I’m sorry but this motor was designed and built by professionals. It’s one of the things RG bragged on. So to say they didn’t think about what would happen if they lost an injector is plain BS. Sounds like another lame RG excuse to me. For as long as the first car has been out, you would think the bugs would be worked out. That test mule has over 10k miles on it. How could you not have bashed the hell out of that car in 10k miles?
When a major OE comes out with a motor, they throw dozens of them on dynos in varying regimens and test them to failure or expected lifetime 24 hours a day for months to a year. Some of this is because they "value engineered" the motor a bit and want to make sure it doesn't bite them, but most of it is because they take these things very seriously, especially when you consider how many product lines the engine ends up on. Polaris and BRP put their SxS motors EVERYWHERE. A common failure with the motor and its ECU parameters will have echoes across the entire company.
Test mules themselves? OEs will build dozens or more of them, stick some of them on Kinematics and Compliance testers and let them run.
Some get thrown on a shaker rig, some get thrown on drivetrain dynos and run mercilessly 24 hours a day through a pre-programmed testing regimen (replete with ultra-shitty "weather" across the gamut). Others end up in vehicle development engineers hands like my buddy Dave Coleman at Mazda. There are at least a couple, if not dozens, of these guys at every car company. They flog vehicles on test courses for months. Once they're fairly confident in the vehicle, they go out in public either heavily disguised, or in low populated areas in the hands of these engineers and others on the team (powertrain especially). The startups (like Rivian) tend to "disguise" their mules with super bright wraps, but there are gazillions of miles of testing amongst dozens or hundreds of mules.
Every vehicle that goes out has a gazillion data-logging sensors on it. An engineer notices something, he snap-shots the time period, and they all go back and quantify it in the data. There's enough computing on-board a development mule to shoot a team into space. When one of my longest friends (chief 12VDC engineer at Rivian) stopped by with an R1T that wasn't to start FRP for over a year, there was kilowatts of dataloggers on the thing (and it was still nauseatingly fast). The one he brought by was production drivetrain, batteries, suspension and frame, but the body was hand built and the entire interior was 3D printed. "Please don't slam the doors, they're made of chit ABS."
There's a LOT that goes into making a mass-produced vehicle. A near equal amount (and often more) goes into an engine line. All of this costs money and we end up paying for it when we purchase the vehicle. Despite all of that investment and data, chit slips by (looking at you Polaris). All of this sunk cost in testing is why you see chintzy welds, or thin tubing, or whatever else: all of it costs money, there's only so much you can bake into a vehicle. Compromises have to be made everywhere.
