Fast Company headline: Tesla’s shoddy wheel symbolizes everything that’s wrong with the company
Using seemingly poor materials in the Tesla Model S yoke is just the latest in an endless list of quality assurance roadkill by the Texas car manufacturer.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90782332/teslas-shoddy-wheel-sym…
“In the end, it feels to me like we have the perfect metaphor for both Tesla’s quality problems and its founder’s erratic vision, poor direction, and broken promises. Elon Musk is vowing to deliver the world’s first completely autonomous car, all while he’s still figuring out how to build the steering wheel.”
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More photos showing yoke degradation, and this from a different source:
AutoBlog/MSN headline: Here’s what a rental Tesla Model S interior looks like after 19,000 miles
Zac Palmer - Thursday
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/heres-what-a-rental-tes…
The most obvious problem was staring us in the face right after opening the door. Tesla’s yoke steering device looked like it had been attacked by a wild animal. Its covering was worn and stripped away on both sides of the yoke’s vertical bars, leaving the somewhat uncomfortable bare yoke below it. Yeah, this looks bad, bad.
Now, some caveats. This Model S Plaid is a rental that’s been on Turo for an undetermined amount of time. According to the listing, it’s only been out on 7 total trips, including ours. The rental life is hard on any car. Even so, being used and likely abused as a rental, this kind of wear and tear is something we’ve never seen before on rentals with a similar number of miles. Maybe one with 100,000, but less than 20,000? Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer is going to be rough on any car interior, but still, this kind of damage is egregious.
For a moment, too, we thought there was a chance this yoke was an outlier. Or maybe somebody defaced it on purpose in a previous rental trip? But recent online revelations by other Plaid owners defeat this theory. In tweets, Model S owners detailed the degradation of their own yokes, showing that our experience is not abnormal.