A Tesla owner in Australia is going public with her experiences with the pioneering electric car, and her opinions are not altogether positive. While she insists that the technology behind the car still inspires excitement and devotion, owning the vehicle has proved so onerous that she has no adjective for the car other than “lemon.”
Anne Bishop originally paid $93,000 (AUD) for her 2015 Tesla Model S when she bought it as a used vehicle from the Tesla corporation in 2018. She was initially excited to own the car, but as the months and years passed, Ms. Bishop found herself towing the vehicle repeatedly—on at least one occasion, it had to be towed a distance of five hundred kilometers.
One of the car malfunctions happened while she was seven months pregnant. In that incident, the vehicle’s door handles stopped working, forcing her to exit by squeezing out of the car’s window.
Other malfunctions have involved the media control unit and the rear motor. The persistent problems eventually prompted Ms. Bishop to file a claim with the Civil and Administrative Tribunal for New South Wales, requesting that they compel Tesla to grant her a partial refund.
The basic issue, she said in a statement to News.com, is that they sold her a lemon.
Her tribunal claim alleges that Tesla kept inadequate fault logs, refused to put their promises in writing, and failed to provide proper documentation of the vehicle’s maintenance history, all of which are violations of Australian Consumer Law.
Before owning the Tesla, Bishop said, she drove a Toyota Echo, which cost her $13,800. It had a flawless performance record for thirteen years without a single surprise repair bill. She had expected her Tesla, being a premium car with an excellent reputation for high-touch customer service, to be even better – but she, like many others, learned that simply isn’t the case.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has made repeated public boasts about the durability, manufacturing and engineering quality, and longevity of Tesla vehicles, which Ms. Bishop detailed in her complaint.
