Tesla’s battle with the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign in China continues after a Model X owner claims the brakes on his all-electric SUV are faulty. The man was caught admitting that the story is fabricated, telling local media that “I know my car has nothing wrong with it.”
Over the past several months, Tesla has been sparring with owners in China who appear to be a part of an effort to derail the company’s momentum in the country. It all started a couple of months ago at the Shanghai Auto Show when a woman invaded Tesla’s booth at the event by jumping on top of a Model 3 and claiming that her brakes had failed during a drive with her father. The drive ended in an accident, and she blames it on Tesla’s “faulty brakes.”
She was sentenced to serve a few days in jail and has made every attempt to make her case as public as possible. She has gone as far as spraypainting the car as it sat outside of a Tesla showroom in China and has also denied any attempt that Tesla has made to resolve the issue. The automaker published a lengthy statement in May, indicating that it had offered to pay for a third-party company to assess the potential of a brake issue while paying for the study. She denied this and also said that data released by the automaker, which proved that the owner’s father, who was driving the vehicle at the time, traveled at excessive speeds during the journey and also had utilized the brakes successfully many times in the moments leading up to the accident, could have been fabricated or tampered with by Tesla.
The Tesla Model Y is leading China’s electric SUV segment by a wide margin
This hasn’t been the only instance, and those who have decided to turn against the automaker have made it abundantly clear that there will be more attempts in the future to claim that Tesla’s vehicles are faulty and dangerous.
Model X Owner claims faulty brakes, Tesla responds
Now, a Model X owner in China named Mr. Wen is claiming that his vehicle has faulty brakes and is demanding that Tesla provide him with a newly refreshed Model X.
According to a statement on Tesla’s Weibo page, Wen suffered an accident in his vehicle, and Tesla reached out to him to figure out the issue. “At present, the initial remote diagnosis of the cause of the vehicle alarm is the right front wheel speed sensor, and the vehicle used by Mr. Wen at the time of failure…may be due to contamination of the wheel speed sensor or damage to the sensor line,” Tesla said (via @Ray4Tesla). “Mr. Wen’s vehicle has traveled more than 175,000 kilometers, which has exceeded the vehicle warranty.”
Tesla then suggested that the vehicle be towed to a Service Center in China so that it could be examined to determine the reason for failure and fixed properly. However, Wen has continued to drive the car over 800 kilometers, Tesla says, and has gone as far as claiming on the internet “that the vehicle has failed and it was dangerous.”
Tesla says it hopes that Mr. Wen will allow the company to conduct inspections and repair the car so it can be used normally as soon as possible.
Mr. Wen admits to media that “I know my car has nothing wrong with it”
According to Tesla, the blog Teslabot broke a recording of Mr. Wen admitting that the car has no issues. In a series of statements, he said, “I know my car has nothing wrong with it,” and “The coil is aging, or it is worn during the car wash. This is suspected to be the problem, my car will not have any major problems.”
Wen said that he didn’t have money to find media exposure and that “If you don’t make trouble, you can defend your rights normally, our police station will not participate.”
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- Credit: Tesla Weibo via @Ray4Tesla
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- Credit: Tesla Weibo via @Ray4Tesla
According to the post on Weibo, the media outlet Henan Guan Lei TV has deleted all of the reports of Tesla vehicle issues in China.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that those who have claimed that Tesla’s vehicles have issues have admitted that their story was fabricated. It’s actually happened on several occasions, with many of the perpetrators admitting that their issues were made up for media attention.
Tesla has also battled falsified and non-verified reports of lackluster sales figures. Most recently, a claim that indicated Tesla’s registrations in China in May had reduced by 50% was shrugged off by the Secretary General of the Chinese Passenger Car Association.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or be sure to email me at joey@teslarati.com or on Twitter @KlenderJoey.
Elon Musk
How to use Grok Bot to block spam calls and texts
Musk told users to ask Grok Bot to scrub their phone numbers from spam lists.
Elon Musk has a new use case for Grok Bot, and it is the spam call. On Thursday he replied to an X user named Arash with a short instruction: “Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!” Arash had said he got tired of the calls, had an AI bot find his number on listing sites and file removal requests, and packaged the process as a free skill for others.
The skill is called Spam-Call Scrubber, which is described to find a phone number on people search sites and data brokers, submits the opt outs, completes the confirmation emails those sites send back, and rechecks on a schedule the user picks. Using it requires the Grok Bot app. The pitch is time saved, since most broker opt outs sit behind separate forms on separate sites.
Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2026
Musk said Grok Bot now gives each bot its own email address, and that it can detect scam emails. On Thursday he also said SpaceX would make users whole if the bot botches a purchase or leaks a card, then told users to shop away from Amazon after the retailer blocked the agent, as Teslarati reported. The terms of service we reviewed at the time put responsibility for what an agent does on the user.
For Tesla owners, Grok Bot is not just a phone app. Tesla brought Grok Bot into its vehicles on September 22, and we argued earlier this week that the Cybercab’s real advantage may be the errands it runs during a ride. Every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y Robotaxi fleet has it enabled. The more routine tasks like this one become, the more a rider has reason to hand over something personal in the back seat.
The new Spam-Call Scrubber skill can be downloaded for free and works on sites that honor removal requests, while noting that listings can reappear, and illegal robocallers do not check any registry. Whether Spam-Call Scrubber cuts anyone’s call volume is something the first wave of users will find out, and Musk’s endorsement guarantees that wave is coming.
Investor's Corner
Tesla’s flying Roadster just revealed something bigger than the car
Analysts say the Roadster demo puts a Tesla and SpaceX merger back on the table.
The Roadster unveiling near Waco ended Thursday night, and by Friday morning much of the investor reaction had less to do with the car than with who owns the rocket technology inside it.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the event “puts the Tesla/SpaceX relationship on the table in a tangible way,” pointing to the propulsion, pressure vessel and control hardware sitting on a Tesla product. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management called the demo “a ridiculous display of engineering” with “no commercial value” beyond embarrassing traditional automakers, though he said it showed Musk wants the two companies together.
The more specific forecast came a day earlier from Barclays. Analyst Dan Levy told clients a deal could be announced before Tesla’s annual meeting, which must happen by December 6, and that an announcement in late October or early November could make shareholder approval harder. Barclays expects SpaceX to be the buyer in an all stock deal, with Tesla holders receiving SpaceX shares at a premium, based on market values of roughly $2.1 trillion for SpaceX and $1.5 trillion for Tesla. If nothing lands around the meeting, the bank still sees an announcement within 6 to 12 months.
The Roadster demo just added more weight to merger speculations. Tesla’s demo used cold gas thrusters and pressure tanks of the kind SpaceX uses on Falcon 9, and Musk described the car as a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX engineers, as we mentioned in our breakdown of the three Roadster configurations.
Musk has not publicly addressed a deal since the event, as far as we have seen. His most direct answer remains the one he gave at the All In Summit, when he said that with so much collaboration, “who can imagine what action one might take” without ruling anything out. Ives has held to a 2027 timeline since his March note, and Musk pushed back on the China piece of the speculation when ARK floated a year end announcement in August.
The next test is Tesla’s third quarter earnings call on October 21. However, we recall in July that Musk told analysts, “we can’t talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call,” so a clear answer wouldn’t be expected.
News
How Tesla’s Roadster fan system and thrusters are built to dominate the corners
Tesla’s Roadster uses fans, active wings and cold gas thrusters to create grip at any speed.
Tesla’s new Roadster is best known for flipping through the air in Texas, but the technology that matters most for a race track is the stuff that keeps it on the ground. Tesla’s Roadster page describes a multi-mode fan and ground sealing system that acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the car. Tesla says it provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
That is the key difference from the wings and diffusers on a normal supercar. Conventional aero only makes downforce when the car is moving, and it grows with speed, so a car has the least grip in the slow corners and under hard braking. A fan system makes downforce at any speed. Tesla’s patent, which we covered last year, describes fans and deployable skirts that create sealed or partially sealed regions under the car, with the fans extracting air to lower the pressure and increase grip and stability.
Still processing this … the most unreal thing I’ve seen. https://t.co/HtEuvnkZjY
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 16, 2026
Tesla pairs that with active wings, a next generation steer by wire system and a Track Mode that lowers the car and changes the suspension, with high downforce and low drag settings for the circuit. To keep weight down, Tesla points to magnesium, titanium and carbon fiber, manual controls and a fixed seat position, which it says lets the car respond to driver inputs almost instantly.
Tesla Roadster: Three configs, one can fly, 0-60 in 0.8 seconds
The cold gas thrusters are the other half. On the Thrust version they sit at the rear and Tesla says they take the car from 0 to 60 mph in under 0.9 seconds, while the Rocket version adds perimeter thrusters for forward, upward and lateral rotational movement. Tesla says the all electric actuators make micro adjustments within a fraction of a second.
Roadster transforms in Track Mode
These aero features aren’t just for looks: they provide the best passive downforce package of any road car (approaching F1 levels!) with wing actuation driven by the @Tesla_Optimus actuator system https://t.co/AqrC4qUga9
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 16, 2026
Musk has been talking about records for years. In June 2019 he said, “We’re going to do things with the new Roadster that are kind of unfair to other cars.” That September, when a follower asked whether the Roadster would beat the Nürburgring production car record, he replied with one word, “Absolutely,” as we reported at the time. In February 2024 he said Tesla had “radically increased the design goals” for the car and that its sub one second 0 to 60 time would be “the least interesting part.”
There are caveats. Tesla has not published a lap time or a verified cornering figure, so the record talk is still a promise rather than a result. Tesla also says the car is not approved for public road use, and the thruster features are limited to the Rocket trim, which is invite only. Fan cars have also been banned or withdrawn before, and getting a sealed underbody to work on a rough public road is a harder problem than on a smooth track. The first real test will be an official lap at a circuit.
How to use Grok Bot to block spam calls and texts
Tesla’s flying Roadster just revealed something bigger than the car
How Tesla’s Roadster fan system and thrusters are built to dominate the corners
SpaceX reveals how its 1 Million AI satellite network will work and prevent space collisions
Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands a new Middle East deal, and Nashville is about to get faster
