Featured Image Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images / Win McNamee/Getty Images
Topics: Cars, Tesla, Technology, US News
Gerrard Kaonga
Topics: Cars, Tesla, Technology, US News
A Tesla owner was hit with a pretty hefty bill after he was forced to take his brand-new car in for repairs less than 2 days after purchasing it.
Buying a new car is always a fun and exciting time - you get to say goodbye to your old banger and welcome that new dreamy car smell.
Then there's the satisfaction of driving it for the first time, seemingly making old tired trips feel fun again.
But what if something goes wrong and it needs extensive repairs?
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Scratch that, what if something goes wrong less than 2 days after you bought it, it needs extensive repairs AND it the repairs are expensive?
Well, Tesla owner Shreyansh Jain seemed to have all the bad luck in the world as he had to deal with just that.
The electronics engineer, from Cambridge, England, told Reuters that he was initially ecstatic to be picking up his brand new 2023 Tesla Model Y.
He explained that he'd used a sizeable chunk of his family’s savings just to be able to buy the car in cash.
However, his joy was short lived - after 115 miles, to be exact.
Jain said that he was driving with his wife and 3-year-old daughter when he suddenly lost steering control as he made a slow turn into a neighborhood.
The vehicle’s front-right suspension had collapsed and parts of the car loudly scraped the road as it came to a stop.
“They were absolutely petrified,” Jain said of his family. “If we were on a 70-mile-per-hour highway, and this would have happened, that would have been catastrophic.”
The repairs weren't short and sweet either, as it reportedly took almost 40 hours to complete as the suspension had to be rebuilt, with the steering column needing to be replaced as well as other fixes.
In total, it cost Jain more than $14,000 and, according to the repair estimate, Tesla refused to cover the repairs and blamed the incident on ‘prior’ suspension damage.
UNILAD has contacted Tesla for comment.
Elon Musk’s car company has faced considerable flack in recent weeks - which was centered around their decision to recall more than two million cars to fix a major safety flaw.
A US auto-safety regulator has said some of the cars' Autopilot system does not do enough to prevent misuse and needs to be fixed immediately.
An investigation has found the driver assistance function is not suitable in keeping drivers engaged and could lead to foreseeable misuse.