All vehicle manufacturers are having quality control problems, but Tesla is very nearly the worst.

All vehicle manufacturers are having quality control problems, but Tesla is very nearly the worst.

This is according to J.D. Power and Associates and their survey of new vehicle owners for the 2022 model year.

Buick was at the top of the list for quality control, and Tesla was near the bottom, which is also a problem because it costs too much to repair them after the warranty ends and you may not see your car for days or weeks.

Tesla is also having huge financial problems and Elon Musk is busy firing thousands of people, many over a video call that’s arranged with no notice.

Most recently, he fired the entire office in San Mateo, California which was working on “autopilot”, which crashes into things and leaves the owner liable. The “job creator” destroyed 200 jobs before breakfast that day.

Most of the complaints people have are with their Apple Carplay or Android Auto not working properly, on vendors that support it, but Tesla owners are basically stuck with some custom thing that hasn’t improved much at all since 2014, which also malfunctions.

Aside from the infotainment problems, the common complaints with Tesla were body panel alignment issues, paint peeling (on a new car), etc.

People who have owned a Tesla for a few years generally find out that the bottom of the car rusts as much in 3 years as the underside of a normal car over the course of more than 10 years. In fact, numerous complaints involve bolts rusting off of a 3 year old Tesla and causing something to fall off the underside of the car.

According to J.D. Power, the 90 day QA problems with Teslas are comparable to a Volkswagen, and nobody I know who has had a VW will ever own one again. They all start doing crazy stuff and run the owner into the poorhouse with repairs while they’re still making the payments.

In particular, an ex of mine bought a brand new 2009 Jetta, which was junk from the start, and he eventually had it repossessed when the warranty ended and he couldn’t afford the car payments and the repairs, and he ended up driving his grandfather’s 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis. (Parked it next to the 1996 Ford Crown Victoria I was driving back then.)

Mom had a VW Rabbit in the 80s and the stupid thing had the engine blow up and strand her in Illinois with 60,000 miles on it.

It’s a wonder VW hasn’t gone out of business. There truly is a sucker born a minute in this country.

The fact that Tesla won’t be around soon should really say something, I guess. Almost anyone can make a car that *runs* for 90 days, so the J.D. Power survey doesn’t tell you the full story.

My 2008 Buick LaCrosse has a CD player finally after I had a tape deck up until this year (except briefly with a Kia my ex got after a year).

CDs were on the market in the US in the early 1980s. Every single one of them will play today unless the disc is damaged.

How long do you figure your Android Auto or Apple CarPlay will work? Even if the hardware doesn’t break, Apple and Google like burning things down and walking away and leaving people who used them holding the bag.

I’ll be seeing you at the meeting of “car owners with a cell phone holder on the windshield” in 5 years or so.

The problems with modern cars are that they cheap out on _everything_.

A while back, something happened and all of the manufacturers started switching away from two coat oil-based paints to this single-coat stuff, and it’s awful. Just terrible. Anything happens, you have a stone chip that goes right down to the metal, or a major scratch just from going to the car wash.

It looks fine long enough for the ink to dry on the loan paperwork, and that’s all they need.

There’s sensors and computers and software, and a big tablet, and cameras. The J.D. Power survey only asks people how well their car held up in the first three months of ownership.

When I had the Kia, I lost it in bankruptcy and then my ex redeemed the car loan so they wouldn’t sue him. It already looked like I drove it to Hell. It had scratches worse than the 2008 Buick I now drive.

The Kia had the air conditioner fail in the first 90 days I owned it. The Buick was blowing air so cold yesterday I could see my breath and was getting goosebumps and it was 100 degrees F outside.

When I had the 2003 Impala, I had to recharge the air conditioner, but it was a 20 year old car with 300,000 miles on it and it still runs fine. I just handed the title back over to mom after recharging the air conditioner unit.

Having an air conditioner got out is bad enough, but Grossinger KIA in Lincolnwood, IL, which is now dba KIA of Lincolnwood, couldn’t fix the problem on the first attempt.

I brought it in. They said the factory overfilled the refrigerant in the air conditioner compressor and they evacuated it and refilled it to specification and billed KIA’s warranty department and my air conditioner worked again. I get in…..air conditioner blows hot hair all over me. So I pulled the car back around and got out and they came up to me….I said, “I was told they repaired my air conditioner. It still doesn’t work. I popped the hood, and immediately spotted the problem. The air conditioner has a fuse wire that is secured and runs over the strut housing, and for some reason the wire burned up and snapped in two, and they had to take it back and replace the fuse wire.

I also got “free oil changes” when I bought the KIA, so I went there and noticed they were using Valvoline MaxLife, which is a high mileage motor oil for an old clunker that’s developed some leaks, burning, or blowby that you don’t want to fix properly. I’ve used it in clunkers before and it normally solves some small problems related to oil consumption.

One complaint about KIAs is they start to go through oil like crazy. I’m figuring the dealers made Valvoline MaxLife their bulk oil to cover up oil consumption problems so customers don’t realize they built the car wrong and complain about it.

I keep getting recall letters from KIA. My ex isn’t fixing them. So far the engine might blow up due to metal shavings. I’ve seen it happen here in town twice in two weeks. Once at a motel and the next week at the Walmart. The other recall is airbags might not go off. It’s hardware defects in both cases, but KIA is too cheap to fix things that have killed people, so their recall is just a software update that doesn’t fix anything.

So part of the problem with newer cars is they don’t build them very well and they can’t get the chips they need for things like a fuel saving module or heated seats, so they say you get a $50 rebate on a $68,000 Chevy Truck for that, and then you have buttons that don’t do anything, and the truck costs you another $5,000 in gasoline.

Then the other problem is there’s too many questionable features, including annoying safety features that only exist because people are f****ing stupid, and that costs everyone money and malfunctions, and it’s not just a bad idea, it’s the law. And then there’s tablets that will konk out or stop working, and you need those to control things like the climate system or the Android and Apple stuff that won’t work eventually, while you still make payments.

The only way to get away from some of this stuff now is to buy the absolute cheapest car they make, which they don’t even want to sell you but they make it so they can tell the government their “fleet” gets good gas mileage, but they don’t even want to put in power windows because everything they do to it makes it a bigger loss when they sell it.

So for now, you can get a compliance car that doesn’t fight you for the steering wheel when you go to change lanes, but it’s coming, folks.

Thankfully, I’ll probably get to buy one more car without some of these scams in my lifetime since I tend to get them very used.

Overall, I’m happier with the 2008 Buick even though it has some blemishes, very minor issues, and old car personality here and there, because the GM engineers who designed it were very conservative and the components were a known factor. These days, everything changes so fast that by the time they know what the problems were, they’re already off to another beta-quality car full of entirely new problems.

The method of development at Old GM used to be a new design came out, it had problems, they recalled the units and fixed the problems, the newer cars had improved versions of those components with the bugs worked out, and it would be 10, 20, 40 years before a major new thing came along. If you were conservative, and gave a new design 5 years, you could get a reliable car.

Those days are gone. Everyone wants new tech that hasn’t been shown to work, and then they complain that their new car, their brand new car, is in the dealership all the time with Idiocracy happening back there in the Service department.

With the Buick, I have been mostly going to City Chevrolet’s service in Grayslake, IL, and Car-X in Waukegan for some things where the dealer is just going to be like WHOA without a huge improvement in the quality of repair, but in both cases I think they generally know what they’re doing back there with my car.

The Chevy Dealer seems to know how to work on the old ones and get the repair to stick better than they know how to work on the new ones, which are very complicated and overdesigned (usually to eek out some gas mileage at the expense of a lot of longevity).

Almost everyone with a new Chevy that goes to any dealer seems to complain that they either don’t know how to repair it or the part they replace keeps having the same problem it did last time.

One satisfied customer said she bought a 2020 Chevy Malibu with 18 miles on the odometer. It was in the shop 16 times over the next two years, and she eventually turned it in as a voluntary repo and got sued because it wasn’t getting her to work and almost caused her to lose her job.

Not even the 2003 Impala with 300,000 miles on it did that to us!

The engine was the best thing about that car. The 2008 Buick has a massively improved version of the same engine. It’s got plenty of power and with simple upkeep these engines almost never develop a serious problem. Which is why I wanted another one.

The Buick division seems to use better parts though. Pieces of the 2003’s engine that I had problems with were plastic intakes and stuff. Not only are the intakes on my Buick metal, but the gaskets are obviously reinforced. I’ve been keeping an eye out for any fluid leaks, and there aren’t any, and it all looks original.