longrangeview wrote:
The recall letter I received states that these problems were documented by Toyota in 2014 and 2015. In our rav4ev forum these problems were reported before that. This is an example that shows the importance of formal and fully documented complaints. Toyota is not admitting that these problems occurred before 2014.
Indeed. It would be a good idea to report incidents of legitimate safety defects that one has encoutered, such as this (but not limited to this) to both NHTSA and the automaker. However, I figure that taking it to the automaker's dealer for warranty work should count enough as a "report".
http://priuschat.com/threads/prius-brak ... st-1061546 mentions official channels. I've met Doug before and he was the Prius Product Manager at the time of that post.
longrangeview wrote:
Has anyone complained to NHTSA that Toyota is taking too long to repair/replace the potentially fatal defects in the electric vehicle traction motor assembly? Do we need to complain to NHTSA about Tesla (since they made the ECU, the software and the hardware involved.)?
You could try, esp. w/Tesla.
Side note: If you direct people at teslamotorsclub.com to report legitimate safety defects to NHTSA, including and esp. involving loss of motive power/propulsion not due to user error, a bunch of fanboys will jump all over you arguing that it's NOT a safety defect AND that one shouldn't report them NHTSA (partly because of the 1st point). And, even if it were, one shouldn't report them to NHTSA because doing so is "running to mommy government"

or they have some misguided notion that it's a good idea to "protect" Tesla, in this way. Nevermind that probably hundreds of millions of vehicles cumulatively have been recalled for loss of power/stalling, including EVs and that the owner's manual says to report them to Tesla and NHTSA.
The above bizarro behavior I've never seen on any other car forum I've been on.
Numerous Model drivers S have lost propulsion not due to user error for a variety of reasons (e.g. drive unit failure, contactor failure inside the battery pack, etc.) but I suspect that such incidents are severely under-reported to NHTSA, partly due to the above attitude. If Tesla ever does issue a recall for loss of propulsion, I suspect the NHTSA reports will suddenly spike (just like they did in the graph at
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/it ... re-feature during the Toyota SUA PR disaster).