It might be in horrible condition.
Only time will tell, but I've always felt that my cars should be used -- not placed into a museum.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!” -- Hunter S Thompson
The problem with your body is you don't know how long you're going to have it. My father is 96 and regrets not getting his other knee replacement 8 years ago when he had the first one done. The doctors say he's too old now and it was really the only thing wrong with him until he fell and broke his hip a month ago because the bad knee buckled without warning.
With cars and other things, I take kind of a middle road (so to speak). I try to take care of them within reason, but I also use them. When I got my Model S, I retired a 24 year old Buick I bought new. I haven't waxed the Buick in over 10 years and the paint held up well, but it was also in the garage every night.
1) Don't care about Cadillac or Lexus. We're talking about Tesla and Chevrolet here, specifically Chevrolet EVs. In our family, we have differend brands of ICE cars, but for EV type, we have 2 Volts (2013 and 2017), Spark EV (2015). None of those 3 have been in the shop for anything not required as routine maintenance or software updates. There are many threads here on TMC about owners complaining about having to wait weeks to get a service appointment, then not all the issues were fixed at the same time, then they'd have to wait for weeks more for parts to arrive.
2) Far from JUST fit & finish, and noise. While the issues are not necessarily the type that leave the owner and their family stranded by the road, they affect comfort level and safety. AC not blowing cold in hot weather, ghosting in windshield, especially at night, FWD not seeing when they're supposed to stop opening or closing, auto-presenting door handles getting stuck, poor paint quality, or unpainted body panels, not to mention the V8 update that cause many owners grief.
3) The "would buy again" is because there are currently no competition. Not necessarily about product quality. Just the lesser of 2 evils: somewhat reliable EV, or ICE.
Do you think that the mass market Model 3 can be successful, and the average buyer, (who probably doesn't have multiple vehicles in the household like S & X owners), will be able to tolerate having their cars in the service centers for weeks at a time? The targeted demographics of the Model 3 will want something reliable to take them to work, kids to school, ......
One thing you can trust Elon to do is learn from his mistakes. They rethought a lot of the problems with the Roadster and came up with a pretty well laid out car with the Model S, but it was difficult to build and had some reliability issues (mostly solved with cars coming off the line now). Then they spent too much time and over engineered the X so it was even more difficult to build and has it's own host of reliability problems.
When they did the lessons learned from the Model X, they realized Tesla was too heavy on the automotive engineering and too light on the industrial engineering. With the Model 3, they brought the manufacturing engineers in much earlier and everything has been thought through in terms of how to design things to be easy to build, be reliable, and as inexpensive to build as possible.
This is a new approach and should result in a much more reliable car from the start. However, that doesn't mean the 3 won't have some initial problems. All new car designs from even the most reliable car manufacturers have teething problems. Toyota is one of the most reliable cars year in and year out because they change their car designs less radically and on a longer schedule than just about any other car maker. A few years ago Ford went from one of the most reliable brands to one of the least reliable because they changed car designs across their line over a very short period of time and most of their car designs were all having teething problems at the same time.
I expect the initial quality of the Model 3 will be much better than the S or X was when introduced, but it won't be perfect. Tesla is very good at customer support, and they are planning on expanding the service center network to support the 3. The first new ones will probably be in California, and then they will expand in the western US. The need those areas first because that's where the first 3s will be introduced.
Considering all the things that have to work right for a car company to survive and most of the existing car companies out there have around 100 years of experience, Tesla is coming along quite fast. The Model S being produced today is dramatically better than 2 years ago. The recent Xs are better than those built just 6 months ago, though they haven't reached the level of quality of the S yet.
Over the last 10 years or so I've looked at replacing my Buick from time to time, but didn't find anything that was really as good. The Buick was behind the curve on tech (it didn't even have a CD player), but on the big things like comfort on a long road trip, cargo capacity, fuel mileage, and acceleration, newer cars couldn't compete. It's fuel mileage was pretty much the same as a new Ford Taurus and the Taurus is a slug with poorer cargo capacity.
The Model S was the only car I've seen that was actually better in most regards. The seats aren't as nice, but that's the only thing I can say that isn't actually better than the Buick. The quality of components and finish are as good if not better. As much as I liked my Buick, even if Buick made a direct competitor to the Model S, the only thing where they might be competitive for my business would be on price. Even then GM would have a big Con for not having an adequate long distance travel network.
My experience with the Buick, as good as it was, my customer experience with Tesla has been better. The distance to the nearest service center is a negative, but I've only been there once and they gave me a loaner which reduced the annoyance a fair bit.
