My experience of US automotive paint is that it is much lower quality than EU or Japanese paint jobs. Just look around you as you cruise the states, and all you see is faded peeling paint. That has been a specific concern of mine as they will need to compete outside the US from US-origin production for a goodly few years, which is not a normal state of affairs for US auto. Tesla do need to improve paint quality in many respects.
Tesla is known to have had real issues with their particular Fremont factory paint shop. They had to basically strip & rebuild it. The problems are well known - see for example
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/tesla-f ... rkers.html and this has contributed to the historical paint quality issues. That said the video paint is a) some delivery scrapes, but b) also dates from after the paint shop rebuild and so should have been fixed.
My auto colleagues once explained panel gaps to me, and it sounded complicated with many contributing factors. Personally it is not something I get wound up over as I only drive bangernomics that have been dunted about. If I was prioritising mfg improvements it would not be at the top of my list (paint would be high, capacity would be higher). But eventually it does all need to be sweated.
More important for me are the tolerances in the active parts (motors etc) and there is a) less of that in a BEV than in ICE, and b) not a great deal of evidence that there are significant issues with Tesla mfg in this area.
Overall this is about where the evidence is that Tesla is at on the quality pathway. It needs attention, but it is not quite the #1 issue for mfg. That is #1 capacity expansion (USA, China) and #2 model introduction (Y). I'd put charger buildout at #3 and quality at #4. Autonomy (FSD) is a R&D/PD item, not a mfg item so not ranked, but if I had to resource allocate it would get #2.5.
regards, dspp