these things are junk in terms of stopping is scary and it seems like it would be scary for the company. Why? If I owned a Tesla Model 3 and I rear ended someone last week, I’d be furious that the car was an underperforming stopper and those that are “legally minded” would probably consider suing the company for negligence because they shipped a car they knew was underperforming and they “fixed” it after the fact. Hell, insurance companies may have a field day with this, right?
As if the production issues were not enough, now there is thing. Yikes.
Link: Consumer Reports Rough Review Of The Tesla Model 3
Why – you REALLY hate Elon Musk don’t you BangShift…..
Haters are gonna hate and that included me!
C’mon, an F-150 stops shorter than the Tesla 3. That’s pathetic. Don’t they test these cars before being release to the public?
OR that shows how good the brakes on an F-150 are.
The model 3 front end looks like a boat. It will go down in history as the edsel of our time.
There are many others in the line up since the Edsel.
Agreed…. Camaro, Chevelle, Monte Carlo, ….pretty much anything with a bowtie on it.
Yet if we compared how an F150 stops to cars built just, say, 10 years ago, how would that stack up? I don’t trust CR, and they have a history of using different test methods on different cars, skewing the results. Bunch of tree-hugging leftists…
Tesla is circling the drain…… and absolutely burning money at a furious rate.