Early last week, Consumer Reports published their Model 3 review and relayed some interesting findings about Tesla’s mass-market EV. Though CR found many things to like about the Model 3, it was unable to give the car a passing grade due to a number of performance and quality control issues.
Most prominently, CR found that the Model 3’s stopping distance during emergency brake testing — when traveling at a speed of 60 MPH — checked in at 152 feet. According to the report, this distance is “far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup.”
Tesla, to its credit, was receptive to CR’s initial findings. Shortly after the CR report went live, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter and said that their own testing yielded different results and that any lingering problems could easily be fixed with an over the air software update.
“Looks like this can be fixed with a firmware update,” Musk said. “Will be rolling that out in a few days. With further refinement, we can improve braking distance beyond initial specs. Tesla won’t stop until Model 3 has better braking than any remotely comparable car.”
As promised, Tesla over the weekend began rolling out an update to fix the aforementioned braking problem, as evidenced by Musk’s tweet below.
Also, firmware fix for upgraded brake performance on standard Model 3 started rolling out yesterday. Should improve braking distance by ~20 ft for repeated heavy braking events. Thanks @ConsumerReports for excellent critical feedback!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2018
Incidentally, Musk a few days ago also said that the Model 3 units Consumer Reports used for testing were early production models and that more recent units coming off the production line address many of the complaints laid out in the initial review.
