Except that there most commonly sold car is half that, plus maybe $500. Then if you factor in cost of ownership, which its crazy not too, subtract another $5000 or so.

Their most commonly sold car is still a very expensive car (around $40,000 after all the dust has settled).

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...

If you, like myself, prefer value and quality issue like body panel alignment then I agree, stay away from Telsa for now.

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.

What's the argument here? That Ford, Kia, Toyota, Chevy et al should start mis-aligning body panels on purpose because some people will accept it anyway - or not know any better?

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 think that's the exact point of the previous comment. Don't stand for misaligned panels? Don't buy a Tesla. The free market will promote those vehicles that have a good enough value proposition over the ones that don't.

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.

Tesla owners tend to be higher income individuals, I.E you have the Kia to get to and from work, and the Tesla when you want to be cool.

My Nissan Leaf cost even less than that. It was one of the first off the line, too; built after they swept all the tsunami debris out of the factory. The body panels line up just fine. Best not get me started on our $15K Scion's quality in comparison.

No one's forcing you to buy one. Let them try other manufacturing techniques to see if it goes anywhere.

Besides, the quality issues are mostly cosmetic, structurally the cars are very sound. Look at crash test data if you don't believe me.

When you purchase a $75,000 car, there's a reasonable expectation basic, basic things like body panels will be aligned correctly[1][2][3]. You're not buying a prototype nor experimental vehicle - it's a full fledged production vehicle priced at an extreme premium.

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-...

Tesla is addressing these issues with metal casting cars in big pieces. If you watch the interview the issues are supposedly due to accumulation of errors on small parts. Metal casting will eliminate all these errors. They already do that on Model Y. They just don't have enough operational capacity to roll it out across all manufacturing lines according to Elon.

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.

I'm still not seeing a reason why mis-aligned body panels ever left the factory. New process or not... some person bolted it on incorrectly, then allowed it to go out to the customer.

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've listened to multiple interviews that state body gap consistency is one of the hardest bits of mass vehicle manufacturing to get right.

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.

Yeah, you might want to avoid having your car manufacturing QC process compared to the Ford Pinto ..

https://www.tortmuseum.org/ford-pinto/

Yeah, I mean Elon refused to learn from the best.

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...

The Toyota production system is less about the physical manufacturing techniques and more about the framework for their industrial and corporate process. I imagine it still takes time to fix each error that accumulates into a panel gap ultimately.

It still takes time, but he's not following it, otherwise the line would be stopped when a worker spots a quality issue, e.g. paint not dried, or Panel gaps misaligned.

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.

SpaceX and Tesla reinvented many things and 90% of the time it worked out. Turns out reinventing manufacturing wasn't as easy.

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.