A friend has a Tesla without a back bumper because it fell off when it rained. She's not alone, either.

Tesla's saying Tesla should sacrifice completeness because Tesla chose to sacrifice completeness. And a car with a bumper that falls off in the rain is in some way one of incomplete or unfinished.

I worked as a mechanic several years ago, I can't tell you the number of times we were working on a car before it was sold. Cleaning up seals, fixing window motors, applying recalls.

2 years ago I bought an Audi that I was unable to get into after it dropped below freezing for the first time, because the window leaked water internally which froze and the door can't be opened unless the window comes down slightly. That doesn't mean the Audi was unfinished, or that all Audis are awful...

Shit happens, not every car is perfect, and i'm not saying it is, i'm just saying that they aren't selling half-finished cars. Defects are defects, not an incomplete product.

Nobodies saying that other cars are defect free. But what they are saying is that Teslas have more defects than other cars, which is a problem--especially when they have yet to scale up to meaningful production quantities.

Having this many defects with this few cars made indicates serious production quality control issues, which just gets worse as production scales.

Why do people think it's easy to make perfect cars in small numbers?

I would assume that defects will go down as they scale up, as things will become less manual and more automated, and they find the common problems and fix them at manufacturing time.

Are there other car companies that started from nothing that went a different direction? Did they start with nearly perfect cars then get progressively worse as they scaled up? Did they plan to mass manufacturer cars?

The Model 3 is still roughly in its first year of production and I would expect it to have more defects that need rework than a car that has been made for 10.

They don’t state in the article that the quoted facts about other automakers are for cars in their first model year.

This from Electrek.com:

"For some unknown reason, Tesla says that it won’t be shipping the Performance Model 3 with the spoiler included in the performance package for the early production of the vehicle.

Owners will be able to have it shipped and installed at their local service center.

The badge was also a question mark for a long time since the first 50,000 Model 3 vehicles that Tesla produced had no badge beyond the Tesla logo."

https://electrek.co/2018/07/19/tesla-model-3-performance-spo...

The factory not installing something that was part of the vehicle means that the car is incomplete.

These are cars that aren't coming off the line clean. Toyota/honda/BMW would see this as a horrible situation. They would say that with so many errors needing fixing that there is little doubt other errors are happening unnoticed.

Why do you think Tesla doesn't see this as a horrible situation?

Pretend your are Honda and you just found out this is happening, what do you do? Shut down the plant and fix it properly? Who is going to fund that? What happens if it causes other issues? How long can you afford to do this?

Or would you get some people to fix the problem after production manually while you worked on solving the root of the issue? Exactly what Tesla is doing here...

>>Shut down the plant and fix it properly?

Yes.

>> Who is going to fund that? What happens if it causes other issues? How long can you afford to do this?

I don't care. I am not an investor. I am a consumer, a potential customer. I don't care whether the Tesla company lives or dies. I care about the quality of the vehicle I might purchase. Seeing this sort of problem at Tesla is a red flag. I don't want to buy a car made in a factory with such problems.

What really worries me isn't so much the problem, but that Tesla isn't in full panic mode about it. The more defensive they and their supporters are, the more rooted the problem seems. A full shutdown and re-tooling would be a signal that they are a serious company. Musk has the money to do this. Instead we read about bandage solutions. The roots of the problem must be very deep.

This has happened to every other car company on the planet at one time. Pretending it hasn't is silly.

If you don't want a car that has ever had any production issues at any point in it's life, you don't want a car.

It's like complaining that Intel has low yield numbers for their CPUs, or that some of the apples that your local orchid grows are rotten.

The cars are being manufactured to the correct specs, it's just a different (more manual) way of doing it. If you care about nothing but your car, then you wouldn't give a shit how it's manufactured as long as it's good.

If you have an issue with the end result of these cars, that's another thing. But the FPY has nothing to do with that. A car made to shitty specs and with awful tolerances is going to be awful regardless of whether they made it awful on the first try or the 10th.

That is exactly what Honda would do. Shut down the plant and fix it properly. In fact, that's what every other carmaker actually does, except that they do trial runs of their factory lines before actually initiating mass production precisely so they can identify and fix problems in the assembly line like the ones Tesla is now facing.

And who will fund that? Because Tesla is not Honda, they don't have the ability to sit back and spend a year or 2 on just prototyping assembly, they don't have the decades of experience running factories like this, they don't have the money to shut everything down for a few months to fix what amounts to 37 minute of fixes per car...

It seems absolutely insane to me that they Honda would stop the world for something like that. It's like what, $15 per car in labor? $30 per car in labor? And you want to stop the whole factory output for potentially weeks to stop that? That seems like a monumental waste of time and money.

> they don't have the decades of experience running factories like this

Then Elon Musk is incompetent. Because the fact is, if you don't have the experience in running a factory, you hire someone that does. This is literally a problem that you throw money at, and it goes away.

It's better to waste a little bit of time and money upfront then a lot of time and money later, especially when the one-time fix will eliminate a recurring time/money sink. It may seem insane to you, but it's just common business sense to a carmaker thats been around for decades.

But that's what they are doing... Wasting a little time and money up front by manually fixing it while they develop and deploy a fulltime fix...

People here seem to be implying that they should entirely shut down the entire factory and not start it up again until all of these flaws are completely fixed, and that's not "wasting a little bit of time and money" that's putting a bullet in the head of the company.

Tesla is wasting a lot of time and money fixing each car individually rather than actually addressing the problem in their assembly line. They actually do shut down their lines for at least a week each quarter--they've simply failed to make all the necessary fixes when they do, meaning that the even their shutdowns are a waste of time and money.

They are wasting an average of 37 minute per car, and I still haven't heard a reasonable explanation of why 37 minutes is going to cost them everything. Even if it cost them an extra $500 per car for those 37 minutes, it's not going to ruin them, especially when it's temporary.

Most companies shut down their lines every quarter, it's a pretty common thing, and implying that Tesla is "failing" to make all the changes when they do so is silly, this is still a moving target, shit is still changing and improving. If they weren't closing down their line every quarter still, then i'd be worried that they can't keep up and aren't even trying to improve things any more.