Ummm the "1 million miles" goal has been mentioned many times and some folks (including here on TMC) have totally misinterpreted it. The company is all about hype. There's 0 evidence to support they're close to meeting that goal yet w/any currently shipping or previously shipped drive unit.
As for battery degradation, I will give them that. Battery degradation appears to be pretty good on most Teslas and FAR better than any Leaf.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if your pack is replaced for some failure inside the pack or some other reason before the 10 year mark.
Sure, best interest yes. Talk is cheap. It's in Tesla's financial interest to ensure that warranty costs are kept as low as possible, yet the Model X scored dead last in reliability in CR.
As for "Longevity is not something that is ever talked about" sure it is.
As for your earlier post about continuous improvements, I can safely say all the major Japanese automakers do that and have been doing that for ages. Look up kaizen.
Yeah, "kaizen" is the Japanese name for the statistical approach taught by American professor William Deming (who American manufacturers ignored for decades, so he went to Japan after WWII to teach his methodology). Its all about improving tolerances in building individual parts and never throwing any out-of-spec parts away, but rather using those failures to improve the process.
Not quite the same as what Tesla is doing. Tesla is more macro and kaizen is more micro.
"Continuous improvements" can also indicate in some cases that the original design was flawed. If we stick with the FWDs and it's actually true what you said about all the parts being on a revision greater than 5 in less than 2 years, that's not necessarily a positive thing! It really just means that the revision 1 production parts were inadequate and needed fixing!
Genuine "continuous improvement" is when you make something better that was already functioning reasonably reliably to its original specification. I don't think FWDs fall into this category! Maybe something like the recent MCU upgrade is a more genuine example of improvement. The power upgrade to the 75D cars was also a major genuine improvement.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's fantastic that Tesla strive to "improve" their cars on an ongoing continuous basis, but the reality check is that most of these "continuous improvements" are merely solving problems with the original parts to meet a reasonable level of performance. I think it's fair to say that early Model X builds required a lot of "continuous improvement" and most respected mainstream manufacturers would not have released the car at that stage of its development. 2 years later it's now looking much better, with many early issues resolved, but that "beta" approach to vehicle development is definitely not the way forward with their future products and certainly not if they want to compete directly with the likes of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volvo, Porsche etc when their EVs are released in the next few years. At that point the market simply won't accept dubious build quality and reliability.
I disagree with your "
revision of parts" interpretation. The design doesn't change, it's the implementation that gets improved. For example, if they design a hinge to open/close the FWD and they find that after 1000 openings, it starts to deform, so they increase the thickness of the hinge to strengthen it (or changing the material). It doesn't change the design, only the implementation.
The FWD haven't been redesigned, the implementation has been tweaked.
Also, the Model-X will always have FWD due to the fact that the whole vehicle is designed around those doors. You cannot put regular doors on a Model-X and still call it that. It would be a completely different vehicle. That's also why there will never be an option for regular doors on the Model-X - the whole vehicle would have to be redesigned.
It's true that Tesla released these vehicles earlier that maybe they should have. But being present at the time, they had no choice. The X was already delayed 2+ years and IMHO they didn't have a choice financially. They dragged it out as long as they could, but at some point they needed to release it.
Tesla's approach is to ensure that the hardware design is as good as it can be, then fix the rest of it after-the-fact with a software update. They don't always succeed with the hardware being bullet-proof, but they try to implement fast iterations to address those deficiencies.
The real big test is the release of the Model-Y later this year. If it has FWDs, then I would interpret that to mean Tesla has confidence in it's decision. If it doesn't, then it would almost be an admission of making a mistake with these doors.
Personally, the biggest thing I hate about these doors is the attention it gathers. If it didn't attract attention, I would be happier about them. Hopefully as time goes on, they'll attract less attention. Another mild annoyance of this design is the inability to use a roof rack storage system, but I've managed to work-around that limitation with various tow-related accessories and the Sea Sucker roof system.
