Tesla has been having suspension issues for a while. Its vehicles can present control arm failures that led the Chinese government to demand a recall there. The most scandalous incident happened to a Tesla Model S owner driving in an Autobahn: his car’s suspension failed at 200 km/h. Luckily, no one was harmed.
Keith Leech has coined the term Whompy Wheels to describe these issues, which he has been reporting to NHTSA and whoever wants to hear about them for years already. Tesla supporters call him a FUDster and a short-seller – which is quite ironic, as you will see as this article develops. They also refuse to listen to his story, but we didn’t. Here it is.
Leech prefers that we call him Keef Wivaneff or simply Keef. Born in the United Kingdom, he was described by a Daily Kanban article as a "retired mainframe computer engineer and an electronics sales engineer” who decided to become “a citizen activist."
“I served a four-year engineering apprenticeship under the Ministry of Aviation at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern. My training included mechanical design, construction, and testing of components to aeronautical standards. My college studies in both mechanical and electrical engineering are equal to a modern-day science degree. On top of that, I have always performed my own maintenance and repairs on motorcycles and cars. This includes removal and repair of engines, drivetrains, and suspensions.”
The Beginning
Keef started his story with Tesla for a very different reason than the suspension problems.
“Before I became involved with Tesla, I had already challenged the false or exaggerated claims of many so-called ‘green’ companies that I believe were cashing in on people's environmental concerns.”
One of these companies was SunCube. A man named Greg Watson founded the company claiming it could revolutionize sun power generation with a device that could allegedly concentrate sun rays and maximize the energy they could produce thanks to concentration lenses and triple-junction solar cells, which work with a broader range of wavelengths.
In his book “The Great SunCube Swindle,” Keef describes how he and his “fair maiden Rapunzel” wanted to live off the grid. But, after buying solar panels, they saw they could live better with a fridge and realized they would need a more potent way of producing energy. That was when he discovered the SunCube. To make a long story short, he ordered one, got intrigued by the company’s claims, discovered they could not be true, and went after Watson to debunk him. The video above tells the story in more detail.
Tesla also started to call his attention. Keef suspected it would not be as green as it wanted people to believe.
“Any unscrupulous con artist can get rich on green scams. Wall Street loves green scams. Tesla is a resource-gobbling behemoth. Neither the cars nor the batteries can be economically recycled. A wrecked Tesla is a toxic casserole!”
Whompy Wheels Hunter By Accident
Volkswagen and Redwood Materials, created by JB Straubel, do not agree with Keef on the impossibility of recycling batteries. On the other hand, any company in need of more raw materials to increase production cannot deny that it still follows the business model that Overshoot Day denounces. If you need increasingly more limited natural resources to expand production, you are helping deplete them sooner every year. In other words, you are not so environmentally cool, regardless of which kind of car you sell. It was in that spirit that Keef started investigating Tesla. Curiously, he aimed for one thing and hit a completely different one.
“I made some comments on forums that I thought Tesla's claims to greenness were dubious since the aluminum and other constituents were unlikely to be recycled. I started looking at crashed Tesla salvage auctions to try and prove my point about recycling, such as Copart, IAAI, and Poctra. One thing that immediately leaped out at me was that many of these Teslas had damaged suspensions that did not appear to be the result of crash damage but were simply fractures of the suspension components.”
He started finding these suspicious broken suspensions in 2016. That drove Keef to try to warn people about what he thought was a manufacturing or design mistake with Tesla vehicles.
“My interpretation of the suspension failures is based on my engineering knowledge. I do not claim that all of these complaints provide categorical proof of defective suspensions, but it does show that these failures are happening at a much higher rate than in other makes of cars.”
Fraud Accusations
First, he shared these cases in forums, but Tesla fans expelled him from many of these virtual spaces. Then, he started using these findings to file complaints at NHTSA, which was seen as a fraud attempt by the company’s followers.
“Tesla is an American car manufacturer. I felt that NHTSA was the best place to make these complaints. There is nothing fraudulent about them. I have been entirely truthful with NHTSA. I even had an email conversation with an investigator who said that I was welcome to keep filing complaints but that they would take more notice of complaints from actual owners.”
Some people accused him of fraud because he did not live in the US. In their opinion, that would be a requirement to make the complaints. Keef has his own opinion about that.
“The website requires that a USA address is used. This is due to the way the website is set up. It does not mean that a non-US resident or a non-vehicle owner is prohibited from making a complaint. I have supplied my correct name and contact details with each complaint submission and explained to NHTSA that I had to enter a dummy USA address to satisfy the website design.”
Keef never made a complaint in the name of Tesla owners he actually met or talked to, only based on the information he retrieved from the auction websites.
“When an owner has posted about a suspension failure on the forums, I have pleaded with them to report to NHTSA. I had to use a fresh username to login to TMC (Tesla Motors Club) because they ban people for dissing Tesla. These owners are under a lot of peer pressure to refrain from complaining. They also risk having Tesla service retaliate against them and may even have signed an NDA or arbitration agreement that makes them scared to file a complaint.”
Keef said he has also been accused of flooding NHTSA with complaints and obscuring “genuine” complaints.
“That is ridiculous. It would be trivially easy for NHTSA to filter out my complaints or even to remove them from their database. But they have not blocked me and continue to post my complaints to this very day.”
While filing these complaints, Keef also tried to talk to Tesla itself.
“I did send emails to Tesla with copies of several of my complaints. I never received any reply.”
More And More Incidents
The number of suspected cases he found kept on growing.
“I stopped counting after about 200, but I would guess that by now, I am over 500 complaints. I first put a list up on the Tesla.bears site because it was about the only place I could post anything critical of Tesla without having my account banned.”
Having an eye on the American market did not mean Keef was not following what was happening in Australia as well.
“I am aware of two crashes in Australia that involved whompy wheels. I have reported Australian whompies to the legal department of the Australian motoring organization NRMA, but they did not reply. There is no NHTSA equivalent in Australia. I have also reported Autopilot abuse (videos posted by identifiable owners) to the police, but they seemed to think it was OK because... Elon Musk!”
Unlike what happened with SunCube, Keef became the villain of the story to Tesla’s fiercer advocates. That only made him more adamant.
“After Musk accused me of filing fraudulent complaints in an attempt to drive down the share price for financial gain, I was attacked by Tesla defenders on the forums, and they said that I was a liar, a FUDster, and a short seller.”
Short Selling To Prove A Point
A FUDster is someone that spreads Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Tesla vehicles. It was supposed to be applied to all-electric car detractors, but you see this term being used mostly by people defending Tesla. Short sellers are people that bet the shares of a company will lose value. Keef says he was none of the above.
“When I started making my NHTSA complaints about Tesla, I had no financial position in TSLA. In fact, I had never held any shares or share options in any public listed company. During forum discussions about Tesla, it was explained to me that I could buy put options on a company and make money if the share value went down.”
That became the perfect opportunity for Keef to make his point and dare Tesla and Musk to prove him wrong.
“Since I was being told that I was either a ‘short,’ I did indeed buy TSLA put options as a way to challenge Musk and also in the hope of financial gain. I am fully aware that filing false complaints whilst holding a position in TSLA could lead to prosecution by SEC and that I could even be extradited to the US if I was charged. I have challenged Musk to go right ahead and report me. I am still waiting.”
Keef believes that Tesla will not challenge his complaints because it knows that something is wrong with the suspension of its cars. Going after him would force it to prove Keef’s allegations are false, and he bets the company can’t do it.
After the Chinese government ordered Tesla to recall 29,834 Model S and Model X units produced from September 2013 up to January 2018, Tesla told NHTSA that the number was actually 18,182 units. It also said that it did not agree with the recall but that it would do it anyway because the Chinese administrative process to dispute that would be a "heavy burden."
Apart from this recall in China, NHTSA also opened an investigation on the multiple cases involving suspension components in the US. Model 3 and Model Y units have also presented suspension problems recently, but they are not included in that investigation. Mena Massoud – the actor that played Alladin – is suing Tesla after losing the front right wheel of his Model 3 Performance one day after picking it up.
With evidence that goes beyond what Keef alleges in his complaints, we sent Elon Musk an email message to learn how Tesla responds to them. Unfortunately, the company got rid of its press relations department months ago. If we hear from him, we’ll update this article.
There are Tesla fans that refuse to even listen to what Keef has to say. Supposing they did, we asked Keef what he would like to tell them.
“I would ask them to look at my photographic evidence and my NHTSA complaints. Unfortunately, they won't do that. They’ll just put their fingers in their ears and scream FUD!”
Some of that evidence (the most recent) illustrates this article. Learning that Keef actually became a short seller after being accused of spreading lies and FUD also gives a new perspective on the entire story. Hopefully, Tesla and Elon Musk will also share whatever they have to say about the accusations with us. We’re all ears.