Nougat

I am right now sitting on a Steelcase Series 1, and while it doesn’t have great lumbar support, it is far better than any shitty $150 “gaming” chair, and is right in your price range brand new.

Ellen Pao.

That’s so reddit.

Who’s not interested in whose opinion now?

That you’ve employed a slippery slope analogy far too widely?

I have also hired exterminators and taken antibiotics.

You shall not think of living things in hierarchical order (x is better than y)

Having to choose between my child and my dog would be a horrible choice to have to make, but I know exactly how I would make it.

Would it really matter? It’s just as easy to subscribe and then say/do whatever. Only accounts that have been subscribed for a period of time? Subscribe and wait. Have a certain post and/or comment reputation? It’s not terribly hard to speak to a specific audience and accomplish that. Make any of those extra parameters too severe, and you limit the community growth.

Crowdsourcing of ideas means that bad ideas are no worse than good ones, and in an evolutionary way, they’re probably better at replication, strength, retention - and when a core tenet of that “bad” idea is that you must actively reject the opposing good ideas, that’s how bad ideas overtake good ones.

On the other end, prevent malicious actors from using identity theft to get credit cards and loans: freeze your credit.

• Transunion: https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
• Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
• Equifax: https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/

It’ll be a minor hassle when you go to get a car loan, and forget that your credit is frozen - but you will be able to temporarily unfreeze it from your phone.

Somewhere around here I have the HP optical mouse that used to come with their desktops. It finally quit working and I had to replace it, and I had to do the math for how long I had been using it.

Twenty years.

Those end joints (often called “tie rod ends,” since they were part of the “tie rod” before rack and pinion steering became popular) operate just lilke the ball joints do, except their job is turning the drive wheels via the steering wheel. Remember how I said that the lower ball joints were a good design, because they came in from the top? These end joints come in from the bottom. That’s not necessarily a “bad” design, but it does mean that if the nuts that hold them on are loose, they can drop out of the steering knuckle and cause the kind of failure we’re talking about. I also do not see a cotter pin in this image, which would contain the nut and prevent it from loosening all the way off the end joint.

However, as I have mentioned more than once, an assembly failure which undertorqued that nut would not happen “all of a sudden.” There would be - yes, again - ample warning to the driver that “oh shit, something is really wrong here” before the wheel became completely separated from the steering rack.

That’s really about it. I’ll mention again that none of this is “new technology.” These are the same kinds of suspension components which have existed in cars for decades. No failure which would result in
“suspension collapse” or “wheel fell off” could possibly occur without plenty of warning symptoms before either of those happened.

Based on what I’ve seen through these diagrams, it seems that the most likely failure would be that last one, where the steering end joint becomes disconnected from the steering knuckle. It would still come with those warning signs, but by comparison to other possible failures, those signs would be the “least noticeable” (still very noticeable, just less than for the control arms).

The article barely even mentions which Tesla model(s) are involved here, only noting one person’s Model X. So let’s go with a Model X. And since there’s been talk of a Tesla with 115 miles on it, we’ll go with 2021 and newer.

Steering knuckle and wheel hub/bearing The weak link in these parts is going to be the wheel studs and lug nuts. A failure here is going to happen there before anything else, and will likely be due to (as I said) improperly torqued lug nuts. If those (or the bolts that hold the hub in?) somehow fail, there’s going to be ample warning in the form of noise, vibration, etc., before the wheel becomes separated from the vehicle. Everything else here is extremely thick steel. Nothing about this design is inherently different from any other vehicle.

Front control arms The Model X apparently has one front upper control arm and two front lower control arms. These mount to the frame on the inside via bushings, and on the outside via ball joints. The existence of upper control arms means that the front suspension does not depend on the upper strut mount as a pivot point for the steering; that pivot point is the upper ball joint here. This also means that a failure of the strut mount would not result in a condition that could be described as “the wheel fell off.”

Of particular note about the lower control arms - I am used to seeing front lower control arms have the ball joints inserted from the bottom of the steering knuckle. This design has the ball joints inserted from the top side, and the nuts attached at the bottom. This is a safer design, since a loose nut would not cause the control arm to fall out of the knuckle. In any case, if a piece of hardware attaching these control arms failed, the wheel would not “fall off,” nor would the suspension “collapse.” It would be more difficult (though not impossible) to drive, there would be excessive noise and crazy vibration.

The weak points in the control arms themselves (for the purposes of our discussion) would be the ball joints. Ball joints simply do not fail suddenly and without warning. The joint can be extremely loose inside the part of the control arm which captures it and still leave the driver with enough control to safely steer the vehicle off the road (which a sensible driver would do, because it would be clear that something was horribly wrong).

The lower control arms pictured appear to be cast, while the uppers may be stamped, with welded on ends. Could one of those welds fail? As previously mentioned, yes, but it would be highly unlikely, and even if the weld at the single upper ball joint failed, it would not fail all at once. At the very least, the steering wheel would pull noticeably in one direction or the other, or the steering would be very “loose,” as the affected wheel would not be tracking normally.

I will reiterate here that this kind of failure would be highly unusual. Automobile suspension is not some crazy new-fangled thing; this type of suspension has been around for decades, and nothing being done in this design demands any kind of special skill to put together or manufacture.

Front air spring The top of this component bolts to the “shock tower,” and the bottom bolts to the rear lower control arm. No failure of this part would cause the “wheel to fall off,” and the only way it could be involed in “suspension collapse” is if the lower mounting bolt were to shear off at both ends simultaneously. Even then, the bottom yoke of the spring would remain captive around the lower control arm. It would be very bad, but you’d still be able to drive the vehicle safely off the roadway (while it made horrible noises and vibrations).

Steering Here we see the steering rack and the rack end joints. Something I find very interesting here is that Tesla … doesn’t sell the ends separately from the steering rack? This seems absolutely bonkers, since those joints are far more or a “wear item” than the steering rack itself.

But I digress. (cont’d next comment)

Again, suspension components do not go from “working perfectly” to “catastrophically failed” without passing through an easily notable period of “oh shit, something is seriously wrong here, I should stop.” A light bulb can fail that way; when there is a functioning electrical circuit, the light works, and when the circuit is broken, it doesn’t. But we’re taking about suspension components. These are (even if they are shoddily manufactured) very beefy metal components. Even when strut mounts, ball joints, tie rod ends, control arm bushings, springs, axles, and wheel hubs fail, they become extremely loose long before the failure escalates to something which could be called “suspension collapse” or “wheel fell off.”

Is it entirely impossible for that to happen? The only scenario I can think of is if a front lower control arm snapped. Not the ball joint at one end of it, or the bushings at the other, but the actual control arm. It’s possible, but highly unlikely - especially at 115 miles, again even if the part was manufactured shoddily.

There’s a giant hole in the reporting here, to the point where the catastrophic failure events being reported only have a reasonable explanation if the driver ignored obvious warning signs.

I didn’t make up anything. I’m not saying Tesla doesn’t have some serious QC issues. Clearly they do.

What I’m saying is that “wheel fell off” and “suspension collapse” are not specific enough descriptions to know exactly what part(s) are failing prematurely or why or how one failure cascades into other damage. My descriptions above of potential failure scenarios are reasonably probable. I will also stand behind the notion that 115-mile guy had to have experienced horrible vibration, or scraping, or noise for at least several miles before “the vehicle’s front-right suspension … collapsed” – whatever that actually means.

“Front wheel fell off” could mean a bunch of different things here. If the wheel actually became wholly separated from the vehicle, at 15,000 miles, that would most likely be due to incorrectly torqued lug nuts after a tire rotation. Those torque specs are important, and undertorqued lug nuts can work themselves loose, putting undue stresses on the lug bolts, which snap, and there you go. Such a situation would not be Tesla’s fault, rather the fault of whoever rotated the tires.

Or, “front wheel fell off” could mean something like a ball joint or tie rod end failure, which could cascade into a very unusual wheel position, easily described as “fell off,” while still being connected to the car by the strut mount. That kind of failure would be Tesla’s fault, and would align with the mentioned “collapsed suspensions.”

In any case, the car would make incredibly horrible noises and vibrations well before a catastrophic failure. These kinds of mechanical suspension parts do not go from “perfectly fine” to “completely failed” in the blink of an eye, even if they do fail far before they should. I’m not putting the blame for the failure on the driver of the car, but I have no problem blaming the driver for letting a situation like that get to the point of catastrophic failure on a brand new car.

Edit: @TheChurn - care to tell me what I said to deserve your downvote?

oh no somebody’s mad

No idea, I don’t use it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190838/mediaviewer/rm2869434624/

Yeah, it’s real systemic, there’s a lot of restrictive things all wrapped around everything that keep labor under the thumb of owners and their minions. If enough people stand up for their humanity, there will be a tipping point. Revolution doesn’t come without risk.

Seize the means of production.

Don’t ask for your employer to meet your time off needs. Tell them that your time off needs are going to be met.

I am not at all saying that it was the employee’s fault in your example. It wasn’t. The sad thing is that people have been conditioned that they need to ask for time off when emergencies arise.