Now, see, if you were talking a $10,000 sedan, sure. I would not be shocked if it were low quality.
But a Tesla Model 3 - the cheapest of the Teslas - is $45,000. That puts it in the price range of most luxury cars. And let’s not talk about the S and X models, which are around $100,000, putting them in the price range of… a house, in a moderate cost-of-living area.
For that price, I would expect laser-perfect precision. Not janky construction. I mean, calling them “affordable” is already one hell of a conceit. The initial outlay on a Tesla is ridiculous. Even with them being supposedly free to charge forever, even if you assume you don’t have to spend money on maintenance, their TCO is still worse than most equivalent vehicles on the market.
I want an EV, truly I do. But I don’t think it’ll ever be a Tesla.
So I recently started working as a Vehicle Condition Report Writer. I’ve been on the job for a short enough time that I’ve only done one actual tesla, But they sell a lot of cars through my company. Fucking worst car I have ever CR’d. The superficial damage that is most of my job was minimal, but just navigating how to make the car work was the fucking worst. Nothing on the smart key is fucking labeled so I just had to guess until things worked. And one of the things I have to do is take a picture of the engine. Guess how you open the hood. If you guessed go through like 3 separate menus on a 2′x4′ touch screen, you would be correct. Unlike every other car, where you only have to find a lever sometimes hidden around the driver’s side door. What even are you supposed to do if the battery dies because the electronics go bad. Can’t jump it because you can’t pop the hood. Can’t pop the hood because the battery is dead. And if that touch screen goes bad, you’re just fucked so bad you can’t even use the car.
Also the engine isn’t underneath the hood so I got confused and just took a picture of the storage space under the hood. Nobody corrected me.
People have literally been trapped (and killed in at least one case) due to a battery fire causing the door electronics to malfunction and lock them in a burning vehicle
Everything Musk’s company produces looks like it was designed by science fiction fans who stopped at “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and never took an engineering class in their life.
And then outsourced construction to the lowest bidder with no quality control.
