"No one should find manufacturing inspiration from the builder of the worst quality cars in the industry."
According to Sandy Munro they are now the best quality in the industry, but yes they did start with pretty bad quality cars.
Here is the thing... Ford needs 12-18 months to improve a specific manufacturing process. Tesla require 12-18 hours to improve something. Ford improves a lot of things and release a new revision after 18 months. Tesla release new revisions on a weekly basis, without ever needing to slow down.
Do not believe the oversell on this though, this method of working is not without drawbacks, it's just that Tesla can tap into a large pool of undervalued college educated Millenials and Gen Zs that makes this way of working viable. The reason Tesla can move as fast as they do is because everyone is allowed to try and change the production cells in a factory, and if that change turns out to be more efficient, it gets copied to the rest of the cells in that factory.
Problem with that is, not every change is great and the more you optimize the less likely it is that a cell can be optimized further. Still, if only 1/10 changes work better, then that is still 10 more ways of making things more efficient every week, if 100 cells were altered across all Gigafactories.
It is a great way to work in a rapidly evolving market but eventually the EV industry will hit a brick wall where new innovations will be very hard to come by, just like ICE vehicles did. Problem for Ford et. al. is, we will reach that point in 2035 sometime and most ICE vehicles will stop being acceptable on the market by 2028.