They just designed a lot of things poorly, used substandard parts to save pennies...
The cars are unsafe as designed...
They are going to avoid admitting the batteries were incompetently designed for as long as possible.
Lots of bombastic statements there, with little to back them up. I generally agree with your sentiments Chaserr, but you are
way off base with these assertions.
ALL cars are unsafe as designed. There's no way to make them totally safe. A ton or more of metal wrapped around a human body and hurtling it down the road at 70+ miles an hour has nearly unlimited potential to mangle that body beyond all recognition in an appallingly wide set of circumstances that can be triggered by equally appalling minor things. In point of fact, Teslas are one of the safest cars on the road. "...unsafe as designed"? Using the safety standards of the automobile industry, quite the opposite is true.
You need to keep in mind that
no one designed a product like this before Tesla. There was a veritable cornucopia of "firsts" in these cars, and despite all the research, an accompanying cornucopia of unknowns (maybe the biggest being that the number and magnitude of the unknowns were unknown).
Bad design decisions certainly were made, sure, like the eMMC chip usage in the early cars. And there were many more. But that happens with nearly everything. Engineering decisions in every industry are more often than not driven by budget and schedule. Those decisions are often known at the time to be compromises that use a less effective design, but it's very seldom that a truly "bad" design is knowingly implemented.
Incompetently designed batteries? Absolutely not. In fact, the design of the batteries and the BMS border on genius. Even with all the unknowns they were dealing with at the time, most of the cars have survived on the road for ten of thousands, and even over a hundred thousand, miles while performing perfectly (or very nearly so). The unknowns have popped their heads up in all those years and miles, and necessitated some very undesirable system changes to control their effects. Batterygate, chargegate and so on.
The incompetence lies in how Tesla has dealt with these things. Had they been absolutely upfront with us early adopters about why they needed to cap our charge rates, impose draconian tapers to our charge rates, cap our maximum battery charges, etc., I think most of us would be much less upset. I know I would. But they didn't. They chose instead to obfuscate or otherwise downright conceal what they were doing, in the hopes that we wouldn't notice (or some other unexplainable rationale that they should have known wouldn't work). And THAT is inexcusable.
So who am I to refute your assertions? What are my credentials? I'm a design engineer with over 40 years of experience who has worked in high tech industry for most of that time. I know how designs are done. I've worked with brilliant and incompetent engineers alike. I can see incompetent designs where there are. They are not in a Tesla.