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Originally Posted by JSH
Tesla is only doing well if you are judging by sales volume. If you judge the product launch and quality they are way behind established automakers.
The Bolt launch on schedule and delivered cars that meet current industry standards.
Tesla launched late and delivered essentially pre-production cars with a host of quality and fit issues. The panel fit has gotten better with time (likely as they tweek the tooling to fix issues that they are discovering building customer's cars.)
Time will tell how the long term quality turns out on cars build by hand, in a tent, by recently hired temp workers. It my experience that doesn't work too well. (Every time we add a shift we have quality issues even when the workers are trained and shadow experience workers for 4-6 weeks before during the job on their own)
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Quality is almost always going to be worse because they're doing public betas with their investors, employees, and select owners, but that's why they limit release AFAIK. They're also more likely to deliver cars with quality issues as long as they are functional because it's do or die for production now that they've hit their 200,000 US sale, and they're also using their repair centers to touch up cars instead of doing that at the factory.
In terms of quality, my feeling is that people are focusing on it because certain media outlets are focusing on it. I never thought about or looked at panel gaps and the like until the stories about them were shotgunned all over the news cycle, and when I did look at them it turns out my wife's 2014 Plug-in Prius, which we bought new in 2014, has worse issues with alignment and panel gap than the 3 I picked up in May has, and similar issues with the interior fit and finish. I imagine if you look hard enough, many cars have these issues. The thing is, after 10k+ miles, rock chips, small scratches, and dents are more obvious on most cars in most than the little quality issues that made it out of the factory, and the majority of people don't care or notice.
Production has certainly been an issue for Tesla, but my car's great overall, and I imagine most cars out of the factory will be similar. That's of course assuming a reasonable 10' view. If I start going over any new car like it's a show car I'm going to find a bunch of issues. From what I've pieced together, Tesla probably has experienced people in the tent (GA4) because GA2, which was the first heavily automated line for the 3, was a flop and is in the middle of being reconfigured/redone, so Tesla has enough people to cover the tent until GA2 is up. GA3, which is less automated than GA2, is what's currently responsible for the majority of production (80% IIRC).
Having the tent allowed Tesla to increase overall capacity, specifically capacity that's relatively consistent, like the Model S/X lines, because there's little to no automation. I'm guessing opening up sales of a Performance 3 with base tires/wheels/brakes provided enough in the way of margin to offset the higher labor costs of production and more time spent on QA for the higher margin costs. I think the plan is to approach 10,000 with GA2+GA3 running at 8,000+ cars/week and GA4 at 1,000+/week. Tesla's been on a hiring spree for production associates ever since it became apparent that GA2 wasn't going to work late last year/early this year, so I'm not sure if the limitation for expanding beyond 4,000-5,000 cars/week is getting GA2 up, hiring/training enough people for GA2, or both.
Their product launch was certainly a failure compared to their own estimates, but at the same time I think they're currently delivering cars that meet and/or exceed the majority of industry standards. I think everyone's going to have to spend/work a lot to catch up to Tesla on tech/design. The outstanding question IMO is how and when Tesla can ramp 3 production significantly from where they are now. After driving the car for a couple months, my feeling is that the 3 is years ahead of anything else offered today, and that seems to be a consistent theme I've seen, provided of course someone's paycheck doesn't depend on their opinion.
Tesla Model 3 - NextGen Battery - EVTV Motor Verks
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors...iewer/e2ryr7u/
https://www.inl.gov/article/advanced...y-development/