Reworking identified problems is a basic part of auto manufacturing. Deliberately putting off rework until the vehicle is in the customer hands is more egregious IMO than making the error in the first place.
Perhaps, but it's not indicative of long term problems. More to the point, it's not an objective measure. If you look at JD Power's report, they said that the average premium vehicle had 204 problems per hundred vehicles, while Tesla had 226. That works out to about two initial problems per vehicle on average, and for Tesla, the chances on average of having a third one were only about 25% higher. For 3/4 of buyers, there were no additional problems. And these are the types of things that Tesla sent somebody to people's homes to fix, not problems with the cars breaking down in the middle of the road.
If people are going to buy a car, what counts is day to day satisfaction. My Lucid has a number of initial problems, and it's more than three. I expect them to be fixed in a single visit, but I will have to bring the car in. So the extent to which this is inconveniencing me is high compared to having somebody come to my house, but it's also a few hours out of a day or two for a car that I might own a decade. The idea of buying a different car that I like less on a day to day basis to avoid that service visit isn't one that makes sense to me. I could have stuck with my Teslas, since the initial problems were taken care of, and even with the warranty long since expired, they've been low maintenance. And buying a car with one less initial problem than a Tesla, and having a car that I liked less on a day to day basis because of it, would have seemed even more irrational to me.
On a Tesla vs Lucid basis, it's too early to tell which might have more initial problems after delivery. But I don't think that most buyers care about that enough that it would have affected their buying decisions. Many of us remember what cars were like up to the 1980s, when it was a question of how often your car broke down, stalled out, or needed service rather than if it would happen. Back then, it did make a big difference when buying a car whether one brand might have left you with a car that you couldn't trust to get you to work or might have broken down on a trip. So reliability was a significant factor when buying a car, and on a scale of 1 to 100, it made sense for a lot of those points to come from reliability. These days, it's a bigger negative for me that Lucid has a repair center in Burlingame instead of Newark than it is whether I have an extra minor thing or two go wrong. Consumer organizations are going by an outdated paradigm.
The problem is that when a range might go from 192 to 240 and 240 could make you 25th on the list of reliable cars, it's easy to lose track of the fact that the real life difference might come down to an average of an extra minor problem. Those aren't the actual numbers, but when my daughter's Chevy Cruze had bad sun visors, I had to take it in, wait in line at a service desk, deal with a courtesy shuttle that wasted hours, only to get a call at the end of the day telling me that they identified a problem that I knew from the onset, they needed parts, I needed the shuttle to get me back to pick up the car, and then repeat the whole process, that single item wasted more of my time than I expect all Lucid problems combined might do. And the second time around, they didn't finish on time.
That was the total effort for sun visors. Compare that to my Model S. The early ones had a bad bearing design that caused drive trains to be noisy. Tesla dealt with it by dropping the drive train, and instead of rebuilding it with new bearings, keeping the car for a week, and hassling the owner, once they dropped the drive train, they replaced it with a remanufactured one with a new bearing design, then returned the car to my house and picked up the loaner. On paper, one was a minor issue with sun visors and the other was an entire drive train replacement. It made it look like Tesla was a lot worse. But it was bearing noise and an easy (from my perspective) repair vs a nightmare of one.
The other thing that people like to excoriate Tesla over is panel gaps and alignment. If I look at every molding on my Lucid, going from one door to the next or to the trunk, etc. it's not perfect. There are much cheaper cars that might have had things a mm closer. People act as if that's a reason to buy a car that I'd like less. I disagree.
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