As Portal reported, a Tesla owner received a $14,000 repair bill for a first-day problem with his Model Y.
He said the Model Y's suspension broke when it only had 115 miles on the clock.
Portal found that Tesla faced thousands of complaints about suspension and steering problems.
Shreyansh Jain, a former Tesla owner, was hit with a $14,000 repair bill for a problem that occurred less than 24 hours after he brought home his brand new Model Y, a report says current report.
Jain told Portal that part of the suspension on his electric vehicle broke while he was traveling with his family a day after the Model Y was delivered. He said the car had 115 miles on it when the problem with the suspension caused parts of the vehicle to break come into contact with the road and Jain loses his ability to steer.
The Portal investigation, which cited interviews with more than 20 customers and nine Tesla employees as well as thousands of internal documents, found that Jain was one of thousands of Tesla owners who had problems with the suspension or control of the vehicle over the past six years company had. The publication reported that while Tesla has publicly denied some of the problems and attempted to shift responsibility to owners, the automaker is more aware of the problems than it has publicly indicated.
Tesla, which disbanded its press department years ago, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Elon Musk has admitted in the past that the carmaker faced some quality issues, especially during production ramp-up.
“When you drive faster, you just spot these things,” he told auto expert Sandy Munro in 2021. “If we knew about them in advance, we would fix them in advance.”
Jain told Portal his family went from “overjoyed” to “completely petrified” when the car they had paid about $55,000 for broke down on the road.
Portal reported that after Jain took the vehicle to a Tesla service center, a worker initially told Jain that they had found “no evidence of external damage” and suggested that the electric car maker would pay to repair the car. But Jain later learned he was expected to pay the $14,000 repair bill after Tesla sent him a letter saying the problem was due to “previous” damage, the publication reported .
The former Tesla owner told Portal that he ended up paying a deductible of about $1,250 and would face a higher insurance premium going forward. It took three months for Tesla to fix the suspension problem, and Jain resold the vehicle at a loss of about $10,000, Portal reported.
The Portal investigation is far from the first glimpse into quality control problems at Tesla. For example, earlier this year Tesla was investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over reports that some of Tesla's steering wheels fell off while driving.
The automaker has also faced scrutiny from regulators over concerns related to its Autopilot and Beta Full Self-Driving features, and recently released an over-the-air update after the NHTSA said the company's system was under surveillance of drivers who used these functions was incorrect.
Tesla owners have also highlighted quality control issues with the brand over the years, from gaps in panels and uneven paintwork to problems at the company's service centers.
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