Tesla could scoff at all the other legacy manufacturers, using multiple panels to create a chassis, when Tesla use a 'Giga Press' to form huge sections in piece.
Now legacy manufacturers are copying Tesla leading the way.
Honestly all the legacy manufacturers are still making cars like they always have, but with electric motors fitted.
Tesla leads the way in vehicle design
View: https://youtu.be/tf8CCyL3BYE
The big pressing idea wasn't invented by Tesla.
There is no doubt that many of their structural design solutions are clever, andc this is good.
Some are clever for the sake of being clever, which is fine but it costs them money and that cost gets passed to the buyer but with little by way of tangible benefit in exchange.
And some or there solutions are verging on comical.
When Ford dismantled a model S they nearly shat their pants laughing at it. Some of their solutions were the sort of bodge TVR or the like would have come up with as an unavoidable alternative to not having mass production ability. This is why the shut lines can be all over the place, because the design not permit them to make absolutely identical vehicles one after the other. I took a close look at a 3, then then one glance at a Pornstar 2 with its deep paint, clinically consistent shut lines, and general quality of finish that makes Audi drivers sick with envy, and the decision was made instantly.
Even individual fasteners were a different league - Tesla once were imprecisely moulded and had evidence of sprew, the metal ones cheap and unplated, where as the P2 the plastic ones are neat and precise (manufacturered by the same company that moulds fasteners and fittings for Borgh, so good provenance) and few metal fasteners stainless. Its absolute night and day. And they bring it in for less money, or at least wer two years ago when we bought ours before the fi ancial markets went potty.
When it's you're own money - I don't do leases or rent cars on PCP - then You pay very close attention to these details.
The only bits that really impressed the Ford engineers were the cable management and the motor itself, both of which they reckoned were 5 to 10 years ahead of them and they seemed genuinely in awe of that. Did you not see the programme? It was an hour of head scratching at how a company that can do such occasional brilliance then settles with poor design and construction solutions for so much else.
Tesla are ahead on the electrfication front, although that lead is diminishing, yet so wrong one the structural front and production front. The likes of humble old Ford are the opposite and have the latter two but aren't there yet with the first. One day probably well before the decade is out, they'll have that first element down pat as well and Tesla will, sadly to my mind, have squandered a huge opportunity through sheer pig-headedness. Their refusal to concede that car structures should be designed by actuap automotive designers with input from actual automotive engineere and should be designed with production in mind from the outset is bizarre. It might work for iPhone, but they've repeated the same mistakes 4 models running now and show little inclination to change course.
Its their market to lose, and they're going to do just that.
Meanwhile the rivals are making cars just like they always have. Relatively inexpensive, reliable, of acdeltable and consistent quality.
If they were leading the way in vehicle design then inner wings made from 5 different parts bonded and bonded together is a very strange way of showing it. They may know about designing cars, but they're absolute rank amateur at designing them with ease and consistency of mass production in mind. They are genuinely best part of half a century behind in that (Ford's conclusion the programme.)