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>All products are defective. Full stop.

Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:

Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.

This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.

There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.

If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.






I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.

Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.




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