For what it's worth, Tesla is by a gigantic margin the lowest quality-for-dollar American vehicle you can buy. The EV thing was unique until it wasn't.
Go sit in a $90,000 Tesla then go sit in a $90,000 literally-anything-else.
That price range for Ford and Chevy trucks or SUVs for example are outrageously luxurious by comparison (not even considering their additional utility).
To start you are comparing wrong segments (premium vs luxury), wrong platform (ice vs ev) and wrong generations (plush shitbox vs self driving sports spacemobile).
Compare to Rivian or Lucid and Tesla is actually cheapest (and yes worst interior).
You don't need to be car literate to know that a $90,000 Tesla interior feels on par with a bottom of the line Nissan Sentra. I'm not sure you can even buy another American-made car that feels so cheap? Curious if people have an idea of what American make/model feels worse to sit in.
Nobody cared that the build quality is "a little worse" all around because it doesn't meaningfully affect the vehicle's fitness for purpose like the internet comment sections will pretend it does.
As long as the vehicles were meaningfully different in other ways, those other ways were the dominating variables in the equation that make/break the purchase decision. Only when all else is within spitting distance of equal do Nth order variables like "muh door feel" and upholstery texture and speculative comments about reliability long after it's projected to replaced (gotta throw that one in there for the Toyota fanboys) start mattering....because they don't actually result in a seriously different ownership experience for the average user and the average user knows this.
What you originally said is that there is little variance along any dimension.
What you're saying now is there is variance along different dimensions and different people care about different dimensions.
This is also what the original comment that you replied to said: build quality is bad (Dimension A), people were willing to accept it due to being an EV (Dimension B).
My point is that "bad" build quality is basically a non-difference. It was never a problem, or it's a manufactured problem in people's minds. Sure, tesla is probably "worse" from a statistical perspective but the average buyer could never see this. You almost have to be looking to see it, and so you're not gonna see it unless all your other problems are solved.
Like if every OEM sets out to build a car of the same specs, they're gonna all be within spitting distance of each other. You'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel (i.e. "muh build quality) to find differences.
Tesla was winning before because they were the only ones who set out to build a car of that nature, build quality was a non-issue because it simply isn't an issue. It only became a meaningful one after the fact when more cars of the same sort arrived on scene and people went looking for minutia.
I’m not arguing from a statistical perspective and nor are buyers using that.
When Tesla came out, its build quality was awful but it succeeded because people wanted EVs.
Now there are EVs that don’t feel like Mattel toys, and Tesla is doing very very badly, in part because its build quality is still very bad which is now a glaring problem in a more competitive field.