I certainly have shipped dodgy stuff knowingly for lack of time to do better. "This is a prototype, we'll apply the Chinese warranty, if it's broken we'll replace the unit". I would ship non-UV cables to outdoors stuff, because I had no time to select and order a better one, I shipped an outdoor temperature sensor cover that was not open to the air enough and was just tracking the sun. The only red lines were thunder and fire. I don't want to start a fire, and I don't want to conduct the thunder.
But I did that way earlier than Tesla in the process.
Yeah, but it's not a single person or single decision. They went with consumer eMMC, and probably had a justification showing that they'd never need replacement for 30 years of use or whatever. But then someone else overfilled the partition, leaving not enough space for the hardware wear leveling to work in, which over-wears the available space. (No idea what the filesystem choice was, some are more susceptible to this than others). And then a third party decided to ship with the logging settings set to dump all sorts of junk to storage that wasn't needed on a production device.
None of those are particularly boneheaded in isolation. It's just a bug. Bugs just happen.
(But again: design bugs should be recalls and not repairs)
> Chinese warranty, if it's broken we'll replace the unit"
That's the mass production warranty for integrated objects.
Calling it "Chinese" is just weird unless you are calling attention to a claim that only china does mass production anymore.
For cars, we have the "extended warranty" which is just a bet that the car won't fail to much on average.
But I did that way earlier than Tesla in the process.