Does Tesla Care About Its Customers? Recent Revelations Suggest a Dark Answer

Anyone keeping an eye on Autopilot lawsuits and controversies will already have noticed Tesla adopts what Madeleine Clare Elish defined as "moral crumple zones." In her words, when companies use customers to protect the reputation of their technologies, they put people to absorb the impact of bad outcomes "when the overall system malfunctions" – just like crumple zones absorb crash energy to prevent that from hurting the passengers.

The battery electric vehicle (BEV) maker does that with its legal disclaimers. They say the driver is always responsible for anything that happens when Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (FSD) is active. Yet, the biography Elon Musk authorized Walter Isaacson to write reveals weird and contradictory episodes.

In one of them, the Tesla CEO said in a meeting that he wanted cabin cameras in the company's vehicles to help it defend against lawsuits involving these advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). In other words, Tesla would record the drivers to accuse them of reckless driving. According to the excerpt, that happened because "Musk was convinced that bad drivers rather than bad software were the main reason for most of the accidents."

Ironically, the same book tells how Musk would furiously rush into Tesla's offices around 2015 to demand his engineers did something to "program this (Autopilot) right." His complaints allegedly repeated whenever he claimed Autopilot had tried to kill him. In his case, he did not say a lousy driver caused these dangerous situations. In a hypothetical crash in which Musk sued Tesla for Autopilot errors, the company would use its disclaimers against him. After all, the driver is always in charge. If they decided to use the ADAS, that's on them.

Bloomberg discovered that Musk dictated this disclaimer for a video showing a seamless Autopilot drive in 2016: "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." The New York Times revealed that the 2016 video was 3D mapped and staged to make it look like the Model X in the video drove without interventions. The truth is that the engineer had to correct it several times. The BEV even crashed when it was trying to park autonomously.

Even if you choose to ignore what the biography disclosed, Autopilot and FSD still face issues. A recent study published on Frontiers in Psychology revealed that "drivers became complacent over time with Autopilot engaged, failing to monitor the system, and engaging in safety-critical behaviors, such as hands-free driving."

Regarding FSD Beta, it "required constant supervision as unfinished technology, which increased driver stress and mental and physical workload as drivers had to be constantly prepared for unsafe system behavior (doing the wrong thing at the worst time)." The Delft University of Technology researchers recommended that "future research to investigate to what extent unintended negative behavioral changes increase the likelihood of being involved in a crash compared to manual driving."

These facts show that Tesla and its CEO were more concerned with promoting Autopilot and FSD than with the safety of their customers. The BEV company has reported several deaths involving the two systems to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Unfortunately, they were not the only recent situations that painted the BEV maker in a very bad light.

The BMS_u029 error code uncovered stories such as the one Bob Atkins and his mother-in-law lived when dealing with Tesla. Atkins rightfully complained when the BEV maker replaced the defective battery pack in his mother-in-law's Model S with a remanufactured component that was older than her car. That was unacceptable for several reasons.

The first one is that batteries die from use or age. In other words, older battery packs have a higher chance of failing than new ones. On top of that, early Model S battery packs suffer from "six different types of pack failures." Jason Hughes warned about them and said they were fixed with successive changes until they became "super solid" after Q2 2015. When the Tesla Hacker warns about something like this, you take notes. Hughes also lamented that Tesla still used the defective battery packs as replacements. That keeps happening with owners affected by the BMS_u029 error codes. Only battery packs made after 2015 should be accepted by people needing a replacement.

Bear in mind that some of these owners are the very people who first bought a Tesla, having kept their vehicles ever since. Atkins' mother-in-law has her 2014 Model S 85 since it was brand new. Some of them still have "Free Unlimited Supercharging," aka "Supercharging for life." The program was initially linked to the car. In 2017, it became something the buyer would only have for as long as they kept their vehicles. In 2019, the BEV maker started removing it from the cars it bought back in trade-ins.

Tesla is now trying to seduce these brand pioneers by offering them newer cars at a discount – but without this benefit. Some of these customers still prefer "Free Unlimited Supercharging," which is what made them put up with lower ranges and reduced charging speeds. Some of them now suspect the error codes they are getting are a way for the BEV maker to get rid of them. Hughes denied this is the case, but that did not prevent them from finding it suspicious that the BMS_u029 or the BMS_u018 emerged after an over-the-air (OTA) update. David Rasmussen, who sued Tesla for capping the voltage of his Model S, preferred not to wait. He sold his car and bought a Hyundai IONIQ 6 to avoid any other hassle.

Again, these are the same people who experienced the best phase of the company when it comes to customer care and who convinced several others to buy the same cars. Tesla dismissed its marketing department thanks to these guys. Yet, here they are, getting older, remanufactured battery packs with design flaws from the BEV maker.

If you think only old and loyal buyers are being disappointed, another recent case shows that this is more democratic than it could seem. A presenter from the Vehicle Virgins YouTube channel shared he would never buy a Tesla again after having a Model S Plaid for the last two years.

Problems started when the tires began losing pressure for no reason. When the video presenter checked, he realized the Model S Plaid eats the inside of its tires. The presenter rated that as a safety issue and discovered that it happened every 5,000 miles. He claims he did not push it hard very often, just drove it normally. However, the main disappointment was that he paid almost $140,000 in December 2021. Tesla has cut prices so many times that the same car now costs $89,990. The youtuber said he never lost so much money on a single vehicle in his life.

By offering these aggressive discounts, Tesla tried to make its aging lineup attractive to more customers with the ridiculously obvious excuse that "demand at scale is limited by affordability." It's evident that Mercedes-Benz will sell more C-Class units than S-Class sedans. However, the German company never lowered S-Class prices to meet those of the C-Class. In fact, no automaker apart from the American BEV maker would do that. When they want to sell a cheaper vehicle, they develop one because they know what happens next.

Tesla either did not know or did not care. That destroyed the residual value of the cars it had already sold. Those who financed their BEVs may owe more than the insurance company would pay them if their vehicles were totaled. What do you do when even insurance is not enough to save you from a financial disaster – especially when you do not have gap insurance?

These are just a few examples of things that are making Tesla customers swear they will never buy anything else from the BEV maker. For a company that relies on word of mouth for sales and thinks a marketing department is a waste, that is not a wise strategy. Better than giving in to advertisements, the company should revise its actions. If people commented about the premium treatment they received in Tesla's beginning, they will also spread the word on everything that is wrong nowadays. The list keeps growing.