FRU sizes are optimized to minimize warranty cost and must be balanced against things like design complexity, reliability and service procedure count/complexity

FRU sizes are optimized to minimize warranty cost and must be balanced against things like design complexity, reliability and service procedure count/complexity. This was a no-brainer IMO: Tesla wanted their cars to be superior and time to market was key. Why do handwringing about the cars that might be still on the road in five or ten years when that's beyond the warranty and beyond Tesla's life in business if they don't deliver a Model S with the target specs? They made the right tradeoff. This is probably one of dozens of design weaknesses that Tesla cars have, ones that allowed them to get way ahead of the competition. Now that we have arrived at five or ten years later there is some nonzero risk to their brand. Do they have unreliable cars? How many Tesla owners still own the original car and how many of these were purchased second-hand? Folks who bought the original car and they encounter this failure mode might think about this expensive out-of-warranty repair when they go car shopping next. If there are a lot of them, Tesla could consider the financial tradeoff between extending the warranty to cover this failure mode and the impact on future sales.