The thing you are missing is also the frequency of mistakes, consistency in the vehicles in general, how well they manage the problem to fix it, and the number of defects relative to vehicles on the road. This entire article sounds like Google or Amazon level Don't-Give-A-Shit about the customer applied to cars. And some of their mistakes are mind boggling:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/5/21502379/tesla-modely-roo...
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-owner-details-quali... "The main issue they have is a lack of consistency,” Nelson said. “I could have rejected the delivery for not meeting my own quality standards, but a new car could take weeks or even months and I’d just be throwing the dice again. The next car could be in even worse shape."
Thanks for getting the ball rolling Tesla, but I'll be waiting for the Japanese to perfect it before going electric.
Other OEMs are reasonably good at those bits, and can, at worst, buy a drivetrain from someone good at it - but there's nothing particularly exotic about an electric drivetrain, especially if you've been putting out hybrid drivetrains for a while.
There are plenty of drivers like myself that specifically buy reliable vehicles, 2nd hand. Tesla can’t even match the reliability of my current car that cost less than 1/4 of the cheapest new Tesla. The incumbents have plenty of run way. It remains to be seen what happens.
Economy of scale would seem to win the day in the end.
Building an electric car is not fundamentally different than building an ICE one.
Changing the drivetrain does not change the rest of the vehicle that much, other than packaging, and thats pretty easy to figure out, any competent manufacturing engineer can do it.
Maybe the question is going to become can tesla keep up?
"General Motors knew about a defect in its ignition switches eight years ago and changed the design of an internal part, but never told federal regulators or the drivers of its cars, according to evidence from a recent lawsuit filed by the parents of a Georgia woman who died in a 2010 GM car crash"
This is a very different kind of problem than leaving out a brake pad. It’d be like delivering a vehicle without a seat belt or airbag.
At any rate, nobody is saying that other car manufacturers don’t screw up. They just typically screw up in non-obvious ways today instead of patently simple ones.
Finally, “what about this other company/person” arguments aren’t HN-caliber. They’re not logically sound, and are best left at the door.
The difference is that Tesla didn't have a near-perfect history of shipping reliable vehicles for decades before screwing up like this the way Toyota did. Tesla's reputation is slowly being formed by failures such as these. I already know several people who have elected to get a Mach-E instead of a Tesla because of concerns about quality. If they don't improve they're going to be seen (rather aptly) like the Lotus of electric cars in a few years: beautiful, powerful shitboxes that nobody wants to have to rely on as a daily driver.
> General Motors is recalling some 4300 units of its 2012 Chevrolet Sonic after finding that some of the Sonics were missing front brake pads.
First line of this story:
> Tesla is oftentimes accused of presenting a shiny veneer to the public and its shareholders, only to show its ugly side to employees and customers.
The GM story is dry, factual. There's no indignation. It's less than a quarter of the length of the Tesla story. Nobody's going to get worked up and spread it around social media.
That's not just about who the companies are, it's about how the media reports the stories.
I disagree with GP that the press is harsh on Tesla.
However mainstream media write about everything but most of it has been deeply buried on their websites and will only be read by a few thousand people.
The actual narratives the media is pushing are the stories you find on their frontpages and being pushed on their social media accounts. These are the stories that will be read by millions of people.
All recalls are warranted, even when done voluntarily for small manufacturing issues, but you can't deny that articles about Teslas having issues are guaranteed to generate more clicks and thus more ad revenue than one about some years-old Ford or GM vehicle.
0: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/2020_n...
People often make their own problems by making outrageous claims in the first place.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=recall
The only car recalls with more points on HN than the Tesla ones are Hyundai (regarding South Korea being soft on them; the issue was already a recall in the US) and the VW emissions scandal.
Is there even any evidence that there are any other units affected by this issue?
If their QC is that broken, aren’t the cars that passed through it suspect?
Edit: within a proper timeframe window.