- Tesla CEO Elon Musk recommended the best time to buy a Tesla in an interview published this week.
- He said that quality tends to be worse at times when Tesla is working to rapidly increase production.
- Tesla was building Model 3 so fast last year that the paint was not drying properly, Musk said.
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For years, Tesla has been criticized for quality control issues – be it poorly fastened roofs, loose bolts or poor bodywork – with one of the biggest critics being Sandy Munro, a car manufacturing expert who once compared construction quality from a 2018 Model 3 to a 1990s Kia.
In an individual interview with Munro published this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confessed to some of the company’s production problems and recommended the best time of the year to buy a new Tesla.
Asked how the fit and finish of two Model 3 sedans that Munro examined could be so different – even if they were built just a month apart – Musk admitted that build quality tends to be worse when Tesla is working to quickly increase production.
“Friends ask me when to buy a Tesla. Well, either buy it early or when production reaches a steady state, ”said Musk. “But during the production ramp, it is super difficult to be in the vertical climb mode and get everything right in the small details. It is just a super difficult thing.”
Customers who “really want things to be adjusted,” continued Musk, should buy a very old or manufactured model “once production stabilizes.”
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Last year, and especially in the final months, Tesla strove to deliver 500,000 vehicles, an aggressive sales target that the company missed for just a few hundred cars. But running to speed up production has its drawbacks, said Musk.
The CEO told Munro that as Tesla accelerated manufacturing, a problem it faced was that “the paint was not necessarily drying enough”, leading to quality problems. He said Tesla “improved the gap and the quality of the painting a little bit at the end of last year, even during December”.
Musk, who tends to be overly optimistic about Tesla’s ambitions, acknowledged in the interview that mass production of cars is not an easy task. Proof of this, he said, is that Tesla is the first car startup in the United States to achieve mass production since Chrysler’s founding in 1925.
“Prototypes are easy and fun, and achieving large-scale production with a reliable product at an affordable price is terribly difficult,” said Musk. “Our production is hell.”