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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

The horror stories about 3 month wait for parts and the videos of water intruding into new vehicles, are keeping me away.

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I love Tesla for its effect of pushing the EV industry forward. And I love Tesla early adopters for largely funding and justifying investment in this.

But yeah, every time I daydream about owning a Tesla, I realise that it's my daydream about owning an Apple Newton.

This.

Tesla has always had body alignment issues since their first attempt, the Model S. It’s honestly quite unfortunate because these models are suppose to be a shiny example of American manual labor pushing out the new luxury model that would set Tesla up to enter the mid level market with a Model 3. Sadly, technological advances, a backlog of orders, and minimal factory space, all contributed to a decline in quality. Don’t get me wrong, these are absolutely beautiful cars, but in terms of actual construction of the vehicles, GM and Ford has nailed this to perfection with their automatic + human labor assembly lines. They’re able to produce numbers right now that Tesla can only dream about with a much higher satisfaction rate, I would think.

If Musk wants to really compete with the Big 3, he has to focus on quality all the way around and not just the ability to slap bigger batteries in and more speed through firmware updates. If you want to make a car, focus on the basics of it—the actual body, making sure my door lines up with my front fenders. Such basic cosmetic issues that are overlooked constantly on the cars coming from the Tesla factory.

The quality on the 3 is fine. I've heard so many panel gap anecdotes and "fit and finish" problem that I was a bit excessive in my inspection of my Model 3 before I took delivery (November 2018). It was fine. There are no quality problems that I've been able to ascertain. The only real kind of weird thing is the polarized glass on the roof turns a really strange but beautiful color when it gets wet.

The car drives like nothing I've ever driven, not even a higher end mercedes.

It looks so weird and cool when it's wet that I wonder if they did it on purpose. It delights strangers who see it the first time.

Yup! My daughter absolutely adores it

so i have an x and when it rains we do sometimes get some water into the back seat when raising the trunk... but to keep this in perspective... the car is like an iphone compared to your flip phone. 2007 was a long time ago so maybe people forget just how impactful that phone was when people first tried it out. That is the exact same experience I have had when first owning and S and now an X. A minor issue like water when raising the trunk on an exceptionally rainy day is just that minor when you compare it to the amazing feeling you get when the over the air update alert hits your phone and you start to wonder whether you'll get the latest update to detect stop signs. Or as I recall in 2014 - an audio up/down control near the passenger seat. Imagine if you were annoyed at the UI in your current car. With all of it's physical buttons that is it. You have no luck unless you buy a different car. In a Tesla if the UI is an issue they'll push an update and you'll have a new car without buying one. Let alone the buying experience of a Tesla vs anything else. Go online swipe your credit card... wait sometime and show up at a Tesla store and drive away with your car or they deliver it to your house. No haggling, no sleazy car salesman just a new car that gives you that feeling of an iphone in 2007 vs the old flip phone.... I am sure i sound like a fan boy... and I know my wife wishes i'd stop talking about it but it's pretty freaking worth it and nice.

I'll weigh in on the curmudgeon side. The knobs in my car were perfect from the day I bought it because they were optimized by engineers over decades. If there was ever a UI issue, it was corrected before I was born. Because the controls are physical I can operate them by touch and habit while focusing on the road. Years of driving have resulted in mental circuits that automatically detect stop signs and manage lane-keeping with zero conscious attention, just as easy as walking.

No-haggle direct manufacturer purchases are good, though. I can only agree with that.

> Years of driving have resulted in mental circuits that automatically detect stop signs and manage lane-keeping with zero conscious attention, just as easy as walking

I thought the same thing when I had an S a few years back. This was just the adaptive cruise control + lane holding days, and I figured it'd be nice for sure but not game changing.

I was entirely wrong. Sure, driving without AP on wasn't hard, but turning AP on made road trips and commuting 1000x more pleasant for me. Driving without AP may be habitual and ingrained, but it still occupies a certain amount of mental capacity to hold the line.

Being freed from that wasn't just about getting more time to look at scenery, either. With fewer brain cycles spent on mechanically maneuvering the car, I could spend those cycles better monitoring other vehicles for potential hazards (crazy drivers, etc.)

Lots of things have changed in cars since you born and their interfaces have hardly been perfected.

Namely things to do with phones like navigation, music, or phone calls. Not to mention things like improved climate control or safety (like the sentry system.)

The knobs in the car represent a local maxima and your muscle memory is a sunk cost.

Why should I have to do most of the things that those knobs do? I’d prefer to let Tesla write the automotive software instead of trying to embed it in my hands via years of practice.

Imagine if you were annoyed at the UI in your current car.

Don’t have to, the UI in the Leaf (at least in the first gen), sucks. But you know what would annoy me more? If my $50K+ car leaked water. That’s something the industry figured out over fifty years ago. I’ll take a shitty UI over over water invading spaces I won’t find out about until the rust and bad wiring show up.

Depends on the vehicle...Our C5 Corvette didn't get teh last minute deflectors and used to spill water on the rear speakers when opening in the wet.

They fix a lot of problems, but the customers demanding new designs every few years means we still keep fixing some of the same problems over and over.

I’m talking about water pouring out of the sunroof, and coming out of the dashboard

thanks but no thanks, software is a disaster. I'm in no rush to be the first set of guinea pigs to have a software update cause a car crash

I personally would buy one if I could. But if I'm not allowed to get parts for it and work on it then its not a viable vehicle to me. I can't be beholden on whatever schedule the service department has or how fast they can get parts. Which sounds like not very fast.

Once Tesla's operations are running smoothly, most of these issues should fix themselves.

We’ve been hearing that for years. What keeps holding it back? Why aren’t things smooth yet?

Because they are ramping up rapidly?

It’s just that every time it seems like they might be about to start to get stable they launch some new vehicle and we go through another period of ‘ramping up’. The older vehicles don’t seem to get stable even though the S has been out for years now. People use the 3 (or truck or...) as the excuse for why things are still a bit rough.

For a company breaking new grounds and pushing EVs, I would give them at least another 10 years. It is not ideal, but you have to take into account that it takes time to build your network (charging/service centers etc.). That's why if the money comes, the rest will fall into place (in time of course!).

So if I were to buy a Tesla today I should expect their service department to be problematic for possibly 10 years?

That doesn’t sound odd to you?

I get when they were selling the roadster or early S. But 10 years from now?

To me ramp up is more a function of org. grows than specifically new model.

And parent will finally feel good to buy TSLA at $1000.

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