Tesla is battling rumors of staff shortages, hazardous batteries, and other quality concerns as the company ramps up delivery rates for its mass market Model 3 vehicle, Newsweek reports.
Claims that Tesla's cars are dangerous to the public are "extremely misinformed and misleading," according to a 750-word statement released by a top spokesperson on Friday.
A slew of current employees anonymously spoke to CNBC, telling the outlet that the electric car manufacturer had begun borrowing employees from its suppliers to keep production smooth. The report, released on Thursday, also included testimonials of Tesla failing to meet its promises of quality and safety due to "sloppy calculations" by new hires.
"There's no redundancy, so when one thing goes wrong, everything shuts down," one anonymous employee said. "And what's really concerning are the quality issues."
Tesla responded: "These false claims are being made even though we have a proven history of making the safest vehicles on the road, with Model S and Model X receiving 5-star safety ratings not only overall but in every subcategory."
Other parts of the CNBC report said workers at the Gigafactory, which mass produces lithium batteries for Tesla vehicles, still assembled the products by hand. To those claims, the company said the facility still has not reached full functionality.
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"To be absolutely clear, we are on track with the previous projections for achieving increased Model 3 production rates that we provided earlier this month," the corporate statement read. "As has been well documented, until we reach full production, by definition some elements of the production process will be more manual."
In other bad news for the leading electric car company this week, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Authority launched an investigation into a crash that involved a Tesla Model S and a fire truck. The driver of the Tesla said the car was in Autopilot mode when it rear-ended a fire truck.
By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com
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Zainab Calcuttawala is an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on… More