When you see recalls from other major automotive manufacturers, you see recalls on models that have a 250k-1M production range. Overall failures in this group is relatively low, so the recall is mostly a cover-their-ass measure to make sure all 500k of some car model is safe, even though they only had a tiny amount of incidents related.
The Cybertruck - all 11k of them - has already been recalled several times, and it’s issues which affect all of them (or almost all). Tesla being unable to roll out 11k trucks that aren’t Edsels is a huge hit to their reputation at a time when Tesla is already under fire from many different directions.
Regardless of the absurd design and the fact that owning a Cybertruck is a wholesale endorsement of Musk’s delusional narcissism, I’m confident that Tesla could have pulled this off as a quality vehicle had they tried. At least, a far less shitty version.
And this is no besmirchment on Tesla engineers, but a criticism of their management and terrible QA process (again, management). It wouldn’t surprise me at all of Tesla engineers said, “X, Y, and Z won’t work or will be crap, so we need to build it better, possibly with a redesign of certain components,” and Tesla execs (esp Elon) just responded, “Fuck it! We’ll fix it in post!”