United States marque
Tesla in the UK
Tesla began UK deliveries of the Model S in 2014 and the Model 3 in 2019, and the Model Y has since become one of the ten best selling new cars here. It sells directly rather than through franchised dealers, so servicing and body repair go through its own network or approved shops. Suspension bushes, control arms and the 12 volt battery are the items that recur on higher mileage used cars.
There is no reliability figure for Tesla as a marque that this site could cite. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates published by companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and variants to count.
Each of those choices moves the answer by several percentage points, and none of them is a measurement a reader could go and check. A number printed beside the Tesla badge here would be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name.
What is genuinely knowable is one car at a time: its own invoices, its own service record and what the common repairs on that model actually cost when they arrive.
No fault ordering is published for this marque
Model by model
Every Tesla line we hold a record for
Before you buy one
What the Tesla record does and does not settle
There are 4 Tesla model lines here and the oldest of them went on sale in Britain in 2014. Of those, 4 are still sold new and none have finished. A finished line is not automatically a worse buy, but it fixes the newest example you will ever find and it decides how long the parts supply has had to run.
Between them those models have been sold here with 1 fuel type: electric. That spread is the practical reason one figure for the whole marque would be no use to anybody standing on a forecourt. Electric cars lost their road tax exemption on 1 April 2025, so an electric one now pays the same standard rate as a petrol one of the same age.
Those lines were bodied 3 ways: saloon, SUV and hatchback. The four wheel drive versions carry more driveline than the two wheel drive ones, and driveshaft boots and propshaft joints are all inspected.
Examples across this marque straddle two road tax regimes: CO2 bands for cars first registered between 1 March 2001 and 31 March 2017, and the flat standard rate for anything registered on or after 1 April 2017. That is why the tax figure on each model page names the year and the engine it applies to, and why it is safer to read the V5C than to take a rate from a badge.
What goes wrong on a Tesla is decided by the individual car and the person who owned it last, not by the marque. Two examples of the same model and year, one serviced on time and one not, are in completely different condition, which is the honest reason a marque average would mislead you even if somebody published one. The invoices for the car in front of you name what was actually replaced, when, and at what mileage. Read those instead.