Simply said: untrue. My BMW had orange peel all over the place when it was delivered. Fit and finish otherwise was good, but not perfect. Durability? Left a LOT to be desired.
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General Build Quality of Teslas
- Thread starter willgreco189
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- Model S
Simply said: untrue. My BMW had orange peel all over the place when it was delivered. Fit and finish otherwise was good, but not perfect. Durability? Left a LOT to be desired.
OilSucks
Member
I appreciate everyone's reply... For a future new owner who will hopefully be picking up his car in about a week, is there a more up to date checklist of things I should check out on my delivery date? Should I wear a ratty T shirt so I can lay under the car with a flashlight? Or will these problems show up after a few miles of driving?
Really great feedback. They are fixing the issues right now...day 2 at the service center. I'm pretty sure the A.C. draining into the car is more of a design flaw than just sloppy install. However, the issue with the chrome trim is just poor workmanship and sloppiness. Whomever installed it barely put any glue on that end of the trim. You can say Tesla QC should catch these things but at some point there just needs to be accountability. It looks as if these guys at the factory are either overworked or just don't care.
pedriscoll
Active Member
The wide variety of responses is interesting and may suggest quality control system issues. My experience has been good. My June 2015 85-D has had only 2 issues, a failed AP camera which was replaced and some water leakage into the tail lights which will be fixed next week. I have 40,000 miles on the car. The fit and finish are great. The interior materials are not as luxurious as my wife's Lexus RX450h, but the car is so much more fun to drive that I still rave about it to anyone who will listen.
JohnSnowNW
Active Member
In my experience, people that purchase $100k cars find more fault in them than those that buy $30k vehicles.
Just an observation.
Just an observation.
Sawyer8888
Member
Sure, my $25K Honda Accord had zero issues at the time of purchase, aside from an almost indistinguishable scratch on part of the dash trim - and I looked it over just as if it were a $100K car. After 50K miles there were some minor problems with the "leather" and floppy sun visors, but nothing like the carelessness that makes up the initial fit and finish of a Tesla.
I pointed out a misaligned door trim to someone at a supercharger the other week, not knowing it was their car. They had it for at least a year and had no idea. Whoops.
Some are just more particular than others, doesn't matter the price of anything. If it's wrong, it's wrong.
I won't bore you with the details, but our fit and finish issues were in the double digits, most of which were found during delivery.
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JohnSnowNW
Active Member
Sawyer8888
Member
Yeah, I saw that before I saw your follow-up and edited it a bit. You were quick, you jumped all over that.
Fact is, Tesla does a lousy job with fit and finish. Many less expensive options do it better. It has little to do with the actual value. So I disagree with your previous statement that we see more because it's worth more.
JohnSnowNW
Active Member
We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.
I think the clientele is more discerning, and pays more attention to the details. Our $25k Mazda has bubbles in the clear coat on the bumper (noticed in the first 3,000 miles while cleaning bug juice off after a road trip). I haven't taken note of panel gap...because it's a $25k Mazda...but I'm sure if I went out there I'd notice some misalignment.
I'm not saying that Tesla couldn't have tighter QC...I'm simply trying to point out that people that purchase more expensive vehicles might pay more attention to the details.
FloridaGary
Member
Your statement sounds good when you read it, but the expectations should be the same whether you spend $30k or $100k. Go to any other car forum and you will read the same kind of feedback as you do in this forum across the price spectrum.
Sir Guacamolaf
The good kind of fat
Dont worry i agree with youRich people complain about everything.
Disagreed. I am not rich, and I complain about everything too. In fact I am complaining about your incorrect statements right now.
jelloslug
Active Member
Yea, mine had flaking paint on the kidney grills, debris in one of the headlights, and missing paint around the openings for the side markers.
jelloslug
Active Member
I find your complaint complaint worthy.
While I agree that practice makes perfect, Tesla has been building the Model S since 2012, albeit with some changes over time. Doesn't it seem as if building something like 100,000 units of the same product over the course of 4 years should be enough to perfect the assembly process? Not sure I would give them a complete pass on inexperience....
No, very few minor problems. Nothing that I saw on the day of pickup. (Loose door gaskets that appeared after a few weeks as I mentioned above, and a sunroof that acted up a few months later.) My car was ordered on July 31, built in the last week of August, and delivered on September 23. the delivery center had lots of cars to deliver in that last week of the quarter, so maybe my car qualifies as part of the quarter-end rush. Not sure. (Maybe the cars rushed the most are built in the last month and delivered to customers nearby in CA?)
Who knows? But perhaps you'd agree that it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to start a car company. I cant think of anybody else who's been able to do it in the US the past 100 years. I think sometimes Tesla's strengths allow us to forget just how difficult their task is, and lead us to forget that the "easy" things become difficult when stacked atop the to-do list of delivering a car that's outselling the BMW 7 and Mercedes S while simultaneously launching the 3 and autopilot. ("Where are my damn auto windshield washers!?")
Both what they've already delivered, and what they are still attempting, are mind-boggling. We shouldn't be surprised at growing pains.
Good point and I absolutely agree on their tremendous overall accomplishment of building a new car company. You are right, it is easy to forget that. But I do hope that these niggling build quality issues are reduced with Model 3 production. Otherwise, there will be a whole lot more unhappy buyers, and they mostly won't be the more tolerant early adopters.
They are doing the right things to address the quality. The Model 3 is being built from the ground up to be as easy to mass produce as possible. Elon has said the Roadster was a mess to build, the Model S was easier, but still difficult to build, and the Model X is 98% about the same level of difficulty as the S with 2% that's much harder. The lessons learned from the X were the design engineers and production people weren't in close enough communication and a lot of things were designed that were just too difficult to manufacture.
The two are in close contact through the whole process with the Model 3.
The lesson of Tesla's history and that of any of the other smaller car companies is that making a car that passes all the highway safety tests is difficult, but doable, but to make a car that has consistently high quality is very tough.
Most Americans forget just how badly built most cars were 30-40 years ago. 50 years ago even the Japanese weren't really known for their high quality. Most of the Japanese auto makers were started in the 30s or just after WW II. It took them 20-30 years to figure out the secret sauce for making consistently high quality cars and part of that grew out of their home culture.
In the western world workers and management were fighting like two tom cats in a bag almost constantly. Management wanted things done a certain way and workers did it even if they could see it was stupid because management didn't want to hear about it. Factories were built on the old feudal model in most cases.
The Japanese listened much more to the people on the line and management took their advice. They also empowered any worker to stop the line at any time if they saw a problem.
The Japanese approach was to fix flaws when they were first spotted rather than keep the line moving and fix anything later. American factories could crank out huge numbers, but there were a lot of inefficient finishing lines that would fix flaws after production was done. In World War II keeping production quotas was so important there were airfields dedicated to rebuilding parts of aircraft after production because it was deemed better to not change the design on the line, but make the changes on planes already built.
The late models of the B-17 had a new tail gun assembly that was called the Cheyenne turret named after the rebuilding facility in Cheyenne, WY where the modifications were made. B-17s were built with the old tail gun assembly and a number of other things, then the planes were flown to Wyoming where brand new parts were torn out and replaced. The USAAF did this to thousands of B-17s.
One of Tesla's problems was Elon Musk came from the software world where there is no production like what you see in a factory. New software goes through testing, but once tested, you make as many identical copies as necessary and send them to the consumer or server where the customer will be served. There are no production quality problems, only design and coding quality problems and once fixed, every unit can be updated instantaneously.
Elon didn't really have an intuitive grasp of what happened when you have hundreds or thousands of people who all have to work together to make as identical a copy of the thing as possible, but each unit is going to be slightly different because you can't make the exact same physical object two times in a row.
The Japanese upped the game in precision manufacturing to levels nobody thought possible. Ford and Boeing both learned this in the 80s. Mitsubishi was making some parts for Boeing aircraft and another American contractor was making the same parts. They found the Mitsubishi parts fit perfectly, but the American made parts needed shims to fit right.
Ford learned a similar lesson when they had Mazda make transmissions for about half of Ranger trucks and a Ford plant made the same transmission for the other half. The Mazda transmissions never failed and the failure rate for the Ford transmissions was alarmingly high. Ford took apart transmissions from both plants and found that while every part in both were within tolerance, the Mazda parts were right down the middle in tolerance with variations that required sophisticated measuring devices to see. The Ford made parts were within tolerance, but they ranged from the extreme low to extreme high end.
Nobody in the US thought what the Japanese were doing was economically possible. It could be done if you wanted to spend a fortune per part, but couldn't be done on an assembly line. What the Japanese were doing was not one thing, but a more careful and thought out approach to the whole process. To a large degree American car companies have finally learned the same lessons, but it's taken decades and two bankruptcies to get there.
Tesla is starting from a more advanced point than say GM was circa 1985. The knowledge about how to mass produce high precision parts and assemblies are out there and a lot of schools teach the basics, but there is such a thing as institutional knowledge that isn't written down, but picked up by people on the job from those around them. That's why Toyota had no qualms about showing GM everything they did when they opened NUMMI. Toyota knew that even if the GM manufacturing people took careful notes, they weren't going to pick up Toyota's institutional knowledge until they had actually worked in it for a while.
GM tried to reproduce NUMMI at other plants cycling managers from NUMMI to other GM factories, but progress was so slow GM went bankrupt before it completely took hold. Gm would have been better suited to taking entire teams of workers from NUMMI and moving them to other plants where those workers could teach other workers on the line. The managers would understand what needed to be done but with the institutional hostility between workers and management, progress was glacial.
Tesla is still building that base of institutional knowledge. Some lessons can be brought in from industry people hired from other companies, but there are some lessons Tesla needs to learn on its own because while a Tesla looks like a regular car and does the same function as a regular car, it is fundamentally something different when you get down into the innards. There is overlap with other cars because cars need certain things to meet regulatory requirements, customer expectations, and basic human ergonomics.
But the drive train is a completely different animal from a regular car and Tesla has also incorporated electronics that is unique in the car industry. Because of these differences, the manufacturing techniques are going to be different. The GigaFactory is something that has never existed. It hasn't had to exist until now.
Tesla has gone from 1980s level quality to around year 2000 quality levels in 5 years. That's covering the ground other company's took 20 years to learn in 5. And by all accounts, the pace of learning has accelerated now that Elon is focusing more and more energy into how to build cars over how to design them.
The Model 3 will have some initial hiccups. ALL new car designs have bugs that get worked out in the first year or two, even Toyota and other top brands. (Toyota minimizes these flaws largely by keeping older designs in production longer than most companies.) I expect the number and severity will be a lot less than the Model S or X, but there will be some.
Elon has said that he plans to revolutionize car manufacturing to make it more automated than ever before. I have mixed feelings about this. Having precision robots make everything will probably improve overall quality and will reduce production costs. It will also probably bring more manufacturing back to the US. But it will mean a lot fewer jobs needed and that makes one of the developed world's problems much, much worse. What do you do when half the population is unemployed and unemployable?
