Sure, there’s an element of humor to the whole thing, and Maserschmidt’s posts can be taken in that light. But that wasn’t “Stonk King”'s purpose. That was to spread FUD about Tesla. There’s a small community of people on Twitter whose entire purpose in life seems to revolve around that, which you can usually spot because they talk about $TSLA or $TSLAQ. Thankfully, there’s another poster on Twitter (The Short Shorts Historian) whose purpose in life is to collect all the idiotic things they’ve said over the years and remind us how wrong they were. The latest one at the moment:
The Model Y was not in fact dead on arrival thanks to the Jaguar i-Pace (the Model Y sold 1.2 million units in 2023. The i-Pace sold about 6 thousand).
I actually feel bad for some of these people–at least one of them lost their life savings from shorting Tesla and IIRC it sorta destroyed their life. There’s an element of genuine mental illness in many cases. I’ll still laugh at them, though.
Anyway, there’s a good chance the car wash text is just something Tesla copy-and-pasted from a different manual and never updated. Or maybe there’s another reason for it, like avoiding thermal shock in the glass, which is unrelated to the stainless steel. Who knows.
Sure, but this current round of discourse didn’t start by someone combing through the instruction manual to humilate Tesla, this came from one person who posted a video of their car actually not starting because they ran it through a car wash and someone else screenshotting that the Tesla manual warns against that. Did the Tesla shorts then amplify it? Yes, along with everyone else who thought it was hilarious.
Ok, but those things have nothing to do with each other. The warning in the manual is so if the car wash snaps off the charge port door or whatever, it’s not covered by the warranty. That should be obvious, but most of the stuff in any car manual is obvious. Other makes also have car wash modes or similar advice about what the user needs to do.
If the car had some other failure, obviously that’s a defect that should be covered. The manual doesn’t say that car washes are prohibited.
I’m not generally impressed by lines of discussion that quietly slide between “there’s actually a serious problem” and “chill out, it’s just a joke”. Which is it?
Well, in the case of the FUDsters, it’s because they’ve shorted the stock and are trying to influence it downwards. They mostly fail because it’s just social media after all, but occasionally the mass media picks up on something or other and possibly causes a downtick. Impossible to know, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
As for Patreon–I mean, 99% of that, or donations on YouTube or Twitch or OnlyFans or whatever are this weird parasocial thing, but that’s one of the milder versions. The internet is weird sometimes (I do use Patreon to fund a 3D printer firmware developer, though).
Like I said, pathological. Sure, it’s “milder” than stalking Twitch streamers but paying someone to white knight for a billionaire so you can pretend that the billionaire is kind of your friend is still a weird road for a healthy life to take. That’s off the topic of silly trucks breaking in the car wash though so I’ll leave it at that.
The Rivian R1T manual makes mention of a car wash mode but says nothing of the warranty being voided if car wash mode isn’t turned on. The Kia EV6 manual just tells you not to open the door in the middle of a car wash and also some soaps used in car washes might make your car difficult to clean. The Ford F150 Lightning manual makes no mention of any car wash mode and just has the usual stuff about putting the car in neutral in an automatic car wash and there being the possibility of some minor cosmetic damage.
I’m not going to exhaustively go through every EV but it appears that only Tesla has a specific warning in the manual that the warranty could be voided by going through a car wash without using car wash mode and it appears that the warning is in the manual because of specific design decisions that cause Teslas to actually be capable of being damaged by going through a car wash that simply isn’t a design flaw in other car models (as evidenced by nobody else ever coming up with anecdotal evidence that their car was damaged by a car wash because they didn’t take a special precaution).
Although it doesn’t explicitly say that the warranty doesn’t cover damage here, I’m fairly confident that since the passage is under a clear “CAUTION” section, they’re going to deny your claim if the car is damaged for this reason.
And Kia’s car wash mode:
A subset of Tesla’s car wash mode, but the same basic idea: closes the windows, folds the side mirrors, disables the wipers, prevents the charge door from opening, etc. Again, I’m fairly certain that if the charge port door gets snapped off because it opened in the car wash, they’re going to deny your claim. Just like any other physical damage that isn’t due to a defect in the car.
Rivian and the car wash would not warranty it. I had to pay over $1,000 dollars to have it replaced at Rivian. Then it leaked lots of water into my lap after the repair, had to have Rivian replace it again. Then the techs dented both driver front doors at second repair.
Maybe the Rivian manual should have included a few more “this is not covered under warranty” passages…
This is getting extremely nitpicky. As I said, all of them have instructions about putting the car in neutral and also not opening your door in the middle of a car wash but that’s very different from what Tesla is trying to prevent.
Do you really think in those instances, Tesla would have said, hey, wow, you put this car into car wash mode, we’re totally going to cover this, but if they found out you didn’t put the car in car wash mode, they’d be like, uh uh, car was mode is there to prevent these specific types of failures?
The specific damage to the cybertruck was that water got into the charge port and caused an electrical fault that bricked the main touchscreen and required a five hour reboot to fix. It’s a hilariously terrible design flaw for a vehicle that was advertised as the rough, go anywhere, any time, you can use it as a boat in an emergency type vehicle that no other EV seems to have a problem with. That the model 3 apparently suffers from the same issue is not exactly the win for Tesla you seem to think it is.
The Model 3/Y doesn’t suffer from the same issue. You’re engaged in acausal reasoning–you think that’s the case because the language in the manual is the same. But it’s exactly backwards–the language is only referring to ordinary physical damage that could happen to any car, like a broken port door or wipers. The Cybertruck just copied that language. Those, again like any car, aren’t going to be covered under warranty, whether the manual explicitly says so or not.
That one user had some water intrusion issue is unrelated to this. The video doesn’t say that Tesla denied the claim. There’s apparently a software bug that causes the reset to take 5 hours rather than 2 minutes (which is the case on my Model 3). And possibly there’s another issue where water intrusion causes a screen glitch in the first place. I don’t know about the Cybertruck, but on the Model 3 the door isn’t even a seal against water anyway. It’s just there for aesthetic reasons and to prevent solid debris from entering. There isn’t even a gasket. The car is indifferent to water entering the port.
If you can find an example where Tesla denied a warranty claim for something other than physical damage to the charge port, you might have a point. That isn’t supported by the video or anything in the manual, though.
That’s your assertion. An average layman, reading the Tesla manual, is going to take it at face value that Tesla requires a special protective mode to go through car washes and that any damage that arises is due to a design flaw Tesla is pushing onto its customers rather than taking the responsibility to redesign. You claim that other auto makers require the same standard of care but so far, have not produced any evidence that owners of other cars need to do anything special in a car wash beyond the common sense things.
It’s not up to the consumer to prove a negative. Of course the guy who posted the video is going to get his car taken care of due to the bad PR but who knows how this will be dealt with with any other owner. Especially given Tesla’s already existing history of trying to weasel out of warranty claims when they knew there was a design flaw but trying to gaslight the driver into thinking it was user error.
No, it’s actual experience with the car. Water in the charge port does not cause damage or any weird behavior. You can plug a charger in while there’s a downpour and there’s no issue. While I’m sure you can find examples of people having problems out there (inevitable for a car that’s sold in the millions), there is no serious design issue there.
So your complaint isn’t actually about the design or warranty coverage, but about the layman’s perception of what they need to do? In that case I’d say the other manufacturers have more of a problem since they’re also going to be denying claims of damage caused by car washes (which demonstrably happens).
That has no relevance to the current discussion since it’s you who is saying the Cybertruck has a design flaw and that the text of the manual is intended to get them out of covering issues related to that. I consider that specious since:
Exactly the same text appeared in the manuals of their other cars
No similar problem existed in those cars
The car wash mode does nothing beyond what non-Tesla cars recommend
There is no evidence of a design problem at all beyond some minor software bugs
As for the Reuters article, I’m not sure it’s worth bothering to pick it apart. Their “A Reuters Investigation” into SpaceX injuries contained an easily disproven lie within the first few paragraphs, and the rest of it was highly misleading, so I’m not too impressed with Reuters’ investigative journalism at the moment.
No, I’m saying if this is indeed Tesla’s belief, they could very easily amend their manual to state “Damage caused to the windscreen wiper or charging port hinge by car washes are not covered by the warranty” instead of “Damage caused by car washes are not covered by the warranty”. I’m not expected to be a mind reader and you’re just asserting that’s what’s Tesla’s belief but that can’t be derived from a plain reading of the text. You might be factually correct that the charge port is waterproof for 99.99% of Tesla cars but evidently, it wasn’t for a n=1 and a plain reading of the warranty makes it seem like such a case wouldn’t be covered.
No it doesn’t, that’s the exact point. Even if we accept your interpretation, it’s up to you to find a manual that specifically states that any damage to a windscreen wiper or charging port is specifically covered only if car wash mode is activated. Every other car seems to survive just fine with both items being protected whether car wash mode is activated or not. Car wash mode, to the extent that it exists, is an optional convenience feature rather than a mandatory liability feature. Other damage is warned against in other car manuals (mainly minor cosmetic blemishes) but those are outside the scope of this discussion.
That other cars survive without requiring a car wash mode for warranty purposes indicates a design flaw in Tesla cars, where the responsibility is pushed onto the user.
Isn’t this car wash stuff, um, sort of obvious for ANY car. Charge port, well, yeah I don’t leave the door for putting gas in it open. Put the windows up? Uh, yeah. The windshield wipers I might use briefly to give it an extra rub down. But I don’t leave them on for crying out loud.
Many, many cars nowadays have automatic intermittent wipers. It can be very easy to simply leave the control set to “auto-intermittent” mode for weeks. They come on when you need them, they don’t when you don’t. Easy peasy.
Then, 2 weeks after the last time you thought about wipers and on a nice sunny day you take your car to the wash. You get out, the crew starts vacuuming, then while you’re waiting elsewhere they drive the car into the tunnel, hop out, and just about the time the car is irretrievable it gets sprayed, the wipers wake up, and are immediately entangled in the washing machinery’s brushes or swabs or whatever. Rip, tear, oops.
So the reminder isn’t to not run the wipers. It’s to have you ensure they’re not set to run themselves after you get out of the car.
