I mean, yeah, they could be doing all kinds of crazy things. But so could anyone else who needs to ship products on tight schedules. Why single out Tesla here? I mean, would you react this way if it turned out Mazda or Audi was taping down some misassembled parts?
Citation needed. I've never seen a story this thin (one photo of tape holding down a nonstructural plastic housing) run about another manufacturer. You have a counterexample?
The shortcuts in question include using electrical tape to fix cracked plastic components, passing cars known to be missing bolts or lug nuts, and reduction of testing. This whole "it's one picture of tape, there's no _real_ evidence, sheeple!" bleating is getting wearing.
* Toyota plans to recall 1 million hybrid models over wiring issue
* Toyota recalls 70,000 vehicles to replace air bag inflators - CNBC.com
* Toyota operating profit growth to drop this year on revenue slip
* Toyota is making high-performance versions of the Camry and Avalon
* Toyota struggles to save breakthrough Prius hybrid - CNBC.com
* Toyota and SoftBank are teaming up to target self-driving car services
* 2018 Toyota Land Cruiser review - CNBC.com
* Toyota recalls 2.4 million hybrids due to stalling problems - CNBC.com
2. Another recall
3. Corporate accounting announcement.
4. Product announcement.
5. Product analysis.
6. Product announcement.
7. Product review.
8. A third recall.
Those all seem awfully newsworthy to me. And they're sourced well, with citations going all the way up the corporate ladder.
How exactly do you argue that these are journalistically equivalent to "here's a picture of tape"?
The usage of the tape, as suggested by the article, wasn't for electrical insulation or wiring protection.
Definitely does seem like a weird thing to base an article on especially when Tesla does lots of other things wrong.
Right, because like I said above, the prevailing paradigm is to skewer Tesla by extrapolating from any available datapoint. So people take "tape" and invent reasons for the tape that don't appear in the article. Some of this isn't the posters' fault, because the article is sensationalized and is clearly trying to lead you to a conclusion about "tape" that it can't make with the simple facts presented.
Which is a media behavior that is, in the auto industry as of right now, almost exclusive to Tesla. No one runs dirt stories about tape on Fords, not because there isn't any (I mean, who knows, but none of would be shocked to read about it) but because even if there was, no one would care.
Whereas the people reporting the tape are saying it's standard electrical tape, used to hold cracked pieces of plastic together.
Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Anyway, your question wasn't would the media write about it, it was would you react the same way. An accusation of personal bias, which gets handed out like candy on Tesla threads. It's toxic.
At the bottom of auto/EV articles, I frequently see a sentence or two soliciting stories from tesla employees specifically. Often times the article isn’t even about tesla!
I can see disgruntled employees jumping at the chance to share their story with a journalist incentivized to write about it.