Or......Tesla became aware of a potentially serious problem with their cars. They immediately sent out a software fix to prevent it happening in all the cars in the country. Since then, no other cars have caught fire because Tesla safely managed the fault.
Meanwhile BMW and Ford rely on contacting customers and asking them to pop in when they aren't too busy avoiding the global pandemic to get an upgrade over a cup of coffee which may prevent them being burned alive any day soon.
It's all spin, innit?
No it's not all spin at all.
With EV's one of the main things people look at is the range they can achieve. They compare that and other things with other cars on the market. People would have bought a Tesla in part because of that vehicle range.
Then because a car bursts into flames, they reduce the charging capacity and consequently the range of the vehicle. They didn't even tell owners, they just rolled out the software update and the first owners knew of it was a reduction on range the first time they recharged after the update.
Just because another car hasn't caught fire yet, it doesn't mean there aren't cars out there whose cooling system hadn't already started to fail and the current charge limit is still too high, it could be that it will just take longer for it to get to the point of failure that it does cause a fire.
This is on all Tesla S models worldwide, not just in this country. Tesla should have replaced all the cooling system, not just updated the cooling management system to cut off earlier. The vehicle should be able to perform as advertised and what people had paid for.
If you had bought a BMW or Ford PHEV, and told by the companies that charging the battery may cause a fire, we won't fix it but we will disable it. Would you be happy that you had paid the extra money for a hybrid that can't be used in EV mode to save on fuel and enissions and just sent on your way.
If you bought a 4 slice toaster, there is a problem with one of the heating elements and the manufacturer puts out a product recall, their fix is to disable the rogue elements in all their toasters and now they are only a 3 slice toaster. Would you be happy to settle for a 3 slice toaster, even though you had paid extra because a 4 slice toaster is what you needed.
It has nothing to do with knocking Tesla, it is about doing the right thing.