This week, Tesla finally gave in to the request of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to revoke its Model S sedans and Model X SUVs because of flash memory flaws that will make 17-inch touch-sensitive center screens facing cars portrait fail after a certain length of time – but not without resistance in the very definition of the word “defect”, according to a letter from Tesla’s legal department made public today.
Addressing federal regulators, Tesla’s legal vice president, Al Prescott, argued that touch screen failures were not a defect worth recalling because the parts were supposed to last only five to six years initially, which it is certainly a new strategy.
Prescott explained that the eMMC flash memory device behind the problems has only been rated for so many cycles that they believe they would last the entire life of the component:
“[The eMMC flash memory] it is inherently subject to wear, has a finite life (as NHTSA itself recognizes) and may need replacement during the life of the vehicle … Although the wear rate is strongly influenced by the active use of the central display system, even more therefore, when the vehicle is in motion or charging, with a reasonable average daily use of 1.4 cycles, the expected service life would be 5 to 6 years. NHTSA has provided no evidence to suggest that this expected life is outside industry standards. “
In addition, Prescott argued that it was wrong for the NHTSA to say that the touchscreen “should last at least the vehicle’s life, essentially twice its expected life.” The fact that the average age of vehicles on US roads reached an historical record of 11.6 years in 2020, for CNBC.
He went on to call the eMMC “state of the art” for the time it was designed and stated that NHTSA regulations on defective parts were “anachronistic”, further pushing NHTSA’s life expectancy:
“[E]Electronic components are becoming increasingly complex and, at the same time, the expected life of vehicles has grown substantially. It is economically, if not technologically, impracticable to expect that such components can or should be designed to last the entire life of the vehicle. ”
Although Prescott’s letter informed NHTSA that Tesla would carry out a voluntary recall, it also made it clear that the automaker was not happy about it.
The fact that the flash memory device has only been evaluated to handle half the life of an average vehicle on the road raises a number of questions surrounding new vehicle technology and planned obsolescence. If this was only expected to last five or six years, what else could fail earlier than consumers expect?
While the Washington Post notes, the way Teslas’ high-tech components wear out can have dire consequences on the resale value of vehicles. Unless there is a way to recycle and reuse these disposable components, their disposable nature can also leave a bad taste in the mouth of environmentally friendly consumers.
In addition, why should consumers think that an internal component needed to access key car safety features should be a wear and tear item? Although Tesla has added alerts that warn owners of an eMMC pending failure, a processor built into a car’s internal components is not something you can easily verify as a set of brake pads or tires, nor is it something that most of consumers know to be careful after so many kilometers of use
The recall includes 134,951 Model S and Model X cars, making it Tesla’s biggest recall to date. It covers Model S sedans from 2012 to 2018, as well as Model X crossovers from 2016 to 2018. That’s less than 158,000 cars requested by NHTSA for recall, as Tesla excluded vehicles that already had memory upgrades or replacements touch screen, reports the Washington Post.
The failures of the recovered memory chips are not the only problems that affected the Model S and Model X touch screens. Tesla CEO Elon Musk once boasted that he had outsourced the then innovative 17-inch screens outside the usual automotive supply chain to save costs. Unfortunately, the screens were not made to handle the vibration loads and temperature fluctuations found inside a car, causing them to yellow prematurely, bubble and even leak.
You can read Prescott’s full letter to NHTSA here.
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