LESSONS LEARNED: An auto-manufacturing expert says Tesla’s days of production hell have put it ’10 years ahead’ of the competition.

“So what Tesla’s done is it’s cranked out a product that’s probably 90%, 95% there,” he said. “But they’ve got so many ways of investigating what’s going on in each car all the time that the feedback can say ‘Hey, what I think what we should do is X. Let’s make that engineering change and implement it on the vehicles from here going forward, and if or when a customer has a problem, bingo, we don’t know how to solve it or we’ll replace the parts.'”

“If I had to make a choice between the two — getting to 95% and then basically waiting until customers complained and then changing things rapidly,” Munro continued. “I’d rather take that approach.”

That approach seems to be working. Tesla’s on track to produce nearly 500,000 cars this year, analysts estimate, in-line with the company’s guidance.

I wrote at the time of Tesla’s “production hell” that the race was between Tesla trying to upscale itself into a mass-producer of automobiles, and the incumbent automakers squashing Tesla by figuring out how to make and market better EVs — and that I had no idea who would win.

Tesla looks like they’ve won.