Tesla's German Automation Expert Klaus Grohmann Ousted After Clash With CEO Musk (reuters.com) 69
According to Reuters, "Tesla executive Klaus Grohmann was ousted last month after a clash with CEO Elon Musk over the strategy of Grohmann's firm, which Tesla had acquired in November." Grohmann Engineer's automation and engineering expertise is being relied upon by Tesla to help it increase production to 500,000 cars per year by 2018. From the report: Tesla planned to keep Grohmann on, and Grohmann wanted to stay, but the clash with Musk over how to treat existing clients resulted in his departure, the source said. Grohmann disagreed with Musk's demands to focus management attention on Tesla projects to the detriment of Grohmann Engineering's legacy clients, which included Tesla's direct German-based rivals Daimler and BMW, two sources familiar with the matter said. "I definitely did not depart because I had lost interest in working," Grohmann said, without elaborating. A Tesla spokesman, asked about Grohmann's departure, praised him for building an "incredible company" and said: "Part of Mr Grohmann's decision to work with Tesla was to prepare for his retirement and leave the company in capable hands for the future. Given the change in focus to Tesla projects, we mutually decided that it was the right time for the next generation of management to lead."
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Re: Shorting is sounding pretty good. (Score:2)
Duh, (Score:5, Insightful)
BMW and Benz are Tesla's competitors. Of course Tesla is gonna want to "service" them as little as possible. What did he expect?
If Mr. Grohmann wanted to continue providing excellent service to BMW, maybe he should've just kept his company and not sold it to Tesla.
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Go ahead and show me a BMW or a Benz with a cracked A pillar delivered to a customer.
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Used to work at Benz. A cracked A-pillar is uncommon but they happily delivered Smarts knowing that the engine would blow up in 20.000 km, and that the glass ceiling would crack in winter temperature when the airco was turned on. They delivered me an A-class with a faulty set of sensors and happily replaced the engine and transmission at my cost, claiming it was my fault. Nowadays I don't work there anymore and happily drive a Toyota.
I'm not saying Tesla is sacred and I'm actually pretty disappointed that t
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Tesla isn't in the same league as BMW or Benz. Tesla is in the same league as the Yugo. They have terrible build quality [teslamotorsclub.com], terrible reliability [edmunds.com], a criminally negligent design [jalopnik.com], and just quite frankly they aren't even luxury cars [motorauthority.com].
The quoted parent post is a perfect example of reality being suppressed by negative scoring. Slashdot should be better than that. Musk is treated like an idol, and his firms are treated as sacrosanct but they are simply businesses with a a lot of product failures due to inexperience and poor management.
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Tesla isn't in the same league as BMW or Benz. Tesla is in the same league as the Yugo. They have terrible build quality [teslamotorsclub.com], terrible reliability [edmunds.com], a criminally negligent design [jalopnik.com], and just quite frankly they aren't even luxury cars [motorauthority.com].
The quoted parent post is a perfect example of reality being suppressed by negative scoring. Slashdot should be better than that. Musk is treated like an idol, and his firms are treated as sacrosanct but they are simply businesses with a a lot of product failures due to inexperience and poor management.
Try looking a little deeper, _every_ manufacturer has defects, all of them, period. The question isn't if there are defects, it's how does the company respond. The very few links (4) are supposed to support the claim that Musk and Tesla are crappy/bad/unethical/etc... yet, look again at those links:
Link #1: As of right now, the last post from the forum on the links "terrible build quality [teslamotorsclub.com]" is this: (1 link down, 3 to go)
Just want to update you folks on what's going on. The folks at Tesla (our regional service manager and the local sales manager) are working with me to spec out the rebuild. I had wanted to take this chance to increase the battery size to 100D and add the 3rd row child seat and informed the team of my desire a couple weeks ago. This would have been relatively simple but since the process took some time to get rolling, it now got more complicated because of all the price changes and the fact that 100D is now includes bundling of options that I didn't originally selected / wanted such as SAS and 72A charger. Based on the professionalism that I've seen from the service team so far, I still am hopeful that this will be handled in fair fashion, keeping my fingers crossed.
Link #2: "terrible reliability [edmunds.com]"
All repairs were performed under warranty and Tesla delivered the car to us the following morning.
Whaaa??? They fixed EVERYTHING FOR FREE??? Please expl
Re:Duh, (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is something most new businesses go through in order to mature: There are bumps in the road.
Tesla isn't lauded for being the highest quality. Yet.
They're lauded for disrupting the market in healthy ways.
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Delivering a car with a cracked A pillar is criminal negligence not health distruption.
Re: Duh, (Score:2)
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Uuh... talk to anyone who works with cars or body work: BMW and Mercedes are some of the worst cars you can buy.
Who's paying you?
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... honor both the letter and the spirit of their contracts.
TFA says nothing about "contracts". This is about "relationships". Grohmann sold his company, pocketed Musk's check ... and then expected to continue to run the company and call the shots as if he was still the boss. It doesn't work that way.
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Your assumption about Grohmann's motivations is possible, but unsubstantiated.
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BMW and Benz are Tesla's competitors. Of course Tesla is gonna want to "service" them as little as possible. What did he expect?
Common decency? Having grown a business, I think it is reasonable to think that he had done the normal due diligence, and that he had reasons to expect that existing deals with his customers would be honoured - it's hard to guess without knowing more details. It is not, in fact unusual for companies to have their competitors as customers; I can how it could have been an advantage for Tesla to own the patents and setting the trends for these technologies for a long time, by licensing them to other car manufa
Next steps... (Score:3)
Grohman founds a new company, most key employees leave for the new company (*), Tesla is left with a bunch of patents.
<sarcasm> Smart move, Elon! </sarcasm>
(*) Between leaving for a company with dependable clients and staying in a company continuing to lose money quarter after quarter, the decision shouldn't be too difficult.
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Grohman founds a new company, most key employees leave for the new company
That is unlikely to happen. The sale/transfer agreement usually includes significant non-compete and non-solicitation covenants. Whereas it's difficult to enforce employee non-competes in California, the CA courts have regularly and repeatedly enforced non-competes on key members who sold their stake in a company.
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Grohmann Engineering was a Germany-based company. Of course, German law also allows for non-compete covenants, though I have no idea how they are enforced. In that specific case, one could argue that the new company wouldn't compete with Tesla as Tesla has shown no interest in servicing German customers.
Also, I wouldn't seriously expect this to happen, that was more a "wouldn't it be funny if..." kind of thought :)
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German law allows non-compete agreements but puts some serious restrictions on them. They are limited to a maximum of two years, can be expensive for the former employer because the former employer is required to pay compensation to the former employer while the non-compete agreement is in place. These compensations can often be between 50-100% of the former salary and do not get the former employer anything other than the non-compete. And these non-compete clauses can be hard to add to existing contracts.
Re:Next steps... (Score:4, Informative)
I worked on a major automation project at Tesla as an automation engineer. Tesla offered me a permanent job, but I wouldn't take it.
Tesla management treats automation engineers as if they are replaceable line workers. They approach problems by trying to buy a quick solution instead of planning for the long term. They spend a lot of money trying to look good (nice lights, painted floor, etc) because they are often giving tours by investment bankers, but they don't have enough experience building cars to produce the product it at scale. I've been in many auto plants and Tesla was just absurd. Tesla's relationships and treatment of automation contractors is bad, which certainly contributes to Tesla's difficulty building cars. Tesla may struggle to build cars, but I have to admit, they have a really impressive stock price.
TLDR; I would much rather work for Toyota than Tesla. Toyota knows how to build cars, and they know how to maintain good relationships with their workers.
Re: Next steps... (Score:2)
The question is... (Score:4, Funny)
Why are they trying to automate Germans? They're efficient enough as-is.
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I doubt this heavily.
While I get the sense that Musk has a huge personality, I also get the sense he's got amazing business and interpersonal sense. The guy was able to work directly with Trump; Musk has balls of steel.
I would actually argue that he probably either knew ahead of time he'd have to let Grohmann go or that something unforeseen occurred.
Could be as simple as loyalty: get rid of the head of the company to be sure there's a transition, as Musk mentioned, and that new orders are coming down to whe