There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues, mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make their own stuff. Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas pedal; they go to a company that makes them.
Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's insistence that he knows better than an industry that is extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century of being in business. He has been propped up by customers and VCs who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy", when really they didn't understand all the reasons things are done the way they are.
It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng team having made some clever app while he was a sophomore...and says "oh you're doing it all wrong" to senior engineers.
One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) ambivalence toward electric cars with incompetence. In Ford's case that is fairly accurate - the Mach E is an engineering embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably because there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up in the product line that is their bread and butter.
VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and Audi mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM really gets its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and truly fucked if they intend to keep making cars instead of just shifting to being an 'electric gas station' company...but they're on their heels there too, having slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard years ago.
A gas station is one of the least glamorous, and lowest margin business out there.
You’re basically making no money from the gas or electricity, and all your profits comes from the chips and other stuff you sell inside.
Tesla is severely problematic as a company, but its salvation does not come from pivoting to selling vapes while people wait for their charge to finish.
> There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues
Recalls are absolutely routine in this industry, though. This sounds like a semantic argument hiding behind "these issues" as being somehow different from "those" issues?
I don't think anyone thinks traditional auto is incompetent at manufacturing.
I think lots of people have their doubts about the strategic product vision of big auto executives, who traditionally have tactically chased short-term profit margins with tunnel vision that would make GE cringe.
Subcontracting everything out and being an assembly company contributed to the quality issues Boeing faces now. Perhaps the root cause is lack of focus on safety & quality.
There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues, mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make their own stuff. Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas pedal; they go to a company that makes them.
Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's insistence that he knows better than an industry that is extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century of being in business. He has been propped up by customers and VCs who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy", when really they didn't understand all the reasons things are done the way they are.
It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng team having made some clever app while he was a sophomore...and says "oh you're doing it all wrong" to senior engineers.
One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) ambivalence toward electric cars with incompetence. In Ford's case that is fairly accurate - the Mach E is an engineering embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably because there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up in the product line that is their bread and butter.
VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and Audi mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM really gets its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and truly fucked if they intend to keep making cars instead of just shifting to being an 'electric gas station' company...but they're on their heels there too, having slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard years ago.