Things aren’t going well at Tesla. The stock is currently down more than 40 percent year-to-date, analysts expect the Texas-based automaker to announce a 40 percent drop in profits, more than 20,000 people are expected to lose their jobs, and Tesla’s flagship product, the Cybertruck, is already on its second recall, this time for an accelerator pedal cover that comes off and could cause unintended acceleration. Now, it appears that one owner’s windshield-mounted gear selector panel has fallen off.
If you’re not familiar, Tesla really wants you to put your car in Drive or Park using the touchscreen. Since touchscreens can crash, though, you need a second way to get your car into gear. So Tesla put a panel in the middle of the windshield that allows you to put it in Drive yourself. The sun visors also attach to the same panel when in use.
Since sun visors get so much use, and moving them puts strain on whatever they’re mounted to, you’d assume Tesla would have done enough durability testing to make sure the plastic could stand up to repeated use. Apparently, you’d also be wrong.
Christina Balan, a former Tesla engineer who worked on both the battery team and with interior systems, shared photos that she claims are from a Tesla Cybertruck owner who took his incEl Camino in for a windshield replacement and the accelerator pedal cover rivet. After the repairs were completed, he reportedly had the windshield panel fall off and refuse to clip back in.
Now, it’s entirely possible that the Tesla techs who replaced the windshield broke a clip or two when they were reattaching everything, but as Balan later pointed out, it’s still a design flaw. In her words, “This whole center console need to be redesign[ed] completely and especially the attachment point.”
It remains to be seen if this issue will become more frequent, or if it ends up being a one-off. In the middle of everything else going wrong for the company, it also remains to be seen whether or not the Tesla board will reinstate Elon’s $56 billion bonus package.