Go find the HN discussion on this report. German processes and bureaucracy surrounding road worthiness checks is not favourable towards non-established car brands like Tesla.

In short: big car brands' cars go through a preliminary check at manufacturers' licensed dealerships, and only after that get sent to the government's checks. It enables manufacturers to fix cars before independent verification so their safety numbers look great. Tesla doesn't have this kind of extensive network for "pre-checks".

You're explaining (one of) the reasons Tesla is failing at the metric. Far from showing the metric is flawed, you're exposing the value of a dealer system and what Tesla's customers are losing because there isn't one.

What value are you talking about?

Not publishing open stats on test failures? Why is that something the customer would want to pay for?

The value is as an additional line of QC. If you think about it as "hiding statistics" then there is no value. If you think of it as the last step in the production process, then clearly the cars making it to the customers are of a higher average level if the bad ones get rejected.

It also lets Tesla play with the numbers of shipped cars, because cars returned by dealers don't count as shipped.

But look at the recent HN story about the Tesla without a brake pad.

I think you may be confused as to the context. Or else I am, let me check.

Ok, so this is a check done after the car has been used for 3 years.

So, it's not QC before the car leaves the factory, it's fixing things before the government checks them and puts them into the public stats for test "failures".

I may have misunderstood. These statistics are generated by the government checking vehicles after they've been in service for 3 years by an end consumer? And only after the dealer gives it an immediately preceding check? If so, that invalidates my point.

If it's just the results of regular dealer maintenance, it's fuzzier.

> And only after the dealer gives it an immediately preceding check?

Some dealers are qualified to perform the checks and also offer to perform a pre check for free. However cars checked by a dealer would not end up on a statistic of cars checked by TüV.

If your mom warned you a day in advance that she is going to see how lean your room is, is she going to get a true understanding of your cleanliness, or just a snapshot of what your room is like?