As an aside, car companies actually consult for others industries because they're so good at manufacturing. When I worked for a big defense/aerospace company I got a tour of their satellite assembly and they actually paid Honda to come in and improve their manufacturing pipeline. They claim the changes sped them up and lowered bugs found after manufacturing.
Where I was wrong is that I thought the market would punish them heavily for that as customers for a car in this price range would care. I totally missed that the segment of rich people with enough disposable income to buy an average electric car as a statement was big enough to be viable. So, well played Tesla I guess.
This is pretty dismissive. I'm not sure how many Tesla owners are trying to make a statement, nor are all Tesla owners over the moon with the product. You can see a prior comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173756
There is probably much wider variation in Tesla quality than other car manufacturers, as the Model Y stories (detaching roof, hardware store wood trim hack jobs to hold assemblies) suggest. Their lack of respect for "legacy" practices throws the baby out with the bathwater. There's lots of valid criticism for Tesla.
All that being said, if you get a unit without the worst of those issues, you quickly learn to see the bigger picture and realize no competitors have yet built a comparably-capable EV. That is what drives the sales. They are here today.
EVs are not for everybody. But if they fit your automotive use case, when you need a car for transportation duties rather than the kind of pleasure that comes from driving a high-performance combustion-driven vehicle, they are so clearly the future. It's like using an LCD flat-panel monitor with a VGA connection in the early 2000s. Even before they got to the high standards they have now, those early units presaged that LCD monitors were obviously going to make CRTs obsolete. Tesla cars are the automotive equivalent of those LCDs. And it will be great for the consumer when Tesla no longer has the enormous lead that it still enjoys (years away).
Well, actually, I found your post to be mostly in agreement with me.
> There's lots of valid criticism for Tesla.
So it could be said they are an average car (in the sense that their quality is neither exceptional nor bad enough to be considered poor).
> EVs are not for everybody. But if they fit your automotive use case, when you need a car for transportation duties rather than the kind of pleasure that comes from driving a high-performance combustion-driven vehicle, they are so clearly the future.
We do agree they are the future, keyword being future. If you buy one today that's what you want to be seen as buying and are ready to suffer the pain points for it. That's what I call making a statement.
Most people would interpret "making a statement" to be a matter of signaling to others. I tried to make clear that people who buy these cars appreciate the benefits to themselves as the ones that drive and experience it, and that it has little-to-nothing to do with signaling to others. Early on in Tesla history, particularly with the Model S, I think you could argue there was a signaling element. Particularly well into in the Model 3 era, I don't think that holds to any major degree.
But the customer satisfaction scores were off the charts. It was the right mix of things. I suspect this is what’s boosting Tesla.
The overall experience is beyond what other companies are striving for.
Software features, like cut and paste, can be added later. Indeed it was.
But Tesla is getting fundamental build quality issues wrong.
“Fundamental build quality” must be subjective because it is not getting in the way of orders.
From the sound of the video, the problem seems to be variant, with paint problems one month then fixed the next.
The examples I gave for iPhone are representative of customers overlooking obvious problems.
The iPhone’s EDGE only internet, terrible screen resolution, low battery life.
These were hardware (and sw) based limitations of mass production that customers overlooked and apple handles in later gens.
You have to look at this from the perspective of Windows mobile users at the time. I.e the Wizard. That is what people who don’t get Tesla are using right now.
It was technology. It was cutting edge. The potential was instantly and tangibly apparent.
There was definitely an "early adopter" feel to it as well. But you were hopping onto something fundamentally different that yet another turbocharged BMW with 400HP and leather.
I guess you either drive in one and get that feeling, or, well, you don't.
People looking to spend a lot of money on a car that isn't used are going to look for something that justifies the cost. A lot of people look at BMWs and think that's a waste of money, you can get a used german auto, a cadillac, or similar. The Tesla has instant differentiation.
Sure the big companies are talking a big game about getting into EVs...
People trump up Rivian and Lucid as "they'll show them how its done". Ditto with Porsche, even though I have great faith in their engineers eventually.
With whose battery factories? You could say the same about Lucid, VW, GM, Hummer, Cadillac. VW is at least starting on this, as is the EU, but they are behind.
It's like a small group of knights walking up to an army challenging them to a fight. Sure they may have slightly better armor and weapons, but an army is .. an army, and they get to say "you and what battery factory?"
I used to think that the possibility for solid state batteries would close the gap overnight, but I suspect that steady progress on lithium ion cells will simply match/outpace any headline splashing battery tech.
Tesla still has a big big lead in the battery, drivetrain, and architecture over the new players. The chinese companies are likely the biggest competition over the next 10 years.
Aside from VW, I don't have faith the execs will follow through on what is at least a decade long push. They're all just dabbling, and we'll see what happens when activist investors, earnings misses, stock options lost, and CEO turnover happens.
Meanwhile outside the Tesla/Musk bubble, traditional car companies do not have QC issues like Tesla’s and are even outselling Tesla in major EV markets like Europe.
At least Musk is finally admitting to the QC issues.
Wait for cars made in Giga Berlin that will be exempted from tariffs.
The top selling EV in Europe in 2020 was the Renault Zoe, Volkswagen is catching up fast (they sold 56k ID 3 despite only going on sale in the second half of last year VS 85k Model 3 over 12 months), Tesla model 3 was second, but numbers are dropping.
If we are talking about quality, I think the new BMW and Mercedes will take the lead in the segment Tesla is being marketed right now.
Tesla numbers are good thanks to Norway buying a lot of them.
The fact that Model 3 is second only to a car almost half the price is kind of crazy.
And Tesla will probably drop this price by some 5000 euro as soon as they will start production at Giga Berlin.
Also, this decade will not be about EV vs. ICE. It will be about self-driving.
My guess is that Tesla will have robotaxis driving all around the world somewhere after 2025, but before 2030.
Traditional car companies have no expertise in software as they themselves admit.
You are probably not accounting for VAT
AFAIK self driving as in unattended driving is not big in Europe, given that most of the driving happens in crowded cities and country roads.
Self driving is welcome on highways, but almost any modern car have some kind of auto pilot system that works well enough.
> Traditional car companies have no expertise in software as they themselves admit.
That's simply not true anymore.
All manufacturers are working on it, Honda will release a level 3 at the end of March this year, Tesla is a level 2 (if I am not wrong)
p.s. I am from Italy
In the UK at least they will not only have to work fine in very busy roads but also be fine in country lanes which are often very thin, very green, and pretty fast - this will be disproportionately a problem for Tesla's because this is where the rich live.
Nobody is able to do true self driving like a taxi in city today. But it will be possible in this decade (I have 95% confidence) and it will be happening in Europe as well. Whoever achieves true, reliable, widely deployed self-driving first will crash competition. Car ownership will effectively disappear in the decade after that i.e. 2030 and later.
as a former car owner that has been car-free for 7 years (using only car sharing and short term rentals) I sincerely hope you're right.
Note that the subsidies can be up to 10k here in Italy, but that's true for Tesla as well.
Just like how they had a cross country summon in 2017, coast to coast drive in 2018, and tesla network "robotaxis" by 2019 already?
But Tesla is making progress. Maybe even more importantly, the world is making progress on fundamentals of machine learning. If you want more reliable estimate than Musk, then you can check forecast aggregators with established track record [0]. I've asked "When will Tesla self-driving taxis be available to Metaculus users?" [1] Metaculus being the forecast aggregator. Community predicts 25% before 2024, 50% before 2026, 75% before 2029, 95% before 2035.
I'm personally more aggressive and predict 95% before 2030.
[0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/
[1] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5304/widely-available-te...
And as soon as a prediction doesn't come true, they rejoice and celibate assuming because it hasn't come true in the original timeline it would never happen.
When SpaceX couldn't land the Falcon 9 for a couple years the amount of industry insider and SpaceX haters who celebrated was amazing to see, and now landing and re-flying boosters is beyond boring because it is so common.
I have seen this cycle so many times now. So, I guess sit around and feel superior for now, be sure in the fact that in 2027 nobody is gone remember all your comments.
They are because among other things Tesla has 10% tariffs.
Tesla has 23% of the global BEV market, that is the same market share as 2019. And many of those other cars are small low range city cars. So in terms of BEV revenue Tesla is much more then 23%.
Tesla has focused on the US and China first. While VW and others had to focus on Europe first. To use that fact and argue 'even outselling Tesla in major EV markets' is just disingenuous.
Next, it simply not true that traditional car companies don't have QC issues. If you look at analysis you will see that other expensive cars are often not so much better then Tesla. In terms of safety, battery and drivetrain, we have seen traditional car companies have lots of issues.
Also, Tesla is not using market share in Europe because of Quality issues. That is simply what Tesla hater want to believe because it fit the narrative.
Tesla is pretty much going through the same thing all automakers go through except it's "Tesla." Sure if they hired a few engineers out of retirement to consult they could have identified a few of these issues, but then they wouldn't have released before the balloon went up and the bulls gored them.
Generally, this isn't Tesla's biggest problem. Delivery, support, and maintenance are the big ones they are losing out on. That's what's making this recall such a big issue for them. They didn't have enough dealers to make repairs or spare parts which is why they are dragging their heels on recalls. But they are catching up there as well in typical Tesla fashion.
Sure they will piss off a few car owners, but people tend to be REALLY loyal to car brands. Just ask any Porsche owner who spends more time at the mechanic than on the road.
True, but 1980 was more than 40 years ago. The cars since the early 2000s have been trending towards cheaper parts, lower quality transmissions, and turbo charged low displacement engines. They are dialing most cars production costs down until they last just long enough for the warranty to run out. Most car manufacturer warranties don't even have more than 60k miles.
Even new designs have better fit and finish. The old automakers do know more about manufacturing.
Software is another issue though.
They'll probably be going through growing pains for years to come. Rapid expansion at the cost of quality. However, they clearly don't have a demand problem as people are willing to tolerate these issues, for now.
Instead, preferring to reinvent manufacturing, one poorly assembled $75,000 car at a time.
You can buy a $20,000 car and still expect body panels to be aligned correctly.
These quality issues Tesla is having are the absolute basics for automotive manufacturing. There's no reasonable excuse here...
But it's subjective. I have friends that prefer an EVs with tech gadgets. And they're happy with their Telsa.
Feels like an efficient market to me. There's lot of car options at different price points and quality standards. Clearly a lot of Tesla's customer are happy with their offering.
Of course not, that would be absurd. Tesla has enjoyed a ravenous fanbase for quite some time - majority of which might be willing to accept shoddy workmanship just so they can claim to own a Tesla - that doesn't make it right nor okay.
Like I said earlier... the quality issues coming out of Tesla have no excuses. They are the absolute basics of production automobile manufacturing. The basics.
30 seconds spent in QC would catch mis-aligned body panels... but they allow them to go all the way out to customers, and then pretend they had no idea what's wrong if the customer tries to reject the vehicle.
These things are not mutually exclusive - you can simultaneously be in love with your Tesla while also being disappointed at the lack of fit-and-finish and quality control.
I'd rather have a misaligned panel than a garbage infotainment system since my interactions with the infotainment are significantly higher. I'm assuming you don't check 99% of the cars you see for panel issues, but if it's a Tesla, you do - it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While Tesla can probably improve its manufacturing and QC processes over time (as they have), other OEMs have it much harder with insourcing half the vehicle components back in-house while developing great software capabilities.
Besides, the quality issues are mostly cosmetic, structurally the cars are very sound. Look at crash test data if you don't believe me.
Some of Tesla's vehicles are priced to compete with Porsche, high end Mercedes, high end BMW's, Land Rover's, etc. The things all those car manufacturers have in common is quality fit-and-finish on their expensive vehicles.
When your brand new vehicle has mis-aligned body panels - it does make you wonder what else is mis-aligned that you can't see...
Body panels being mis-aligned isn't some new manufacturing technique Tesla is experimenting with - that's just plain shoddy workmanship and a total lack of quality control. You cannot just hand-wave those issues away, particularly at the price point Tesla has maneuvered into for even their less expensive offerings.
[1] https://teslaownersonline.com/threads/pre-delivery-panel-gap...
[2] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/body-panel-alignment...
[3] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/panel-mis-alignment-...
If you watch tear down by Sandy you can compare old Model 3 manufacturing and the new Model 3 manufacturing. There is a lot of changes in welding techniques, amount of welds etc. everything gets simplified and more streamlined. With one piece casts as the final goal.
Are we to believe Tesla has zero QC? How do things like this occur? These are all solved problems companies like VW figured out decades and decades ago... Tesla is just insisting on figuring them out on their own all over again.
I highly doubt QC was sending cars out they didn't know about - it simply was too time consuming to manually fix, so they only fixed the absolute worst ones and hoped most customers wouldn't care enough to force them to fix later.
Tesla is some mix between car company and software company. Someone did a calculation where it was cheaper to ship now and take a hit on the % of customers they upset. That someone obviously was completely vindicated in their decision - the vast majority of their current customers apparently do not care enough body gaps to stop buying.
It's not like there are hundreds of books on the Toyota Production System. It's not even a secret. He had to actively ignore it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2018/02/16/tesla-th...
Also in the TPS you only automate processes that you know exactly how to do manually. Elon tried to start with automation from the start, ignoring that automation of processes you only know partially ends up multiplying your quality issues.
But it also has to be said that since Tesla has come up with a lot of new solutions that nobody else is using. Meta Casting being a nice manufacturing example.
Its easy to shit on somebody for doing something new, but that very sprit made it possible for Tesla and SpaceX to shake up their industries in the first place.
If Tesla had done everything like other car companies, they wouldn't be close to were they are today.
The same exists with buildings. Door and window placement is messed up all the time, despite being a few millenia old art.
It seems fields never really mature, they reach maybe some 90% level and can stay there at best. No problem is ever really solved. If you look away, it might actually get worse.
When we release new cars, there are huge production line issues and inefficiencies. There are a huge number of little things that add up, and most of this wisdom is held by people who have been these companies for a life time.
I am surprised that Tesla hasn't acqui-hired a smaller automobile company just for knowledge transfer.
Now-a-days, they pretty much take parts from higher-end / niche cars, and put them in production vehicles. In such cases, a car that's a Frankenstein's monster of generally reliable parts will usually be reliable, even in a version 1.
But if it is brand new, brand new...you might want to be cautious. Especially if it is a convertible or a car in a new segment that they didn't cater to before.
Lastly, some sub-brands are too important to tarnish even in a version 1. Civic, Corolla, Rav4, Wrangler and similar bread-and-butter models go through significantly higher scrutiny and are generally safe to buy in any version.
Turned out that there are huge number of issues when manufacturing an automobile. And that the knowledge to prevent or resolve a lot of those issues exist only in the heads of people who have gone through it before.
The build quality of early Tesla's was... not great. And while my understanding is that it has improved quite a bit in recent years. That said, most people in the industry seem to feel that Tesla still has a ways to go before they are "world class" in build quality.
This does not excuse Tesla, I do own a model 3 from September 2018 and still find it a great car, but the idea that other manufacturers don't have problems is ludicrous. Ford had to issue a STOP SALE on Mach E because of issues.
Tesla has introduced so many innovations from OTA which other manufacturers will have to adapt to as well remote vehicle services which for the most part you cannot get elsewhere. VW suffered a lot of issues on this, their software stack is apparently really a mess.
https://fordauthority.com/2021/01/ford-issues-mustang-mach-e...
It helps that they have money that allows them to delay shipping one of their models, if needed.