A Tesla owner says he got a $14,000 repair bill one day after buying a Model Y. A new report suggests it’s part of a much bigger problem.

via Yahoo:

Jain told Reuters part of his electric vehicle’s suspension broke when he was driving with his family the day after he’d received delivery of the Model Y. He said the car had 115 miles on its odometer when the suspension issue caused portions of the vehicle to come in contact with the road and Jain to lose steering capabilities.

The Reuters investigation — which cited interviews with more than 20 customers and 9 Tesla workers, as well as thousands of internal documents — found that Jain was one of thousands of Tesla owners to face issues with the company’s suspension or steering over the past six years. The publication reported that while Tesla had publicly denied some of the issues and attempted to put the onus on owners, the automaker was more aware of the issues than it had indicated publicly.

Tesla, which disbanded its press department years ago, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Elon Musk has admitted in the past that the carmaker has faced some quality issues, especially during production ramps.

“When you go faster, you just discover these things,” he told the auto expert Sandy Munro in 2021. “If we knew them in advance, we’d fix them in advance.”

Jain told Reuters that his family went from “over the moon” to “absolutely petrified” when the car they had paid about $55,000 to buy broke down on the road.

Reuters reported that after Jain took the vehicle into a Tesla service center, a worker initially told Jain that they’d found “no evidence of an external damage” and suggested the electric-car maker would pay for the car to be fixed. But Jain later learned he was expected to pay the $14,000 repair bill after Tesla sent him a letter indicating the issue was the result of “prior” damage, the publication reported.

The former Tesla owner told Reuters he ended up paying an insurance deductible of about $1,250 and faced a higher insurance premium going forward. The suspension issue took three months for Tesla to fix, and Jain resold the vehicle at a loss of about $10,000, Reuters reported.