It's hard to know what the real story is at Tesla. It could well be that Musk forced an early release of the Model S. There have been reports that Rawlinson simply had all he could take of Musk and joined the legions of Tesla execs who have left the company. I once did an off-the-cuff analysis of who had left Tesla. Inside the generally high attrition rate, what stood out particularly was the extremely high turnover in the compliance functions of Finance and Legal. This can be a sign that people who are responsible for legal compliance and clean financial reporting were put under unusually intense pressure at Tesla. Given Musk's open flouting of SEC rules and settlement agreements and dodgy sales timing practices, this theory seems supportable.
It's telling that 8 of the 20 senior staff at Lucid came from Tesla, including the head of manufacturing (Peter Hochholdinger) and the head of hardware engineering (Erich Bach). In the engineering world, people seek to work for people whose engineering chops they trust more than any other factor. And Rawlinson seems to be a talent magnet for engineers where Musk is a talent repellant.
One has to remember that Rawlinson is a mechanical engineer who added electrical engineering to his resume later in his career. He is not a manufacturing engineer, and prior to Lucid he has never overseen a manufacturing function. Thus he brought in a well-known industry player for that role at Lucid.
We took delivery on August 21 of a Tesla Model S Plaid. Despite a lot of hoopla about its much-improved build quality, we are finding more uneven panel gaps and interior trim misalignments than in our 2015 Model S. The car has already been in the shop to correct the scuffing of the yoke against the steering column, and mobile repair is coming tomorrow to replace the driver side outside mirror which vibrates so badly that images don't resolve clearly. We've just been hoping it doesn't fly off the car before it can be replaced. On the other hand, our 2015 Tesla had some hidden flaws. A battery pack weld failure took out the battery pack and the rear drive unit, we went through four driver door handle mechanisms, and the MCU had to be replaced. In fact, we were in such a hurry to replace the car after its extended warranty expired that we took a Model S Plaid instead of waiting for the Rivian R1S Launch Edition we had reserved to replace the S.
Tesla has taken a lot of justified flak over shoddy build quality and poor inspection. However, the Model S electric powertrain rocked the automotive world, and THAT is what was squarely in Peter Rawlinson's brief.