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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

How many Tesla insiders knew reliability would be poor before the first customer picked up a Model X?

Certainly it was known by many of the key engineers, possibly some in management, but the interesting question is did Musk himself know?

It's hard to believe he would knowingly tarnish the brand by delivering the least reliable SUV in America to customers.

On the other hand, it was already 18 months late - the pressure from all sides to deliver must have been enormous, with people on the edge of burnout.

As a purist, it's easy to say hold out as long as needed and don't compromise, but at some point it could have become a duke nukem forever scenario.

Pick your poison.

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I think we're seeing Elon Musk's strategy of hitting the market early play out here. Same thing is happening with "autopilot" - the aggressive marketing has clearly cost lives, but it helps Tesla in their future endeavors (for now, at least).

By contrast, Google's self-driving tech is years and years ahead of Tesla's. Google is not interested in going to market with this technology until it's 100% ready.

It's worth mentioning that Google lost most of their team working on self-driving cars this year. In fact, I think every person in charge (Thrun, Levandowski, Urmson, plus whoever else) has left.

> Google's self-driving tech is years and years ahead of Tesla's.

Source?

It's an apples to oranges comparison; the two companies have quite different approaches, and it's totally unclear how it's going to turn out for either one.

You can find a ton of opinions about it, though, here and other places.

"the aggressive marketing has clearly cost lives"

Tesla has suggested the opposite -- that the crash rate when the car is on autopilot is already lower than normal.

Tesla spun bad statistics to make that claim. They're comparing highway driving to all driving, and highway driving is statistically safer. They're also ignoring demographics, as Tesla owners tend to be affluent and older. If you take this into consideration, it actually suggests that it's less safe, however with such a tiny sample size it's too early to draw any conclusions from the data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/0...

Considering Tesla's very generous warranty on the first 4 years or 50,000 miles https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/Model_S_New_V... it's hard to believe any sinister theories regarding shipping a flawed product under strong pressure from sales department. Any monetary gains would be short-term and go into negative quickly as consumers start bringing their vehicles for free repairs.

My friend got a loaner Model S while her X was in the shop for repairs, which on top of completely free repairs seems like a pretty expensive and undesirable process for Tesla Motors.

> Considering Tesla's very generous warranty on the first 4 years or 50,000 miles

It's not overly generous, considering that in the same North American market Kia offer 10 years / 100,000 miles on the powertrain versus eight years / 125,000 on the Tesla, and five years with various higher-than-Tesla mileage limits on other aspects.

http://www.edmunds.com/kia/optima/2016/long-term-road-test/2...

And that's on a sub-$30k vehicle.

As of 2014 the powertrain warranty (Tesla refers to it as drive unit warranty) is 8 years + unlimited miles http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/08/tesla-extend...

The 4/50,000 is bumper-to-bumper.

"it's hard to believe any sinister theories regarding shipping a flawed product under strong pressure from sales"

But I think pressure could have come from the accounting department ("if we do not ship now, our shares will go down, making it too hard to get the money we need, bankrupting the company") or from Musk ("if we do not ship now, our shares will go down, an I would have to give up control of the company to get the money we need")

Yes, a flawed product costs more money, but even if that is only weeks away, it may be better than facing a slightly less bad situation _now_.

he stated he was camping the production line, if this is true then how could he not know. maybe they were counting on buyers of the X to be so enthralled they would over look the issues? I know reading the forums you do get some rabid sycophants who defend about anything, get off the forums into the wild and it can be sillier.

I was simply shocked someone actually defended having their axles replaced. The only X at work has misaligned door handles, front to passenger are so off its just odd looking.

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