While many car manufacturers were busy announcing concepts and future machinery this year Shanghai Motor ShowTesla had other things to sort out at its car show booth. A protester climbed over a Tesla Model 3 and started shouting about alleged defective brakes in Tesla cars on a Bloomberg report.
The woman was wearing a Tesla T-shirt that read “Brake lost control” and repeatedly shouted the same phrase before the security of the booth held her back. Bloomberg:
The woman was simply identified as Ms. Zhang, according to a Tesla statement quoted by Wall Street Journal. Zhang was linked to previous protests in which she claimed that her father’s Model 3 brakes failed and endangered her family in an accident earlier this year, according to WSJ:
Tesla said in a statement on Weibo that the protester was a Tesla customer in Henan Province whose father was involved in a February accident in which his Model 3 collided with another vehicle.
The woman had demanded a full refund, claiming that a technical problem with the car caused the accident, according to Tesla. However, the company said the woman’s father collapsed due to speeding. The company said it had been in contact with the woman and was willing to help her find a solution.
Tesla seemed to reconcile the situation with the woman, claiming that he had tried to negotiate with the woman and reach a satisfactory conclusion following the accident.
A top executive and Tesla vice president, Grace Tao, went on to say that she is confident that many customer complaints are still based on misunderstandings and that May not be the best quote to offer in such situations. In essence, Tao’s remark from WSJ it is a manual validity and a “user error”, which challenges issues that are far from the harmless but annoying errors that technology users go through.
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When product failures endanger people’s lives, tensions ignite and you get situations just like this protest. So it seems that the exchanges between Tesla and Ms. Zhang did not go well for either party and it is not the first protest in which Ms. Zhang was involved, according to Bloomberg. This last protest did not end well, the security members having to physically detain the protester.
Tesla tightened security in its stand after the altercation, but at the time it seemed discordant, given that the woman caused a lot of public agitation, which began to have trends on social networks and gathered a lot of attention and solidarity from other Tesla owners with their own grievances.
