NHTSA Complaint #11631654 — 2016 TESLA MODEL X

While driving on city streets at very low speeds, error messages starting popping up on the screen "Vehicle may not restart/Service is required". We somehow made it home by restarting the computer and driving home at low speeds. At freeway speeds, this would have been catastrophic. We were able to make an appointment with the Tesla service center and found this to be due to the battery coolant heater to be internally shorted which in turn was because the large rear drive unit had an internal coolant leak. This required a very expensive $8k replacement of the large rear drive unit and the heater. A search in the blogs has yielded this to be a design and manufacturing issue. Specifically the blogs say: "the rear motor used in the early Teslas has a design flaw and will need a very expensive repair/replacement but what does that actually mean? Many Model S and Model X produced between 2012-2020 have the Large Drive Unit (LDU) with the fatal coolant seal flaw where the seal around the rotor shaft will leak coolant into the motor (Reference 1). They will ALL leak eventually. Tesla tried many things over the years to keep this seal from leaking but finally gave up and developed ‘Revision U’ in the fall of 2022 which deletes the coolant from the rotor but maintains the coolant to the inverter, stator and the ‘flyover’ tube cooling the gearbox". This means that the same problem even after the replacement, will happen again soon. I am writing to request you to send out a recall to all owners of these cars, and to have Tesla refund us for the cost of replacement of the drive unit and for Tesla to install the bypass as some aftermarket vendors (Reference 2) have started doing. Reference: 1) [XXX] 2) [XXX] INFORMATION REDACTED PURSUANT TO THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552(B)(6)