YC: Requests for Startups

It's bizarre to me that Tesla gets cited as an exemplar for operating as an American manufacturer for physical goods, given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there, many of which I've found out about through this very site. If manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of more companies that operate like Tesla, I would guess that American-manufactured goods would come to be distrusted more

Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn

Tesla has done fantastic R&D and marketing for EVs but you're right that their cars themselves has always defective rolling off the lot. I know a good number of people who have had or currently have a Tesla and every single one had to take it in after buying it to get something fixed.

What scandals (honest question)? Is it more than comparable companies?

I think a big problem is that modern American firms outsource practically all required expertise to suppliers so they are left with no core competency apart from marketing, lobbying and financial engineering. Its my impression that Tesla does more stuff themselves so they were quicker to innovate and experiment. But not sure if that's just their marketing and cult that leads me to believe this. But I do know that electric cars were long thought impractical and dead, and their sudden rise in popularity coincided with Tesla creating a good electric car

Off the top of my head, there was a story on here about cars crashing due to axles failing months after they rolled off the lot, and a more recent story about the bodies of cybertrucks rusting from small amounts of rain exposure

This is just on the physical components side. Tesla is also continuously dealing with scandals about data provenance, transparency, the false promises and dangerous consequences of its pushes toward autonomous driving, and of course the same nickel-and-dime nonsense other tech companies do like trying to charge subscriptions for every little feature, gradually rolling out user-hostile behavior in a proprietary software ecosystem, litigation threats toward victims of accidents who seek any remedy or even accountability for harms caused by many of these issues, etc.

It serves as a better exemplar of how much hype and marketing to attract investment drive the success of an American company in the current environment than of how onshore manufacturing could work

EDIT: Also, comparable in what sense?

>given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there

They're very young as far as automotive manufacturers go, and this is a pretty normal part of the 'figuring out how to build a car' learning cycle. South Korean car companies had dismal quality issues decades after they were founded, and now they're much better. Manufacturing complex goods at scale is just really really hard and takes a ton of process knowledge and human capital. Tesla it at a normal part of the automotive manufacturing lifecycle

Consistent quality control is a much harder problem to solve than product design.