… that his one week old Tesla has “full self driving” technology. 
I know that this marque has problems with “fit and finish”, but this is a bit extreme.
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I’m not sure if it was mentioned in this article, or in another article on the same topic, but after it was towed to Princeton Tesla, they attempted to charge the owner more than $100 to reattach the steering wheel on his one week old vehicle. I guess that this was a good “fake” on their part, but they finally agreed that this was a warranty item.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve never before heard of any vehicle manufacturer trying to evade responsibility for an assembly defect as severe/extreme as this one–on a brand-new car.
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Have to wonder what that Tesla staff person was thinking? Maybe they were just having a frustrating day and lost perspective. Doesn’t seem fair to blame the entire corporation for one cranky employee’s bad decision.
Speaking of warranty disputes, wondering if @thegreendrag0n 's issue has been resolved?
Not resolved yet.
Honda offered one third of what reasonabke settlement would be, so we rejected and asked for a day in court.
From what I understand - it will not be any time soon.
Car drives, so I don’t care.
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thanks for the update. Crossing fingers you’ll eventually come up with a good compromise. Covid-worries are probably delaying court proceedings.
For the life of me I don’t understand why the manufacturer didn’t just truck the car back to the place the design engineers are located, meanwhile give you a loaner. A corporate engineer or scientist should have the necessary knowledge and tools to solve a problem like this in their sleep. C’est la vie I guess.
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What holds wheel on column? A big nut? And shaft is splined. So, where did nut go?
They don’t have room for truckloads of cars at the engineering headquarters and transporting all those cars would be impractical. They send field technicians to the dealers.
Yes, that’s the common sense first step. Only if the field tech couldn’t solve it would you ship the car back to the manufacturer. In my high tech experience still once in a while the field tech would give up and ship the product back, end up in our lab with a bunch of engineers poking and prodding at it. Worse case of difficult to solve technical problem like this, we had to send 3 design engineers from home office to customer location. They worked for 3 days until they finally found a tiny bit of wire had got wedged underneath a connector and shorting out two pins, intermittently. Couldn’t be seen without de-soldering connector.
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Presumably they’ve already sent field techs, who were not able to resolve @thegreendrag0n 's problem. I realize there are two sides and we are only hearing one, but just curious, since you seem to handle dealership warranty issues from time to time, what would you do if you were the customer & you had that problem yourself?
Here is an update on that Tesla owner’s tale of woe:
has “determined that the vehicle contains no defect, non-conformity or other warrantable condition, or any other basis for Tesla’s liability
“ wink, wink, nudge, nudge”
Maybe someone has a diagram of the steering column just for fun. It looked like a couple dabs of liquid nails holding the wheel on. Any I’ve had has a splined shaft, a nut, and a retainer so there is no way it can come off without trying. New kids, new designs, but sometimes miss some of the tried and true. Still question how he got it to the side of the road.
Yes, that is supposed to be the way that they are attached, but in both of the cases that NHTSA is currently investigating, the bolt was missing, so now there is a question of how many other '23 Teslas might be lacking that bolt.
If there was a nut or bolt holding the steering wheel on and it fell off then it would either fall on the floor or is rolling around inside the steering wheel or column one (and that could cause other issues)… So either it didn’t have one (the robot didn’t install it) or it’s still there rolling around in the vehicle somewhere or the laptop car driver didn’t know what a bolt or nut was and threw it out…
Yeah I think I would be driving mine straight to the dealer and make them check it while I waited or put me a loaner that doesn’t have an easily removeable steering wheel…
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Radio news report today said they believe the bolt was never installed in some of the cars, presumably some sort of manufacturing problem. This is a downside to the friction fit method I guess, b/c otherwise a loose steering wheel would be obvious to the first person who drives it off the assembly line.
Tesla was in another radio news report today, alleged self-driving mode accident.
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My wife would call a bolt a nut and visa versa with no understanding. Every steering wheel I have had off uses a nut. I suppose they could slip rhe wheel on a shaft and use a bolt, but then no redundant snap ring? If they did this, seems like re-engineering a wheel just to be different. Some designs are so straight forward it’s had to improve on them. Just my two cents.
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This is an example from 15 years ago, item # 1; steering wheel bolt.
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So Chrysler did it and maybe others? So guess it was a missing bolt. I haven’t owned a Chrysler product since 1974 though. Interesting.