After 4 Cybertruck recalls in 5 months, Elon Musk’s Tesla may soon lose more of its luster – Fortune

Tesla just cant shake those quality problems with its Cybertruck.

The first recall came at the end of January, thanks to a warning-light font size that was too small, which could have caused crashes, though Tesla said there was no record of any happening. This was easily fixed with an over-the-air software update, unlike the next recall in April, when Tesla had to physically fix the vehicle because its accelerator pedal couldand didget stuck, causing surprise acceleration.

But yesterday, Elon Musk truly spoiled his critics with not one but two Cybertruck recalls, both of the this-needs-to-come-in variety.

Tesla paused Cybertruck shipments a couple weeks back, with some reports saying there was a windshield wiper issue. Accordingly, one of the recalls is because excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to failincreasing the risk of a crash. The wiper motor needs to be replaced. Its not clear if there were any crashes because of this, but there were multiple reports of the wipers failing.

The other recall is because the Cybertrucks sail appliquethe long strip of plastic lining on top of the sides of the truck bedwas badly installed in some vehicles. The cosmetic piece fell off in at least two instances and had the potential to create a road hazard for people driving behind the truck.

Thats four recallsthree physicalin just five months. Its only been seven months since people first took delivery of the thing. Like the Cybertruck itself, its not a good look. (Your mileage may vary; nearly 12,000 Cybertrucks have been delivered, suggesting plenty of people do like its early-PlayStation-graphics design.)

Teslas investors, who recently decided that Musk deserves a $50-something-billion pay package, remain very patient people. There was barely a blip in the rise of the companys share price, which ended Tuesday up 2.6% and continued its ascent this morning (the stock is down over 30% this year.)

Whats likely to be of more interest to them is Teslas next overall shipment figures, which are expected to arrive early next week. Wall Street consensus has deliveries down to 440,000 from 466,000 last year, though some analysts say you could lop off another 20,000 or so.

On top of that, other carmakers will also soon report their Q2 shipments and, as Bloomberg reports, it is quite possible that Tesla will no longer be the electric car company that sells more in the U.S. than all its rivals combined. Its Q1 sales were already down 13%, while the likes of Ford and Hyundai soared.

That is not a favorable trajectory, but perhaps it is naturalin an expanding market, an early lead may not last forever.

More news below.

David Meyer

Want to send thoughts or suggestions toData Sheet?Drop a linehere.

Waymo accelerates. Waymo, Alphabets robotaxi outfit, has begun offering its services in San Francisco without a waiting list. As TechCrunch reports, this comes shortly after two Waymo software recalls. Meanwhile, GMs Cruise robotaxi unit has a CEO again, after predecessor Kyle Vogt was felled in a serious safety scandal. The new CEO is Marc Whitten, who was a founding engineer in the Xbox team, and also an Amazon executive.

OpenAI delays voice assistant. ChatGPTs voice assistant feature was supposed to be released about now, but OpenAI is delaying the launch while it improves the models ability to detect and refuse certain content, it said. Bloomberg reports that OpenAI also wants to get its infrastructure ready to handle what it expects to be heavy demand. Meanwhile, OpenAI suddenly cut off access to its services in China this week, and Bloomberg also reports that local rivals like Baidu and Alibaba are racing to scoop up OpenAIs customers there.

Reddit vs. AI bots. Reddit, which last month announced a partnership with OpenAI, doesnt want other AI companies feeding off its users data. As The Verge reports, Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to tell most automated bots not to scrape data from its website. However, recent reports have suggested that several AI companies (Perplexity is a notable example) have been ignoring the anti-scraping requests in websites robots.txt files and siphoning off their data anyway.

It is true that we have ferocious competition with [OpenAI]. They are an independent company. We dont own or control them. We dont even have any board members. So they do entirely their own thing. But we have a deep partnership.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells delegates at the Aspen Ideas Festival that the two companies will partners for many, many years to come.

Rivian founder tells investors why incoming shareholder Volkswagen needs his help to take on Tesla just as much as he needs the cash injection, by Christiaan Hetzner

Ethereum ETF process going smoothly a testy SEC Chair declares, by Michael Del Castillo

LinkedIns cofounder slams Trump social network Truth Socials absurd $6 billion valuation, by Seamus Webster

The move fast, break sh*t ethos of todays AI startups is already coming back to haunt themand us, by Jeremy Kahn

For U.S. VCs, average fund size this year hit $153.5 million. But fundraising is only going well for a select few, PitchBook data shows, by Allie Garfinkle

Why the Pentagons overtures to the private space industry are good news for Europe, by Jeff Huggins (Commentary)

Apples RCS push. One of the bonuses inside the upcoming iOS 18 is newfound support for the Rich Communication Services standard, which will let iPhone users send media-laden messages, with read receipts, to Android users (and vice versa, obviously). 9to5Mac reports that some U.S. carriers have now enabled this in their infrastructure, so if youre running iOS 18 beta 2 and youre with AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon in the U.S., you should be able to turn on the functionality now.

More:

After 4 Cybertruck recalls in 5 months, Elon Musk's Tesla may soon lose more of its luster - Fortune

Related Posts

Comments are closed.