But seriously, that stunt has nothing to do with production Teslas. Tesla is still a very new player we are now seeing more and more growing pains, especially on the customer side, which is too bad but honestly should have been expected.
We are the first adopters to discover what kind of shelf life a Tesla car has, what it works like after 5, 10 and 15 years. Personally, I'm not optimistic about it. It seems to break down quite easily for a lot of people - add a decade of wear and tear on top of that, and it's not a great picture.
The idea that we are only now seeing growing pains is wrong. Service has always been a major issue. As far back as Model S it has been a consistent topic.
The base electronic, motors and batteries seem to be pretty reliable for most people. They had very few major issues with those things compared to most companies much smaller EV efforts.
Its easy to think of this stunt as some sort of playboyy thing, but I felt it was a brilliant PR move.
They needed a known weight to test the rocket and orbital flight mechanics. Instead of putting any random thing, he put his car and the world went gaga over the stunt. It brought Tesla and SpaceX tremendous amount of press.
Didn't he put like, a whole car, into orbit around the Sun?