Quote:
Originally Posted by RabidRat
We really would need the actual stats to know for sure, which would never be available to us, but some possible reasons why failure rates will differ between brands:
It will differ in how battery designers handle environmental conditions: what is each cell being subjected to, thermally (e.g. do you get hotspots? how hot do those get? how quickly could the temperature ramp up/down?). How about mechanical stressors (e.g. how much shock / stress are you subjecting the cells to)? Electrical (e.g. how good is your cell balancing? how hard are you allowing your system to pull charge out, and dumping it in?). There's a lot of variation in how they can design the cooling, control/sensing electronics, structural design of the pack.
It then comes down to experience informing improvements on the battery pack design: you get a lot out of large-scale long-term real-world field data, vs just the usual accelerated life testing. Tesla has a huge head-start on other manufacturers in this regard.
Other manufacturers have a lot more experience in making the rest of the car, so it would make sense to me that Tesla's not there yet wrt door locks failing, seats squeaking, trim rattles, panel gaps gaping, that kinda thing. Point is, I don't think necessarily, problems in the rest of the vehicle are a good proxy for the reliability of the battery. But they could be. Who knows. Need data. Anecdotal evidence sucks. My dad's 2001 Sienna's transmission failed at just 110,000km, right out of warranty SOL. He took great care of that car. Had it serviced every time at Toyota for all the scheduled maintenance. Quoted $3000 to fix. Does that mean Toyotas are unreliable?
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No denying that any car brand can have catastrophic failures at low mileage. There are outliers/anomalies for sure for every brand. But if a failure/design flaw of some component happen quite commonly, then yea by all means, that car brand/specific model is unreliable.
I also just realized model s has been in the market since 2012 but you don't see them a lot on the street let alone high mileage ones, I doubt any owners wanna replace the batteries, they either ditch the car or junk it once the battery fails.