Comment by tromp
17 hours ago
With possibly more cases outside Korea:
> My understanding is that most of Tesla’s vehicles sold in Korea are made at Gigafactory Shanghai in China, and that’s Tesla’s main export hub. Most of Tesla’s vehicles outside of the US are made in China. We should start seeing similar issues in other markets unless there’s a specific contributing factor in Korea.
A brief search in Chinese social media turns out:
- the cases are rare, once every several months
- the affected battery pack is usually replaced free of charge
- many of the cases are from Chinese in North America, and even one case is about imported Model 3
Considering Chinese media prefer reporting Tesla defects to gain more clicks, I would assume this is not a Shanghai-specific, broadly affecting problem.
I suppose that may depend how one defines a "broadly affecting problem". 2/3 (~2.9k) of the cases are for 2021 vehicles, and maybe it's possible those relate to specific batches shipped only to South Korea or something, but that still wouldn't explain the other 1/3 (~1.6k) of cases.
Tesla hasn't provided statistics about cases in the Chinese market, but I have a hard time believing it's really a handful of battery issues per year (regardless what one assumes of social media). That's just too far beyond any reasonable quality level expectation for ~half a million cars over the time period.
I have never considered posting to social media about automotive issues, unless something truly egregious happened that I felt I should warn people about. If you see complaints, it's probably fairly frequent.
That's you, not the common Chinese crowd - compared to a known problem of another good-selling car, I can say that Tesla problem is indeed rare.