When Musk called it a battery company and not a car company he wasn’t wrong, they were one of the first “mass market” options for an EV you’d actually want to drive with their original high performance roadster. Which was based off a lotus chassis, meaning it was in some ways more of an EV conversion mod rather than a ground up car. This makes sense given that they had the battery and EV motor tech figured out, but more or less had to learn how to build a car. Something that Ford, GM and others already know how to do and now that EVs are coming into vogue are able to take advantage of their existing tooling and institutional expertise to use towards making competitive EVs. While you could see them out and about teslas weren’t being produced anywhere near the same scale as other cars and when you try to up production to a truly mass scale across multiple factories and markets there’s almost always going to be QC issues in terms of machine tooling, tolerances, and general teething troubles.