But that's the whole point, there rarely is an outcry when a volume manufacturer has minor quality issues. Take Porsche for example. The stock engine in the 996 had very serious reliability issues (IMS, RMS, D-chunking etc) due to it's open-deck design and lubrication, which even led to independent specialists like Autofarm and Hartech making a whole business out of fixing them. Porsche just swept the whole thing under the carpet, with only minor updates to the IMS bearings, which didn't really solve most of the issues. Engines were quietly replaced under warranty (with units containing the same inherent flaws) and few people even knew the extent of the problem. But it was very real indeed and only fixed years later with the introduction of the DFI engines in the 997.2.Dandock wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 11:14 am Surely, Peteski, the number of faults, teething troubles etc are relative. I'm not knocking the product but thinking that maybe you're being quite philosophical and forgiving in favour of the tech and driving experience. Had a volume manufacturer launched with the same percentage of issues there would be an outcry.
Imagine if Tesla had such major powertrain issues. The press would have a field day. Instead they just pick on largely trivial stuff that you see on all sorts of cars, from Ford to Mercedes. Porsche build quality is relatively good in the industry, but hardly perfect. I would say Tesla make more effort to rectify faults than most other manufacturers too.
Having said all that, Tesla did obviously mess up with the Model X release, which was clearly not ready. Early builds had a lot of reported faults, mostly minor, but a lot of them. The press slated Tesla for it of course, but they did actually respond to nearly every issue reported and quite quickly too. But it certainly damaged their fragile reputation and gave the haters plenty of ammo!