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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.