Tesla is similar to Apple in the regard that owners of their products are something of a cult following and their satisfaction is not based on the quality of the product, but possibly other psychological factors such as being part of what they perceive as an exclusive “in group”.

Unfortunately I’m on the other side of that, my family has a Tesla which has been to the shop more times in the 2 years we’ve owned it than our past 3 cars combined needed to over more than 20 years. We have genuinely researched lemon laws it’s so bad. The windshield wipers hit each other and broke, the windshield stress fractured for no reason, the camera was full of water when we drove it off the lot, the side fender fell off on a country road 2 weeks after that… I could go on for ages.

I think the earlier models when Elon was less of an unhinged arrogant asshole doing his best to follow Kanye’s arc and wasn’t inserting himself into the design process randomly (make the steering wheel square, make a space truck no one needs, make it have stupid windshield wipers, etc.) were much better.

My family needed a loaner while our car was in for one of the many repairs and they gave us the previous model of our same car, made 2 years earlier, and it was much better. Other people I know with older models haven’t suffered from the same issues.

To me it seems that Elon’s leadership is now actively harming the company and making the cars worse, they have serious quality control issues which are leading to out of control repair and service expenses for the company, and are designing features based on what an out of touch billionaire manchild thinks would be neat instead of what any sane average consumer needs from a vehicle.

Things like the turn signal being on the wheel making signaling 2 turns back to back in opposite directions extremely difficult, making the horn a tiny off center button with no ability to feel so you have to take your eyes off the road to find it, glove boxes that won’t open unless you navigate to the right submenu of a terrible ui, gullwing doors that don’t open all the way reliably, a steering wheel that isn’t round and makes driving less comfortable, the deep flaws in optical only self driving, a work truck that can’t actually accomplish work, etc. are all glaring issues which should become clear in user testing, but as the famous “bulletproof” window smashing demo indicated: Tesla either doesn’t do adequate or even baseline testing, or (as I believe) Elon is just too arrogant to listen to the smart people around him who might point out those issues and has created an echo chamber of yes men afraid to point out obvious problems

Ironic to have someone named after a cyberpunk book simp so hard for a megacorp. Yuck.