
Tesla's Infinite Mile Warranty - brbcoding
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty
======
bane
I think this is them just getting ahead of some possible long-term drive-train
issues.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/60-second-business-
break/ci_26323...](http://www.mercurynews.com/60-second-business-
break/ci_26323845/biz-break-tesla-model-s-suffers-flaws-over)

[http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/alternative/1404...](http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/alternative/1404_2013_tesla_model_s_p85_update_3/)

[http://insideevs.com/real-imagined-tesla-model-s-
drivetrain-...](http://insideevs.com/real-imagined-tesla-model-s-drivetrain-
defective/)

 _Recently Edmunds sold their long-term Tesla Model S; but before they did so
the car had four (yes, four) drivetrains replaced by Tesla Motors. Motor
Trend’s long term car is working on its 2nd.

This does not make us ask the question “is drivetrain failure a common
occurence in the Model S?”

Because it is.

If you check out the latest numbers on a Tesla Motors Club poll, you will find
that 75 (supposed) Model S owners have had a least 1 drive unit replaced - 12
of which have had it replaced more than once.

(Fair disclaimer: There is always a couple jokers messing with the results of
an uncontrolled poll like this. As a point of reference, TMC likely has
somewhere around 5% of Model S owners as members)

To their credit, Tesla service has been doing a yeoman’s job taking care of
its clients. Despite the many failure occurrences we have yet to hear of Tesla
giving a Model S owner a difficult time in solving the problem (ie-replacing
the drive unit entirely).

The problem for customers will arise however when Tesla’s 4 year/50,000 mile
warranty on the unit expires; that is when repairs reportedly greater than
$10,000 a pop really start to hurt._

Tesla has got to both get ahead of this issue for the upcoming models and
instill consumer confidence in the vehicles while they're fixing it.

~~~
tdicola
I kind of wonder if swapping out the drivetrain is actually a really common
and perhaps early part of Tesla's troubleshooting procedure. Since it's just a
motor, batteries, and relatively simple transmission it probably isn't nearly
as hard to remove as a combustion engine (especially if they designed it for
easy removal). It's probably a lot easier to pull the drivetrain out, swap in
a known good one, and have the customer on their way than spend hours and days
trying to debug the unit in the car (and potentially having the customer back
again if the issue isn't resolved).

~~~
sounds
With fewer connection points it would seem a given that the drivetrain is
easier to swap out than an internal combustion engine. Musk has also mentioned
on an investor call that drivetrain replacements were sort of a catch-all for
some other unrelated issues (before they had fully discovered the issue).

Even if we err on the cautious side and say a better comparison is replacing
just the transmission of an ICE vehicle, the Tesla drivetrain is only
electrical connections (albeit some large ones), drive shaft, and mounting
hardware.

I wrote out the list of ICE transmission removal steps but deleted it -- I
think the point is clear: this is no big deal.

Tesla can absolutely reuse the drivetrains it removes, unless the defect is
catastrophic. I wonder what exactly the cause is? (I'm sure Tesla is hard at
work determining just that.)

Just speculating: if Tesla has gone ahead and extended the warranty, they
might be doing it because they are certain that the issues are not
catastrophic. Cost/benefit analysis was probably completed to Musk's
satisfaction before this announcement.

------
pkaye
That should be clarified as an 8 year warranty on the battery and drive train.

~~~
wyager
Most car companies advertise something like "3-year, 100,000-mile warranty". I
don't see any issue with Tesla saying "8-year, infinite-mile warranty".
They're making a parallel to the way other auto manufacturers advertise their
warranty, while making it clear that their warranty is different because it's
based only on time, not travel.

------
cpwright
I think it is important to point out that although it is billed as an Infinite
Mile Warranty, that is only for the 85 KWh version of the car, the 60 MWh
version has a limit of 125,000 miles. That is still a lot of miles, and I
think quite reasonable for a drive train warranty; I just wish they would have
come out and said it instead of needing to dig into what the warranty for a
65KWh battery would be.

------
turar
One thing I still don't quite understand. So a battery in a laptop will
significantly deteriorate in the amount of charge it can hold over several
years, to the point of being useless. How does this work for Tesla? Do their
batteries die down gradually, and have to be replaced? What is the cost of
replacement after this 8 year period?

~~~
sfeng
They don't allow the batteries to be fully charged or discharged, to limit the
type of wear you're referring to.

------
vladimirralev
Well, they can afford this, because there are practical limits on the mileage
due to the pauses for charging and cycles of aging batteries. You can't use a
Tesla as a heavy-duty vehicle such as a taxi/delivery/field car, so it's a
smart way to take advantage of this.

~~~
fragmede
Why not? At least one person is: [http://videos.venturebeat.com/turning-the-
tesla-model-s-into...](http://videos.venturebeat.com/turning-the-tesla-model-
s-into-a-taxi-517981501)

------
tbrock
Isn't Elon Musk just the best? It's surprising that he was in charge at PayPal
which has some of the least friendly customer policies. At least it's sale to
eBay has enabled him to do other glorious things.

~~~
leeoniya
i believe he was an early investor in paypal, not a founder or employee. he
most likely was fairly hands-off a lot of the operations.

EDIT: also, most underdog companies are "the best" in terms of customer
service until they get huge. there's no doubt that he's one-of-a-kind, though.

~~~
pbreit
Elon founded X.com which merged with Confinity to form X.com PayPal where he
served as CEO for 8 months or so. X.com had an email payments service but the
PayPal service originated at Confinity.

------
bri3d
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170545)

This is a great idea - just as cars are about to go out of warranty, Tesla are
getting ahead of potential reputation issues by offering it "forever."

Because Tesla offer an aggressive buy-back program on their leases, they're
also incentivized to improve their cars' depreciation curve, so this makes a
lot of sense.

------
dave1619
For those who want some background on this, recently there have been some
minor drivetrain issues that have creeped up (see quote below from last
quarter's TSLA conference call).

As a result, some potential customers were getting concerned about the
reliability of Tesla's drive train especially since it's only covered under
the 4 year (50k) warranty. So, Elon decided to extend the drive train coverage
to 8 years, and this significantly makes the car more appealing to potential
customers since they know Tesla will take care of the biggest problems (ie.,
the most expensive part of the car is the battery and drive train, which are
now both covered for 8 years). This is a great move by Tesla and should show
people how committed they are to product quality and to the ownership
experience.

Below is from TSLA's Q2 quarterly conference call:
[http://seekingalpha.com/article/2368515-tesla-motors-tsla-
ce...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/2368515-tesla-motors-tsla-ceo-elon-
musk-on-q2-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single)

"We definitely had some quality issues in the beginning for the
[indiscernible] number of cars, because we're just basically figuring out how
to make the Model S. And I think we've addressed almost all of those CARB [ph]
production cars, I mean not all, but the vast majority have been addressed in
cars that are being produced today.

And we're also getting better at diagnosing what's wrong, because in some
cases we, particularly with respect to the drive unit, we think that something
is wrong with the drive unit but it's actually something wrong with another
part of the car. And then we'd replace the drive unit and that wouldn't solve
the problem because the drive unit was not the problem.

And we had one particular case where there was vibration, and it was due to --
it was due to the -- a cable detaching itself and touching the drive unit
assembly and causing vibration to be transmitted to the body of the car. And
it was somewhat pernicious because if the cable moved a little bit and so that
it didn't provide a conductive path, then you wouldn't -- the vibration would
go away. If you replace the drive unit, you temporarily tuck the cable back
and think the problem was solved and it was -- but then the cable would
vibrate itself down and transmit the energy. So I mean that, you know, the
cable thing takes us like -- it's nothing to fix it. It's like, virtually,
it's like a $3 cable tied to solve it.

So there's a bunch of things like that which are just [indiscernible]
diagnosis of the problems that we've obviously addressed.

There are a few items that will need a fair number of drive pans [ph] will
need to be serviced. It's actually related -- one particularly is related to
the differential, and we need to assume [ph] the differential. It doesn't
require drive unit replacement, it just requires a technician to insert a Shim
[ph]. We're going to have to do that on a fair number of cars. But that's like
a $0.50 Shim [ph].

So it's really -- I wouldn't assume that there's going to be some vast number
of drive pans [ph] that will need to replaced, but there's several service
buttons [ph] that we'll be instituting, many of which we've already have to
address the issue.

And every week I have a product excellence meeting, which is to -- which is a
cross-functional group, so we've got engineering, service and production, and
we go about all the issues that the customer is reporting with the car, and,
you know, the action items that we addressed to get car ultimately to --
photonic ideal of a perfect car, that's what we're aiming for. Because
although we -- I think we've got great service, but that service is no
service. That's really what we want, is a car that never needs to be serviced.
And I think we're getting there quite rapidly."

~~~
canistr
I was listening to the conference call and Musk also mentioned a goal of Tesla
is also to service your vehicle _before_ you even realized it needed service.
Here's an excerpt:

" _And another key metric we measure is the average time to service something.
So our average is less than a day. So the car is -- so, in most cases we can
actually pick up your car, fix anything that 's wrong with it, and give it
back to you, without you even knowing it was gone. So you just tell us like my
car is at my office and this is where it is, and we'll pick up the car, fix
it, and get it back to you before you finish work.

Our goal with service is sort of invisible up, which is, is there even -- it's
like elves [ph] service delivery [ph]. Like you don't even see it. It's like
-- it happens so fast. And once done, you'll love it.

And so I think there's like -- there's an interesting opportunity to
revolutionize service as well. It's not just like, oh, let's do the same thing
as before. I think it was a lot of lessons learned from a Formula One car
approach. So, because we're not trying to serve customers for the most amount
of money possible in a service, which is typical of the conventional auto
industry, we want to get the job done super-fast, and then also make sure that
you don't -- like we want to anticipate issues so you don't have to come back
again.

And so we actually bring the car and we kind of hit with a pit crew, like a
Formula One pit crew. So instead of having one person per bay, the car gets
slowly worked on over several days, it actually comes in and a team attacks
it, and we're constantly improving the tools and the metrics to say, how can
we get the car perfect as fast as possible. We actually bring in people from
Formula One to help with the training on this. And I think there's a real
opportunity to revolutionize the way service works._"

------
jobu
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. A family member of mine is a
regional sales manager and usually puts more than 100k miles on his car each
year. A million miles in 8 years wouldn't be impossible for him, but so far no
car has lasted that long.

~~~
JonoBB
That's about ~273 miles per day on average. If we take out weekends, then we
get an average of ~383 miles.

For someone to do that _every_ day for 8 years and still do sales work would
be some kind of endurance feat.

~~~
vikramhaer
Even more, I think!

Days in a year: ~365 x 8 = 2,920; 1,000,000 / 2,920 = 342.5 miles per day

W/o weekends: ~260 x 8 = 2,080; 1,000,000 / 2,080 = 480.8 miles per day

That's more than 5 hours of driving, every. single. day. Unlikely.

~~~
willthames
So 2080 is number of hours per working year (assuming zero annual leave and
public holidays)

I think you should have just calculated 100000/260 to get miles per day, not
10^6/2080.

Your 480.8 miles per day should be 48.1 miles per hour.

Still doesn't change the huge amount of driving needed to do 100k miles in a
year!

------
logicalmind
I'm not familiar with the details of the tesla driveline but is the definition
of "drive unit" well-defined? Is this the equivalent of the engine? Or the
drivetrain (including transmission-equivalent and axles)?

~~~
autocorrector
The drive unit of a Tesla Model S is the motor, gearbox and rear wheel
assembly. It can be quickly changed out to facilitate repair.

------
denzil_correa
Elon Musk : “If we truly believe that electric motors are fundamentally more
reliable than gasoline engines… then our warranty policy should reflect that.”

This is putting money where your mouth is.

~~~
dm2
Same with the half-inch titanium plate upgrade given to Tesla owners.

It probably wasn't necessary (and might have been largely a marketing stunt)
but going above and beyond at such a critical stage in the companies history
will undoubtedly pay off in the future.

Their actions of doing everything possible to ensure they have the best and
safest car possible is refreshing in the business world that has typically had
the motto of "buyer beware" and "maximize profit".

------
tdicola
What's really covered by the warranty, for example if the stitching or leather
on the driver's seat starts to wear out (very common for any car after 5+
years) is that covered? I can understand the drivetrain and critical systems
being covered for 8 years but wonder if they're going to get nickeled and
dimed by customers expecting a perfect car after 8 years of hard use.

~~~
jaredmcateer
It says right in the article. 8 year infinite mile warranty on the battery
pack and drive train.

~~~
tdicola
Ah right, duh it was right there. :)

