“What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.”
So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional.
Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.
To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this:
"This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect."
If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1].
To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite.
If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see.
Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful.
You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable.
In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional.
So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional.
Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.