I recently talked about this with a friend who is an engineer at a large traditional car manufacturer (working on sensor technology for self driving). It came u

I recently talked about this with a friend who is an engineer at a large traditional car manufacturer (working on sensor technology for self driving). It came up out of a completely different discussion (I had not heard about touch screen failures). He said that Tesla is well known for using general consumer grade parts (he mentioned the touchscreen as an example) instead of automotive parts (which have typically much longer expected livetimes). That allows the to push the price down but also to iterate faster. The worrying bit is not really that Tesla does it, but that the mandated strategy at that manufacturer is to only compare themselves with Tesla (all others don't count), so I think we will see a drive to lower quality from all manufacturers to emulate tesla. This is a well know premium manufacturer.