The fact is that if they'd hired the right people from Silicon Valley they could have solved the problems. Their major problems are in IT (apparently they can't keep enough good programmers and database managers?!?), communications (you can hire secretaries and communications specialists in Silicon Valley), and legal (there are plenty of appropriate lawyers in Silicon Valley).
They just *didn't do it*. The other car companies are not particularly impressive -- you don't want me to share the horror stories related to the Bolt. (Communications failures between GM and the dealerships. Repeatedly. Requiring many many hours of wasted time on the phone. This is what Tesla *ought* to be avoiding by owning its own stores, but is somehow running into anyway.)
I personally believe the problem is too many engineers, not enough communications majors. The company leadership *undervalued* "people skills" and so they didn't do what it took to handle the people-skills stuff right.
(And the frustrating thing is, there are lots of bottom-rung people who *are* great at the people skills and great at communications. But they don't have the management support.)
Traditional car companies are known for being pretty awful at people-skills stuff too, so I wouldn't have talked to them.
I would, however, have tried to poach a lot more talent from companies with heavy *customer service* reputations. Service industries. Right there in Silicon Valley, there are companies with good customer service reputations, and it would have been worthwhile to poach from some of them. I might also have hired from hotel companies, which have incredibly complicated logistics chains, tangled legal rules, *and* great customer service reputations.
On the legal side Tesla just needs to replace their chief legal counsel, who is a divorce lawyer, with someone who understands the value of looking up the regulations and procedures in each state and summarizing them in a little booklet which is distributed to staff. And looking up the copyright laws and summarizing them. And so on.
