Bad news for Tesla: ANOTHER rental company dumping its Tesla fleet!

[thewayne]

A European car rental company known as Sixt is dumping all of its Teslas due to costly repairs for the cars, particularly collision damage. In their place: 100,000 electric cars from BYD of China.

This is a general problem with Tesla, which is only going to be exacerbated with the Cyberstuck, err, Cybertruck. Body parts are hard to get replacements for when they're damaged, and a rental car that's down waiting for parts is not something that fleets can afford. Hertz was a big news story when they bought a ton of Teslas for its fleet, not so much of a news story when they got rid of them because of the costs when they got bent out of shape.

The Cybertruck is going to be even worse as the body panels are steel, it will be another factory part and they'll be devoting as much production as possible to getting completed units off the line for sale, not for collision damage repair.

Interesting story about the Cyberstuck moniker. A Tesla employee took a pre-production Cybertruck up a mountain in California to fetch a Christmas tree and got stuck. Didn't have the proper tires for off-road, much less snow and mud, and a software bug had disabled the locking hubs. It took a Ford F-150 to pull him free. But the worse part? The Tesla had NO TOW POINTS. Hopefully that's been rectified in the production truck, otherwise how is it legal? If it doesn't have tow points, I don't see how any right-thinking tow truck operator would pick one up as it would be hard to tow one without additional damage to it!

Interesting times.

https://jalopnik.com/rental-company-sixt-will-begin-dumping-tesla-fleet-due-1851081220

Comments

Re: Well ...

[thewayne]

I always use a flat bed because our Subarus are all-wheel drive, it's the only safe way to tow them.  But you still use the tow points to pull it up onto the truck.  Without the tow points, you're going to have to attach to suspension points, which risks bending them or damaging frame/body parts if the tow hooks should pop off since they're being used improperly.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

You use the tow points if they're intact. With a wrecked car, you often have to use a strap that sort of scoops the whole mess onto the bed. So that approach would work with anything that does not have a usable toy point. I don't think cars should be built without good tow points, but there are workarounds to compensate for stupid engineering.

Re: Well ...

[thewayne]

True.  The last time I had collision damage on my Subaru, I asked my body shop guy about this little square knock-out plug on my front bumper.  He said that I should have a bolt, perhaps in my wheel well, that can be screwed in there for a tow operator, in case I get stuck in a ditch and they can't access any of the tow lugs.  While I can see a pre-production truck not having tow lugs, I can't imagine the NHTSA issuing VINs for production models not having them, but I don't know the details of such.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I would certainly want all street-legal vehicles to have tow points, and preferably, everything else that might need towing (like tractors). But my standards are very different from the mainstream.

Certainly people are at liberty to avoid purchasing vehicles that don't have tow points, provided that feature is available on other models.