Outsourced using in-house designs, and, in Tesla's case, in-house assembly lines and factories.
Even the SPEAKERS inside of the Model 3 and Y are designed by Tesla (and manufactured by a vendor).
That's the big difference. It's also the reason why legacy manufacturers will struggle to effectively respond to Tesla. It takes a LOT of money and egos to upend generations of culture (and accept hundreds of millions in losses in the process)
> Even the SPEAKERS inside of the Model 3 and Y are designed by Tesla
In this particular case, is this really a good thing? Porsche's high end option for example is getting the speakers, amplifiers, tuned filters etc. from Burmester. Since Burmester specializes on this kind of thing, and the sound system (not the head unit and interface) are pretty much entirely distinct from the rest of the car, except that it has to be tuned to the environment it will exist in, that intuitively feels better conducive to focus areas and quality all around.
While I’ve no doubt the speakers in your Porsche example sound great, the German car industry LOVES to upsell a customer to a speaker with a designer label on it - every single brand in the VW group does it, BMW, Mercedes…
I think the German manufacturers just understand their customers vanity, sadly, where being seen to have the brand matters. The label is practically more important than the sound beyond a certain point.
In this case, the Burmester system sounds really great. I'm saying that as someone who has no such thing, so I'm less biased to like it. The example came to my mind because when I heard it, I was amazed that this was in a sports car.
But you may have a point anyway: The Bose system in the same car (a vastly more popular option because it is much, much cheaper) sounds worse than the cheap sound system in my old Ford.
Every auto manufacturer does this. Include a "Bose", "Harmon Kardon", or "B&O" sound system as part of a multi-thousand dollar premium package. Speakers are still the same paper cones as the trash-tier sound system; only difference is in some amp tuning, a sub, and a few tweeters. No surprise: the resale value of these systems is pennies by comparison.
For my particular example, I can at least say that the Burmester tweeters seem significantly better over the Bose, being solid (and heavy) ribbon tweeters, and not light cone tweeters.
Naïvely, I would think that having audio engineers in-house from companies like Harmon and Burmester that specialize in car audio but specifically to Tesla's product line would produce better, cheaper results than paying those companies to white-label audio systems.
