I grew up ~12 miles from the incident. My family still lives there. To add insult to injury, the local Shell plant is also doing a safety burn right now.
They have terrible manufacturing quality. The screens melt in Arizona heat. Maybe the ride is cool and feels good, but the car itself is not incredible.
How many other cars do you know that turn their A/C on while stationary for ‘cabin overheat protection’? My 2021 model 3 did that this week while sitting in the sun in northern Ontario and was helpful enough to send a push notification to let me know.
This is not to helpfully make sure the driver gets into a nice cool car when they finish their errand. It’s because the non-automotive grade screen isn’t rated or tested above 40C and were failing in heat. Rather than upgrade the part and do a recall Tesla opted to just use battery to keep the cabin below 40-45C.
I love EVs, but that’s some pretty dodgy behaviour.
I take your point but to me this seems like a feature rather than a bug. Many of the plastic parts in most cars (not just Teslas) are degraded by oxidation in the greenhouse heat of the car being parked in the sun for a long time. Some of that oxidation is caused by UV, but to the extent that it's caused by heat, keeping the interior of the car somewhat cooler should prolong the life of its interior plastics.
This is not really an option in an ICE car because it would require running the engine. In an EV, it's easy.
vinyl and plastic degradation is a many years-long process before it has any real impact on the performance of the parts. Failure or yellowing of the non-automotive grade screen in a model 3 has been seen in just a few weeks or months.
I've put a lot of miles on my ModelY in Phoenix in the summer. Phoenix in the summer is not my idea of fun, but the screen (and the rest of the car) worked fine.
I think the whole "terrible manufacturing quality" thing is a talking point people seized on. They had problems with manufacturing quality as they brought up their whole factory/assembly process -- was their manufacturing quality ever "terrible"? Meh, I think it was kind of "we have kinks to work out." Nowadays, they seem fine.
I set it two years ago too, and then a couple months ago they changed the app and again tried to foist it on me twice. I changed back twice, and had it changed once again - this last time seems to have stuck. I have another Twitter account (newer) that I don't log into frequently and it's happened on that one 3 times for a total of 6 between my two accounts. Oddly, I have one biz account that's never changed.
