- Tesla CEO Elon Musk recommended the best time to buy a Tesla in an interview published this week.
- He said the quality is usually worse at times when Tesla is rapidly increasing production.
- Tesla built Model 3s so fast last year that paint was not properly dry, Musk said.
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For years, Tesla has been heated over issues of quality control – whether it’s improper roofs, loose bolts or sloppy bodywork – with Sandy Munro, an expert carmaker who once compared the build quality of a 2018. Model 3 to a Kia from the 1990s.
In a one-on-one interview with Munro published this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned of some of the company’s production hurdles and recommended the best time of year for a new Tesla for sale.
When asked how the fit and finish of two Model 3 sedan cars that Munro examined could differ so much from each other – even though they were only built a month apart – Musk acknowledged that the build quality is usually worse than Tesla’s. scale up production quickly.
“Friends ask me when they should buy a Tesla. Well, buy it right at the beginning, or when production has a steady state,” Musk said. “But during the production ramp, it’s very difficult to be in vertical climbing mode and get everything right on the small details. It’s just a super difficult thing.”
Customers who “really want things to be called,” Musk continues, should buy a very early model or one built ‘once production is flattened’.
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Last year, and especially in its final months, Tesla strongly insisted on delivering 500,000 vehicles, an aggressive sales target that the company only missed a few hundred cars. But the race to speed up production has drawbacks, Musk said.
The CEO told Munro that Tesla was accelerating production, a problem he was dealing with, that ‘the paint did not necessarily dry enough’, which led to quality issues. He said that Tesla did “improve the gap and paint quality considerably by the end of last year, even in the course of December.”
Musk, who tends to be overly optimistic about Tesla’s ambitions, admitted in the interview that mass – producing cars are no easy task. He said Tesla was the first American car company to reach volume production since Chrysler was founded in 1925.
“Prototypes are easy and fun, and it’s extremely difficult to achieve volume production with a reliable product at an affordable price,” Musk said. “Our production is hell.”