Chinese Ride-Hailing Company Puts Tesla Shaming Ads On Times Square Billboards

A Chinese ride-hailing company purchased a number of billboards in New York’s Times Square on Wednesday last week demanding compensation from Tesla, QZ reports.

The company in question, iUNICORN, also known as Shenma Zuanche, specializes in ride-hailing with high-end electric cars. Posting on Chinese social media site Weibo, the company asserted that 20 per cent of the 278 Tesla models it purchased in 2016 and 2017 had electromechanical issues. The company also claims that repairing the faulty vehicles took an average of 45 days and cost the company 6.5 million yuan ($970,000).

After trying, and failing, to reach out to Tesla directly regarding the vehicle issues, the company took inspiration from the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to rent three large billboards on the Thomson Reuters building in Times Square, to publicly ask for compensation from Tesla. Shenma Zuanche decided on New York because that is where Tesla’s shares are publicly listed.

The billboards were, rather confusingly, in Chinese and included messages such as “Tesla, fix it or not,” “Tesla, compensate or not,” and “Tesla, admit it or not.” Shenma also detailed the losses it experienced due to the vehicles, including a 20 per cent fault rate and 3.5 million minutes of driving time lost as the cars were out of service and being repaired.

Shema hasn’t said how much it paid to rent the billboards, but revealed that the messages were taken down just half an hour after they went up. The company doesn’t know why this happened, and was unable to take any photos of the billboards, but did a rendering of what they looked like.

Tesla has, so far, declined to comment on the incident.