2024 Tesla Model S — Should You Buy One?
Typical asking price: $45,000–$65,000. There is 1 high-severity known issue you need to know before handing over a check.
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Kestrel Take
Thirty-eight complaints is a thin record, and a thin record is not a reliability rating — it means few people have filed, which is what you would expect of a car this new and this expensive. Half of what is there is one behaviour: lane departure assist tugging at the wheel and sounding emergency alarms while the driver is turning slowly into a driveway or a garage, sometimes with the feature switched off. Read those filings and several come from the same owners logging incident after incident, so treat 50% as one loud problem rather than nineteen households. The rest is software — a driver display going black, an update that moved the speed control, Full Self-Driving doing things at intersections it should not. Most of these cars are still inside Tesla's four-year warranty, so the first question is what the service history says and what the car has been updated to since.
What we checked
Reconciled against public records, 2026-09-25
NHTSA holds 38 owner complaints for the 2024 Tesla Model S, and 6 recall campaigns.
A big number here usually means a lot of these were sold, not that it is a bad vehicle — popular models collect more complaints for the same rate of trouble. So the total on its own says little. What is worth reading is the shape of it. 50% of them are about one thing — lane departure. That much concentration is a genuine pattern rather than background noise, and it is the first thing to check on any example you look at.
6 recall campaigns cover this model year. Recalls are repaired free, for any owner, with no time limit on most safety campaigns — but only if someone books it in. Ask the seller to show it was done, or have any dealer check the VIN; it takes them a couple of minutes and costs nothing.
Counts come from the NHTSA complaint and recall database — free, public, and worth checking yourself.
Known Issues for the 2024 Tesla Model S
Ranked by wallet impact. These are documented, recurring problems — not freak accidents. How we decide that.
Nineteen complaints, half the entire record, plus filings under steering saying the same thing. Owners describe driving manually at 5–15 mph with the blinker on, turning into a driveway or a garage, and the car sounding an emergency chime and putting a steering input in — one says it swerved him toward the garage door frame. Several state the lane departure settings were already switched off. It is a software behaviour, not a part, and Tesla changes it in updates, so what matters is the build this particular car is on. On the test drive, signal and turn slowly off a road into a driveway and see what the wheel does in your hands.
Repair cost: Not yet priced — a safety matter first, a repair bill second
Source: NHTSA complaints filed under lane departure (19), steering (4).
Seven electrical complaints, 18% of a small record, and they are about screens and software rather than wiring. One owner had the display behind the wheel go black while driving, leaving no speed and no gear indication. Another found an over-the-air update had changed the scroll control so the set speed could no longer be capped. A third let go of the Summon button and watched the car keep rolling forward until he caught it by the door handle, and one filing is a crash during a right turn in self-driving mode with no warning light shown. Have the seller update the car before you view it, then check that both screens come up cleanly from cold.
Repair cost (estimate): $700–$1,600 to replace the driver display unit
Source: NHTSA complaints filed under electrics and electronics (7).
Walk-Away Red Flags
- ✗The wheel tugging, or an alarm sounding, as you signal and turn slowly into a driveway
- ✗The driver display going dark or restarting during the test drive
- ✗Summon still creeping after you take your thumb off the button
- ✗An advert claiming Full Self-Driving when the car's Autopilot screen shows only the basic system
- ✗A car left on an old software build by an owner who stopped updating it
Good Signs
- ✓A clean, complete boot of both screens from a cold start, with speed and gear shown
- ✓Lane departure assist staying quiet through a slow signalled turn into a driveway
- ✓Current software on the screen, updated within the last few months
- ✓Remaining factory cover — 4 years or 50,000 miles basic and 8 years on the battery from the in-service date
- ✓Full Self-Driving showing as active on this VIN's own Autopilot settings page, if the price assumes it
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Known issues on this page are based on documented owner reports, NHTSA complaints, class-action records, and manufacturer technical service bulletins. Individual vehicles vary. A pre-purchase inspection by a trusted mechanic is always worth doing.
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