Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.
Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving:
* Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
* Pre-sell your product years before it's ready.
* Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism.
Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else.
They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share.
Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them.
They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed.
> * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.
Like what?
Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested:
There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work.
But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.
I'd say tesla's "full self driving" and "autopilot" claims are pretty theranos like.
There's zero way they don't KNOW internally that asking an inattentive driver to take over with no warning doesn't work, and that they aren't as safe as they are trying to spin.
What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.
