Tesla

Tesla

Lee Hutchinson

Volvo

Volvo

Jonathan Gitlin

Ron Amadeo

Anyone who has driven a Tesla can't help but be impressed by what the company has achieved in just a few short years. OK, the Roadster was basically a Lotus Elise underneath, but the Model S and Model X are ground-up designs and feature a very impressive powertrain. But at the same time, anyone who has driven a Model S or Model X also can't help but notice the company's weakest point—the terrible interiors. Evidently Tesla has realized this—as Electrek first reported earlier this week, the company has poached Volvo's head of interiors, Anders Bell, in order to remedy the problem.

I'm sure writing this will enrage some of the company's more vociferous online supporters, but I make no apologies. It's clearly evident that all the R&D money has been spent on that powertrain and on software (particularly Autopilot); the cabins have been almost an afterthought. It's not just a lack of design flair—although that is certainly true. It's also the materials used, most of which would look out of place in an economy car in 2016, let alone a luxury SUV or sedan that starts out at more than $60,000. And this stuff is important. As a driver, the interior of a car is the bit that you'll look at and touch almost all the time.

Acres of flat, black shiny plastic abound. The Model X central storage bin has cheap removable inserts for cup holders. And the cubby that lives below the massive touchscreen in the Model S? No one thought to give it a lip at the forward edge, so anything you put in there is headed straight for the back seat the moment you hit the accelerator. And that's before we've touched on the Q&A problems—the last Model S the company let me drive had that cubby misaligned, so there was a half-inch gap at the upper left corner.

Volvo, on the other hand, is one of the industry's leaders when it comes to good interior design. For mass-production vehicles, no one other than Audi does them as well as Volvo, and I'm a particular fan of the sense of space and the use of materials in both the XC90 and S90.

It's not the first strategic bit of poaching that Tesla has conducted. In May of this year the company hired Audi's Peter Hochholdinger to head up Model 3 vehicle production.

Listing image by Tesla