openinverter forum

Hi All,

So I am in the market for a Tesla Front SDU for my Subaru Legacy EV conversion and my query is thus (after trawling through lots of articles and threads!):
Q: in the early years, say 2012 through 2014 there were a lot of drive unit failures but later on Tesla started making much better units.
Could anyone comment on when (more or less) the better units with far lower failure rates started to be installed in Teslas? I.e. is a 2015 F SDU generally fine or am I better off going with a 2017 F SDU for example?

My understanding, and I'm sure someone has better information than me, is that most of the early drive unit failures were bad bearings in the first few batches of LDUs. Remember that there were no SDUs until the first dual motor Model S debuted (late 2014). I don't recall there being a significant number of failures of the SDU.

Great, thanks so much for the reply - makes sense.

In general, I think you need to worry less about mechanical problems and focus on making sure you are careful not to damage the inverter. In particular, if you browse these forums, you will discover that many people have accidentally killed small drive units by allowing the high voltage to be disconnected while the motor was spinning, or accidentally doing firmware upgrades while the high voltage was connected. The kinds of reliability problems that impact production Teslas are much less likely to be an issue for our low mileage DIY vehicles.

Thanks for the heads up - will keep that in mind.