Despite all of the accolades that Tesla vehicles tend to garner — both for performance and design — one of the more common criticisms levied at the company is that the fit and finish on Tesla vehicles simply isn’t up to par with similarly priced vehicles from rival manufacturers. What’s more, build quality issues — though perhaps not widespread — have continued to plague the company in recent years. Early production models of the Model X, if you recall, were especially prone to worrisome problems.
In recent years, Tesla has slowly but surely improved the build quality on its fleet of cars. With the Model 3, for example, Tesla claims that the car’s panel gaps are now “competitive with Audi, BMW, and Mercedes models.” That notwithstanding, reports of wonky Model 3 issues still appear to be creeping up every now and again.
The most recent instance involves a New Jersey man named Rithesh Nair who saw the rear bumper of his Model 3 completely fall off due to heavy rain. Yes, you read that correctly. A bout of heavy rain apparently caused the rear bumper of a Model 3 to detach entirely. And far from being a lone incident, another Model 3 owner took to Twitter and reported a similar experience.
Without question, this isn’t something one expects to see on even a used car picked up from a lot, let alone a brand new Tesla.
https://twitter.com/rithesh/status/1028437449318576128
Below is a photo from Ben Franks who experienced the same problem.
https://twitter.com/Benj1Franks/status/1028459288799465473
Commenting on the matter, a Tesla spokesperson relayed the following to Autoblog: “We’re setting an extremely high bar for Model 3, and what happened in this situation is not how we build our cars. We’re investigating the issue to understand what caused it, and we are contacting our customers to resolve this and ensure they are satisfied.”
