Tesla’s first mass-market vehicle, the Model 3, continues to be plagued by quality control issues. Charved EVs magazine covered the recent purchase and teardown of two Model 3 copies by Sandy Munro of Munro & Associates, a Detroit consulting firm which dismantles cars and analyzes them in painstaking detail for auto-industry clients. The results were not pretty on some basic manufacturing issues:

As others have, Munro found that Model 3 suffers from poor build quality – panels that don’t line up properly, and in one case, a door liner that seems to have been installed backwards. He also claims to have received “hundreds, maybe a thousand” emails from owners complaining about similar fit-and-finish issues. He surmises that the problems stem from poorly trained assembly line workers and (as others have noted, and Elon Musk has admitted) too much and too-hasty automation.

But the news was not all bad, particularly with Munro’s glowing account of the Model 3’s electronics and battery technology. He compared the circuit board to the “kind of technology you’d find in military-grade hardware.”

Munro also heaped praise on the Tesla battery pack, noting its high power density, superb build quality and minimal current differential between cells. “Nobody can balance batteries that close. Nobody. Nobody’s ever done that.” Munro says that Korean suppliers LG and Samsung have long been considered the best in the battery business, but that the Model 3 pack “blows them both away.”

The positive reviews in some ways underscore the frustration with the quality control challenges. Tesla’s survival as a company will depend on its ability to right this ship, as a poor reputation on quality could sink sales (and a new Bloomberg report indicates that the company could possibly run out of cash later this year, as it reportedly spends more than $6,500 every minute). While the company has thrived by bucking tradition on almost every facet of the automaker industry, its efforts to reinvent manufacturing may have been a step too far.

For more information, check out the in-depth video of Munro’s teardown above.