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- Tesla CEO Elon Musk recommended the best time to buy a Tesla in an interview published this week.
- He said the quality tended to be worse when Tesla strove to ramp up production quickly.
- Tesla was building Model 3s so quickly last year that the paint wasn’t drying properly, Musk said.
- Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.
For years Tesla has drawn attention to quality control issues – whether it’s loose roofs, loose bolts, or shoddy bodywork – with one of the harshest criticisms being Sandy Munro, an automotive manufacturing expert 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 confessed to some of the company’s production issues and recommended the best time of year to buy a new Tesla.
When asked how the fit and finish of two Model 3 sedans Munro reviewed could be so different – even if they were only built a month apart – Musk admitted that the quality Construction tended to be worse when Tesla strove to ramp up production quickly.
“Friends ask me, when should they buy a Tesla. Well, either buy it early on or when production reaches a steady state,” Musk said. “But during this production ramp up, it’s extremely difficult to be in vertical climb mode and tune everything in the little details. It’s just a super tough thing.”
Customers who “really want things to be fixed,” Musk continued, should buy a very old or built model “once production has stabilized.”
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Last year, and especially in its final months, Tesla has gone to great lengths to deliver 500,000 vehicles, an aggressive sales target the company has only missed by a few hundred cars. But the race to speed up production had its drawbacks, Musk said.
The CEO told Munro that as Tesla ramped up manufacturing, one of the issues it faced was that “the paint did not necessarily dry sufficiently” leading to quality issues. He said Tesla had “improved the gap and the paint quality a bit late last year, even through the month of December.”
Musk, who tends to be overly optimistic about Tesla’s ambitions, acknowledged in the interview that mass production of cars is no easy task. A testament to this, he said, is that Tesla is the first American auto startup to achieve volume production since Chrysler’s inception in 1925.
“Prototypes are easy and fun, and then hitting volume production with a reliable product at an affordable price is extremely difficult,” Musk said. “Our production is hell.”
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