"The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones.

Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.

Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too.

People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.

> Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.

Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C they needed to do at least a review of environmental constraints and operational ceilings, and the most rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily get to 80C.

I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking about Teslas shortcuts.

But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.

+1. This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line, because you can reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship updates before they come into play. But when you sell someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20 years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later.

The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly.

There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering).

In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.

Selling something you know breaks within a short amount of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to replace it is fraud.

a lot of things can feel like the future when you don’t have to support them through their lifetime.

Move faster, break more things? Tesla delivers far more refined products than SpaceX

I've seen my 2017 Mazda LCD go into protection mode a few times. It also dims before that stage.