Comment by bko
1 year ago
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?