blakerson.com

I'm getting a Tesla. 

Two reasons why:

I feel morally compelled to, given that climate change is taking the Unbelievably Bad trajectory - it's worse than most worse-case-scenario projections. Record-breaking summer heat worldwide and record-breakingly fierce tropical storms worldwide should be enough to convince everyone. Even places that genuinely try hard, like California, experience Beijing-like pollution due to severely dried air, due to global warming.

This post isn't about that. If you know me well enough to read my blog, you're probably already on board.

Tesla disrupted everyone. I came to write that. This bit flipped in my head one recent morning and had me planning a purchase for the last couple weeks.

Friends who talk cars with me know that I've been an obsessive BMW fan for years. But Tesla's world makes BMW's look dumb. As I recently wrote to my friend Robert:

Tesla's cars are flawed. I don't care at all about the debate surrounding its stock, but there are clearly valid criticisms of the product.

The quality-issues are well-documented - perhaps at their most representative, while journalistically verified, in this NYT piece. The oft-quoted "manufacturing hell" turned to "delivery hell" because it turns out that the car business is a complicated logistics machine. Let's be honest - manufacturing hell isn't finished, either; it's just turned to quality hell. A Model 3 I test drove had a clear issue with wind noise. Owners (or would-be owners) with paint issues abound. 

But there's precedent for improvement in quality. The first cars that were exported from Japan were laughing stocks on wheels. Quality was terrible, as is every country's or every manufacturer's when it first starts. Japan learned and improved its quality, to the point that the Japanese word kaizen (continuous improvement) is taught in business schools worldwide. Moreover, Korea followed Japan on a path to quality. China may be at the start of that path now.

Also, we fail to notice that we're passively forgiving established manufacturers for their quality issues. Toyota, synonymous with quality itself, tarnished its image with stacks of dangerous recalls for its American-built cars, even Lexii. American and Korean cars frequently have wide panel gaps, a criticism the car guys level at Tesla all the time. For years, BMW has been notorious for electrical "gremlins" causing ambiguous issues - especially in the first year of production of any model. Anecdotally, my Mini - a BMW-designed-and-built car - had a panel fall off at speed. 

No car maker has flawless quality. We should talk in percentages, not black-and-white. Tesla is worse now, but improvement is learned.

Also, I have absolutely no idea how this bug can come to be, but it's hilarious.

Sporting performance is learned too. The Model 3 Performance's track mode seems to have figured it out, mostly by way of listening to a highly-qualified "user" (ie an accomplished test driver) and tweaking the software on the fly.