Also, the condition of the body and the interior matter more to the vehicle’s resale value than the condition of the rest of the car - again they are indicators of the quality and care taken with the rest of the car.
If they can’t manage tolerances measured in millimeters, how can they manage manufacturing and assembly tolerances measured in the thousandths of a millimeter?
Yes.
Internal combustion engines require intense tolerances. If your cylinder head is 1mm out of spec you're going to have serious problems.
But if the wire winding bundle for the electric motor is 5mm out of spec? You'll be fine.
The areas in a Tesla where tolerances are actually important- the batteries and PCBs- are subject to completely different engineering practices. Nobody's going to get cross trained from fitting door panels to placing SMCs... which is done by a robot anyway.
Do you (literally) kick the tires of a car before you buy it?
If the doors are misaligned it either means the chassis is deformed, or at best the hinges are misaligned.
That doesn't bode well to what happens in a crash, or if it rains. Are the seals oversized to account for slop? what happens when they get old?
If I'm dropping $100k on a new car, I want to make bloody sure its built well. That doesn't mean that people won't buy them, far from it.
Look, I get it, Tesla is new and shiny. But lets not over-rate them. They have parts that are very well built. but the software, chassis and interior are not part of that.
This is implicitly saying that what matters is not even the specific car you are buying, but the image of the company and their entire lineup being electric.
This cuts in the opposite direction for me - it is a significant reason why I wouldn't buy a Tesla (other than the price). The company is so tied to Elon that if some sort of scandal happened to him, it would instantly taint owners of the cars.
High end Volvo’s are a good example of old-school quality — gorgeous interiors, beautiful trim. But they’re still predominantly internal combustion engine era designs. The height of it from a luxury finish standpoint. But, Tesla’s different.
Maybe it’s that petro cars reached a peak, and the only way to really differentiate has come down to “door sound” and body panel alignment measured in nanometers.