So far, we’ve heard about a couple of these improperly installed ball joints out of a universe of, what, maybe a few thousand MY owners on this board? That’s a few orders of magnitude worse than six sigma, assuming a Gaussian distribution...
To speak to your larger point - Of course there will be defects in any complex manufactured assembly. The concern here is the assembly defect is in such a safety-critical assembly; a ball joint failure at highway speeds could easily be a fatal accident. How did this make it through the quality sign-off of that assembly? There are certain basic safety-critical pieces of a car that any reasonable manufacturer should expect to have zero defects in those pieces delivered to the customer - i.e., they should never happen and/or should always be caught by inspection prior to delivery. Single-point failure suspension components should be one of those.
The up side is that this appears at first blush to be a manufacturing escape, not a design flaw. The likely recall would be a simple inspection.
it certainly doesn’t help to panic or immediately extrapolate to the worst possible case for this kind of thing. It is also not helpful to minimize it. Assembly defects in safety-critical parts should be taken seriously, and IMHO Tesla needs to get to the bottom of this expeditiously.