fullmetalbaal
Well-Known Member
I think your assumptions on fleet age and miles driven are too high.That sounds really high. Let's assume for a minute 7,500 Taycans are sold until now, and sales are going on for 2 years. That means the average age of any of the 7,500 cars is 1 year. Your chance means ~2,500 owners would have experienced it. I expect the media to go ballistic when that would be the case. (I know I don't take multiple occurrences for one owner into account).
Probably more realistic: 250 occurrences of those 7,500 sold, that's 1 in 30. Still very high, don't get me wrong.
For the record: I have driven 7,000 miles(in 4 months), haven't got it (yet?). Car is at the PC for the AMB5 update now.
There's ~10,000 Taycan in the US (see higher up in the thread for sources - that's from Porsche). But while it's been on sale for over 1 year, the majority of that fleet is much younger. Furthermore, the lock down months had drastically reduced miles driven (on all cars, but particularly for high income households, USDOT shared numbers, I worked with 25-50% reduction based on that). So there's likely less than 2,000 Taycans in the US that actually have >10,000 miles on them. The model assumes linear monthly fleet growth, based on the quarterly data shared by Porsche. Actual data is likely slight more biased towards end of quarters (which would decrease fleet mileage and increase likelihood of event - but not enough to worry about).
Note that we witnessed a certain level of issues based on one set of driving parameters, but forward looking I am making the assumption that I will be driving more normally in the next year (here's to hoping the Delta wave doesn't nuke that).
The core assumption in the model is reporting rate. The >40 reported incidents are only a fraction of the actual incidents. The model assumes an actual rate based on a reporting ratio of somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 20 of reported. 1 in 20 is probably too low, 1 in 4 too high, but the range probably has us covered pretty well. Self-reporting is typically embarrassingly low when there's no immediate and direct benefit (e.g., in this case, unless that's the only path to getting your own car fixed). This is particularly true when the course of action isn't common and/or well documented. Personally, I wouldn't even have known to report this to the NHTSA had it occurred to me and had I not been on this forum, I would have told Porsche my car needs to be fixed and not even have thought about this needing to be reported somewhere. I'm willing to bet real money the average US car owner is in the same boat. (BTW, that range works out to more or less 200 - 1,000 events, so the 250 you had assumed actually is in the range
)Forum participants will skew heavily towards being more proactive and also driving more miles. So I'd expect far more of us than average to have reported it, and for many of us to be planning on putting a lot of miles on these cars. So extrapolating from our own behavior doesn't work. (e.g., with 7,000 miles you put on your car in 4 months what most luxury sedan owners do in a year )
What the media does and doesn't go ballistic over has always left me dumbfounded. Maybe losing power isn't terrifying enough? That doesn't come across as immediately dangerous to other people in any way. I suspect they'd need to have at least one incident involving loss of life or a spectacular accidents for this to be a story. But even when there's fire and potential loss of life involved, it's hard to predict what they go for. One new Tesla burns down in a situation that leaves all kinds of questions open, and they lose their shit. GM issues yet another recall on the Bolt for fire risk (presumably with real likelihood), and it's almost a non-event (e.g., CNN buried it in the business section, many didn't even feature it). But riddle me this: why did we all hear about the Taycan that burned down in Florida, but haven't heard about individual Bolt fires? (the recall is following an NHTSA investigation that started based on reported car fires - this is not GM being proactive). Not saying this should be a big story, just pointing out that what they choose to blow out of proportion, report relatively neutrally, or essentially ignore/discount seems arbitrary.
Anyhow, using different reporting rate assumptions (as long as they are even remotely reasonable) doesn't move the likelihood into anything that would change my behavior: you might go from ~1 in 3 chance to ~1 in 10 on the one end and maybe ~1 in 2 on the other.
Neither would get me to say "let's leave this car at the dealer until it's fixed" - (which for me personally is apparently a moot point anyway, as they won't deliver until it's fixed).
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