My Tesla Suddenly Lost Power While Driving

Some Thoughts

After this incident—the car suddenly losing power while I was driving—I’ll be honest: I went from being a Tesla fan to a hater. For the past four years I’d been recommending Tesla to friends. Now I only advise people to stick with established gasoline-car brands, and not to choose a carmaker that runs its business like an internet company.

Tesla is far too aggressive. It constantly treats its users as lab rats. Just look at Tesla’s update strategy: it pushes a system update roughly once a month. At that frequency, how could they possibly do enough thorough testing? On top of that, plenty of past facts (1. cutting corners in China; 2. secretly transmitting data; 3. the brake-failure scandal) have already shown that Tesla is only interested in how to extract profit from Chinese consumers, not in how to serve them better.

What Happened

Even if Tesla offered me compensation, I honestly wouldn’t care. It’s just that there are too many Tesla fans in China who think this whole thing is foolish. So let me lay out the facts. Here’s how it went:

1. On the morning of February 26, 2022, at around 9:30, I was driving normally on the road. While picking up my phone, I may have brushed against a gear paddle and somehow shifted into who-knows-what gear. Suddenly the screen flashed a warning: the gear indicator, normally shown in white text, turned entirely red. After a moment it displayed “Front motor disabled,” and then “Pull over safely.” At that point the car completely lost power. (This had happened before—accidentally touching the gear paddle while driving—but each time it was just a single warning that cleared up after I dealt with it.)
2. At that moment, no matter how I shifted gears or pressed the accelerator or brake, nothing worked. I had to rely on the car’s momentum to coast to the side of the road. Thankfully I wasn’t on a highway at the time but on a low-traffic lane—otherwise it would have been unthinkable.
3. After pulling over, none of my actions—starting, shifting, accelerating, opening or closing doors—could get the car running again. It kept showing “Front motor disabled,” with the gear indicator, normally white, all displayed in bold red.
4. I force-restarted the Tesla. Shutting it down took a very long time (longer than a normal shutdown), and restarting took a long time too (also longer than usual; the screen stayed black throughout, probably because the background self-check couldn’t pass). After the screen came back on, it was just like before the restart: “Front motor disabled,” the gear indicator all in bold red, and none of my actions—starting, shifting, accelerating, braking, opening and closing doors—could get the car going.
5. Then came the most bizarre part. I called Tesla’s 400 customer-service line and was told a tow truck would be arranged, and to be careful getting out of the car. After getting out, about 15 minutes later, I got back in and found everything had returned to normal—it could start and operate just fine. At that point the towing company called, so I canceled the tow. Afterward, talking with the Tesla repair staff, I learned that Tesla comes with its own SIM card—not one registered under the user’s name—that can transmit data directly to Tesla’s service center.
6. Tesla’s 400 customer-service line called me, and I demanded an explanation for why the car had suddenly lost power while driving. The rep gave a bunch of official runaround. Eventually, when she couldn’t keep deflecting, she promised to get back to me within half an hour.
7. Three hours passed and I still hadn’t received any reply from Tesla. Only after I called the 400 line again did the rep arrange to bring the car to a service center the next day to inspect the motor.
8. Then another bizarre thing happened. After Tesla finished the inspection, the official answer they gave was: “The data volume was too large, the data gateway couldn’t keep up, and a fault occurred.” It was at this point that a Tesla staff member explained the whole thing: Tesla collects data in the background and then uploads it to Tesla’s data center; the data volume was too large, and the program couldn’t respond in time. They had now reformatted the firmware and reinstalled the latest version.

Reflection

I used to think Tesla had been running on the roads in the US for years and should have very mature technology, plus a huge user base. Now I think Tesla is still far too aggressive. Just search “tesla power loss” online and you’ll turn up a whole pile of problems. My personal guess is that, for the sake of faster iteration, Tesla simply doesn’t do enough testing before putting its products in front of users to test.

There’s another thing I can never understand: Tesla’s self-driving actually has to be purchased separately. This is a product that completely treats users as lab rats, yet it still asks users to pay 20,000 to 80,000 yuan to hand their lives over to a system that’s only Level 2 autonomous. Even if it were free, I wouldn’t use it. And then there’s all the marketing, including videos of people sleeping while the car drives—this kind of reckless, life-endangering marketing is nothing but consumer deception, and I hope the state or relevant authorities will order it banned.