Tesla recalls nearly 3 million vehicles in China over door handle safety risks
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/21/china-tesla-vehicle-recallOpen linkView original on lemmy.wtfSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.wtfhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/21/china-tesla-vehicle-recallOpen linkView original on lemmy.wtf
21 replies
Just so everyone knows the score...
It's not that the ones they're selling in China are less safe - it's that China is the only country holding them to any kind of reasonable safety standard.
How are they even selling in China when China makes cars so much better and cheaper
Teslas are, unfortunately, quite nice - they became as popular as they were for good reason, and they're only suffering because of their CEO's antics and the cybertruck being such a shitshow. The few BYD cars I have driven are... fine? Unremarkable, which is generally the goal with cars - not exactly fun, but none of the models I tried were designed with fun as the goal. Plenty servicible vehicles. But the current model 3s really are an extremely polished user experience; they go very fast, look quite distinctive and with minimalism being as popular as it is in China right now, their design language has lucked them into having broad pop-culture appeal.
I dislike Teslas for two reasons: I like physical buttons / function-over-form design, and I fucking hate elon musk. The cars themselves aren't the problem; fascism is the problem. If Musk isn't fucking you over every day, and the reporting you see doesn't cover his antics, there's little reason to avoid the cars.
I dunno, man. Touchscreen everything is plenty reason to avoid, just from a safety perspective.
Yes - I don't know what more I can say about that, really. I hate it too, but to a whole lot of people that hyperminimalist design is quite appealing. So many chinese manufacturers are implementing or outright imitating it that China had to pass regulation mandating physical controls for such obscure features as turn signals and headlights, which is yes, ridiculous.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/
If this were an Asian or European brand, Congress would be investigating.
I hate to say, but as the article lays out they are investigating this.
::: spoiler Excerpts about NTSB and NHTSA reporting from the article:
:::
The LendingTree study also invites the hilariously obvious conclusion that Tesla drivers are assholes (though there's a rather interesting argument that it may not simply be "assholes are bad drivers" but that Tesla's misleading advertising may play a large role in the problem by convincing consumers that their "autopilot" is much more capable than it truly is)
Here is a an example of what congressional oversight of regulatory agencies like the NHTSA looks like.
Here are Tesla and Waymo being called to testify before congress about the safety issues in their cars.
Here is a rather daunting list of all the (US?) recalls thru March 2025, which both dispels the common line about most of the recalls being solved with OTA updates and provides a great deal of schadenfreude (fuck musk).
^(edit:^ ^spelling)^
According to TUV safety data, they are the worst cars on the road for reliability. Even after only ten years, a gen1 model S is a rare sight. They are also the top brand for crash rates, likely due to the distractive interface.
Yes, and although wear on the mechanical components of the drive system (axles and differentials especially) is higher with EVs (which accounts somewhat for their frequent appearance on that and similar lists), the model 3 (and particularly the refresh model 3) suffered mightily both from being an early entry into consumer EVs and from Tesla's descent into fascism impacting their design. That's in no small part why I was talking about user experience, and not mechanical reliability (the Model Y, apparently the 2nd most popular EV in china, doesn't seem to have shown up on the list? But I'm not sure if that's because it's actually more reliable, or simply because they're uncommon in Germany/Austria)
(parenthetical asides are like garlic - you can never have too many)(Edit: Sorry, forgot this bit. The interface is likely not the whole of the cause - although this has for some reason barely been studied, if it were at the heart of the problem you would see similar accident rates / rate increases among similarly infotainment-heavy models; and they do show an increase, but not anything as dramatic as with the Teslas. It may be down to UI differences, though that seems unlikely, but until there's more research we've few options besides simply speculating in the wind.)
There are plenty of problems with the cars.
Insightful, yet shedding all excess verbiage - an excellent allegory for the cultural minimalism I mentioned earlier. Thank you!
Lol thank you for making me laugh
You're most welcome lmao, thank you for the opportunity! And rest assured I'm not defending Tesla here, just explaining their unfortunate popularity in the Chinese (and to a lesser extent world) market.
https://www.tesla-fire.com/
Is the site dead? It seems somewhat unlikely there haven't been any fires in the last two years, there's been almost 2 million more teslas sold since then.
edit: ah yes, it appears to be dead. That's a shame, I wonder if anyone else has cropped up in their place.
https://www.tesladeaths.com/
Damn, that's still just through 2025. Thank you though, that's an excellent source!
Inertia. They been one of the first ones to sell there and they been better than any other option. Today that is not the case but inertia is still there.
It's like BMW. We'll known "always in the shop" car that costs an arm and a leg and not being premium enough compared to many other brands. Still is being sold at insane amounts annually.
Status symbols are very important there, even if they're absolutely shit
Well the status symbol of a Tesla owner is "fucking loser" so they might want to try again
Years since their introduction, and it still boggles my mind.
How in God's name can you fuck up a door? You have to pull on a little cable to open a Cybertruck rear door without power, after you remove the rubber mat, of course.
What the fuck is wrong with you people, and it's pervasive now with all sorts of crap. To use buttons on my fridge, I have to push another "unlock" button for 3 seconds. God dammit I can't stand it I wait for death