Yeah, sacrificing QC for scaling is biting them in the ass in a big way.

There are plenty of people who have heard horror stories about Tesla and are now won't consider buying one. All of the small buy annoying defects were acceptable to the first-mover crowd, but they're an extremely small segment of the market. Once you go mass market, people care a great deal about the quality of something they're spending $30k+ on and which may be their only vehicle.

Tesla’s are great and all but American cars don’t exactly have a good reputation in Europe

What's more likely to happen first: Tesla catches up on a century's knowledge and experience of car manufacturing, or the combined resources of the entire car industry catches up on a decade or so of technological advantage in batteries?