As for build quality, we haven't had any major problems with our Model 3. It's a great car.
Tesla has a media problem, where every little problem gets reported as if it's systemic and unfixable.
And now it looks like Cruise and Waymo have full self driving in San Francisco which looks amazing. There’s hour long videos of it navigating perfectly and smoothly in a jam packed city. Nothing like the Tesla videos which show it almost slamming into bikes/curbs or just freaking out and stopping in the middle of an intersection.
Has great acceleration though and charging at home is great or on the road with superchargers. But Teslas edge is not as wide anymore.
Who could have predicted that just relying just on cameras was not a good solution ? Definitely not the hundreds of researchers that told Musk that a LIDAR was necessary.
It's like hiring a plumber who can only flush toilets, not install them. Self driving in pristine conditions is a party trick. Until it can do the hard part, it's nowhere near human-level.
They knew dojo wouldn't be online by then and they didn't even really train on video at that point, just trying to judge the scene image by image instead of taking into account prior frames (like knowing someone walked behind a bush 1p frames ago, so that sliver of emerging leg from behind a bush that might not be detectable confidently enough from a single image should be weighted higher).
See this example, where the map data is completely wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gTV9SlutU0
Does it actually work in the real world is the yardstick to apply.
Beyond the problems with YouTube as evidence, its very clear that Tesla isn't operating a proper safety lifecycle as part of the beta and its not clear that their approach and their current hardware is even capable of solving the remaining problems with FSD. Having already sold the hardware as FSD capable, Tesla has created a problem where the hardware drives the validation process of the system, rather than validation process driving the hardware. This is a fundamentally unsafe approach to safety critical systems.
German automakers are a great example of this. Whether it's gas or electric they significantly understate the performance and efficiency of their cars while in the real world they always exceed what they've promised.
Similar to Apple, people expect more from them than anyone else. Minor issues on Apple products are always scandals. Remember Antennagate? People were sure that it would sink Apple, because "they don't know how to make antennas". People and media handle Tesla similarly, and minor issues are blown out of proportion.