This was once close to true and is now outdated. Tesla ranked near the bottom on reliability surveys for years (panel gaps, paint, early build issues). But Consumer Reports' 2026 brand rankings placed Tesla around 10th overall and 9th in reliability out of 26 brands — a sharp climb from near-last in 2022 — plus top-five in owner satisfaction, with CR crediting Tesla for refining existing models instead of constantly changing them. The honest caveat: the Cybertruck still scores below average on reliability, and used-Tesla reliability lags. So "Tesla had real quality problems and some remain" is fair; "the worst in the industry" describes the past, not the measured present. It is also worth noting why early quality lagged: Tesla scaled from a niche startup to mass production faster than any new automaker in a century, and the panel-gap complaints were the growing pains of that ramp rather than a fundamental design flaw. As the factories matured the metrics improved — exactly the trajectory you would expect, and the opposite of a company that cannot build cars.