> Can anyone explain why the Tesla build quality is so bad compared to established giants?

Because they can? Up until this point Tesla had no real competitors in its segment, it has (had?) a religiously devoted fanbase, and lets face it: their cars out-performed their nearest ICE competitors (luxury sports sedans and SUVs) by a long shot.

Therefore, they could afford to have lower build quality, because electric drive-trains are just so much damn better performing, and their cars in particular sold themselves for years based largely on image and identity.

You only need to test drive a Chevy Bolt to understand how much better even a cheap EV is than most ICEs.

Tesla's poor build quality isn't unprecedented either. Plenty of other niche luxury sports car brands also have been known to have bad build quality and require gobs of maintenance. But people who drive such cars tolerate such things due to the other benefits of the car.

Technically, I think some of this is also because of Tesla's ruthless focus on reducing weight to maximize the range of their vehicles. They remove every last bolt or other metal component they possibly can (which does also lower cost). They have received high praise compared to their competitors by manufacturing optimization experts like Sandy Munro for this.

But I think this approach can have its downsides when it comes to things like this issue, where it was trivial to detach the steering wheel. I don't have any proof that this issue was caused by that approach, but it's pretty plausible.

Always sort of assumed that Musk just has a kind of distain for expertise; it's not like it is a deep dark secret how to do this properly.

I suspect (but know nothing about manufacturing) that 90% of quality is boring, tedious things like quality control checklists, documenting processes, training low-level staff and so on.

Neither of these things strikes me as something Elon Musk would consider time well spent. He's more like, "cybertruck!", "really self-driving this time!", and more recently, running Twitter.

Is it any worse? Or perhaps Tesla is now in the trough of disillusionment stage of the hype cycle, so every bit of negative news is made out to be a big deal.