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.