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There's a learning curve parable about the fastest way to learn how to make quality clay pots.

Team A focuses on making 1 perfect pot. Specifications, research, process, testing, verification, etc. They get pretty close with their initial pots, but they struggle to scale up.

Team B just starts making pots. As fast they can. Make incremental tiny improvements. Most pots are total losses. But they do manage to start making pretty good pots. And they hit scale.

Which approach is better?

Tesla's QA/QC will not improve, stabilize until their rate of change slows down. They are hellbent on scaling up (20m vehicles, build out charging network, etc) while reducing costs (new tech, fewer parts, etc).

A lot of mistakes will be made.

In the future, I'd consider buying a budget (~$25k?) Tesla vehicle. Maybe after they ship a few million.

Hopefully, we'll have many options to choose from (BYD, Kia, etc).

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I would not bank on Kia or Hyundai... A large swath of of their engines made within the last decade or so have a reputation for not lasting within or much beyond the warranty period, which has lead to multiple class-action lawsuits.

I have a Kia Sorento and overall it's a simple, honest car that's easy to work on and pretty well-built overall. But at 80k miles, the engine burns a quart every 1k miles which is entirely stupid. By comparison, our Mazda 5 (a very cheaply-made car!) engine lasted something like 150k miles and burned no oil with practically no maintenance to the engine.

I think a Toyota is in our near future.

Conceptually, Mazda 5 BEV is exactly what I want. For my dogs, road-trips, and runs to the hardware store.

I'd accept a passenger-oriented Ford Transit Express BEV.

A lot of companies have major build issues. Honda had a batch of engine heads cracking and bad transmissions. Subarus are oil and had a long slew of head gasket issues. Sometimes you just goof a design in a way you can’t easily correct out of

> A large swath of of their engines made within the last decade or so have a reputation for not lasting within or much beyond the warranty period

A warranty that is now of 10 years/100k miles (or 15 years/150k miles when extended). The value proposition of Kias, when you factor in features included as a standard, has never been greater, and is better than most other manufacturers.

Being that your life depends on your car not failing catastrophically while using it, I think your analogy would make more sense if you replaced clay pots with pacemakers.

The second approach is better but… you need a system of continuous improvement in place and production stability to capture and hold the improvements. Tesla just doesn’t have to culture of capturing or embracing quality

Yes and: Tesla sacrificed low defect counts for other qualities {1}. Such as high iteration, units shipped, reducing weight. {2}

Which could maybe be fine, if Tesla had also adopted the Bezos Amazon obsession with customer satisfaction. Bezos knew that given Amazon's growth there would be a lot of errors (defects). So they built out superior customer service infra, gave CSRs wide autonomy/authority to fix stuff, try to make every customer whole.

And Amazon's customers loved them for it, have high tolerance for mistakes, which would harm most other CPG brands.

Instead, Tesla adopted the Page Google antipathy towards customers. So dumb.

At some point, Musk will have spent all of his goodwill. Then Tesla's brand will suffer accordingly. And that kind of soft equity is wicked hard to rebuild.

These lawsuits are going to hurt Tesla's brand. Celebrity is a two-edged sword. The media that fawned over him for so long will now gleefully tear him to shreds.

{1} IIRC, Tesla's defect rate is %10 vs %3 for other "luxury" auto brands, however that's measured.

{2} Noting that defect rate varies across subsystems. IIRC, Tesla motors and batteries remain best in class; Whereas body, paint, interior, and trim suffer.

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