Tesla Employees Say Automaker Is Churning Out a High Volume of Flawed Parts (cnbc.com) 150
Several current and former employees of Tesla said that the automaker is manufacturing a surprisingly high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles, leading to more rework and repairs than can be contained at its factory in Fremont, California. CNBC reports: One current Tesla engineer estimated that 40 percent of the parts made or received at its Fremont factory require rework. The need for reviews of parts coming off the line, and rework, has contributed to Model 3 delays, the engineer said. Another current employee from Tesla's Fremont factory said the company's defect rate is so high that it's hard to hit production targets. Inability to hit the numbers is in turn hurting employee morale. To deal with a backlog of flawed parts and vehicles, said these current and former employees, Tesla has brought in teams of technicians and engineers from its service centers and remanufacturing lines to help with rework and repairs on site in Fremont. They also said that sometimes the luxury EV maker has taken the unusual measure of sending flawed or damaged parts from Fremont to its remanufacturing facility in Lathrop, California, about 50 miles away, instead of fixing those parts "in-line." Tesla flatly denies that its remanufacturing teams engage in rework. "Our remanufacturing team does not 'rework' cars," a spokesperson said. The company said the employees might be conflating rework and remanufacturing. It also said every vehicle is subjected to rigorous quality control involving more than 500 inspections and tests. The report from CNBC has caused Tesla's stock to tumble today. You can read Tesla's full statement about the CNBC report here.
Slashdot is lawed too! (Score:5, Insightful)
From the blurb; emphasis mine:
Several current and former employees of Tesla said that the automaker is manufacturing a surprisingly high ratio of lawed parts and vehicles, leading to more rework and repairs than can be contained at its factory in Fremont, California.
That's ok, Slashdot has had plenty of time to work out all of its kinks in the supply chain for their product and, yet, we still see a surprisingly high ratio of flawed spelling.
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Fixed that for you.
"Gramer Nazi" approach is wrong for a hit piece... (Score:3)
Which is what this article by Lora Kolodny is.
She really, REALLY, REALLY has an issue with Tesla. [slashdot.org]
And again... she puts doom&gloom in the title...
Tesla employees say automaker is churning out a high volume of flawed parts requiring costly rework
Tesla employees say the company is manufacturing a high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles that need rework and repairs.
The electrical vehicle maker has had to ship some flawed parts to remanufacturing facilities to avoid scrapping them, rather than fixing them in-line, according to sources; Tesla denies this.
Then she digs through "at least one Tesla employee profile on LinkedIn" to try to "prove" a much greater level of part rework - cause an employee listed working in a team of 130 instead of 40 on a CV.
But the best part is where she quotes experts.
Like this part at the end of the second paragraph...
Lean manufacturing specialist Matt Girvan, founder of MAG Consulting, said: "Even during what is considered 'launch' mode, if a company is selling its cars to customers, it should not be experiencing large amounts of rework.
This speaks to an internal quality issue that is on a magnitude that is not normal for most car manufacturers."
Then... after much more text and a "sad" photo of Musk [cnbc.com] (Why not a
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Landfills are the 22nd centuries' resource strip mines.
The thing that the people of the future are going to HATE are the high temperature incinerators that are so popular with some environmentalists today. They destroy so much that could be banked away for the future in a good clay-lined landfill.
Re: Tesla is good for the environment (Score:1)
I've been saying for years that "unrecyclable" plastic should be separated from general waste and buried. When the oil wells run dry and prices rise, those dumps will make good feedstock for processes currently thought of as uneconomical
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They destroy so much that could be banked away for the future in a good clay-lined landfill.
Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
The power companies should sell options/futures on the waste, and use the money to pay for the (temporary) storage.
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Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
They're easy to make more of and there isn't a lot of isotopic waste around at the moment anyway, a few thousand tonnes total around the world. Most spent fuel is U-238, unburnt U-235 and bred Pu-239 and Pu-240 which is already recycled into new fuel in a few places such as Russia.
The interesting fission products from reactor waste tend to be short-lived and go away quite qu
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Perhaps you should read a book about the topic instead of spreading this nonsense.
You could start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They destroy so much that could be banked away for the future in a good clay-lined landfill.
Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
The power companies should sell options/futures on the waste, and use the money to pay for the (temporary) storage.
You ask a great deal of a near-sighted, planetary-level, Alpha species that often has a difficult time getting out of its own way, even socially... yet I hope your insight is shared by enough of us.
Re: Tesla is good for the environment (Score:2)
How and why are well known. The politicians (Gore/Kerry/O'Leary) shut down the program.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages... [pbs.org]
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They destroy so much that could be banked away for the future in a good clay-lined landfill.
Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
The power companies should sell options/futures on the waste, and use the money to pay for the (temporary) storage.
Actually we know exactly how to reuse them. It just is more expensive and politically iffy as refining spend spend fuel back into (a smaller amount of) usuable fuel require the same kind of facility (a breeder) as making weapon grade nuclear material.
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Friend of mine used to work for GM and this sounds pretty familiar, he said they'd have piles of parts with defects lying around next to assembly lines awaiting rework or perhaps reuse without rework when they were in a hurry and needed a part. There was little to no accounting, parts just ended up shunted off to the side somewhere where they'd be held indefinitely until something could be done with them.
I guess the advance with Tesla is that at least they can track their defective/in-need-of-rework parts.
I just had a tour of the factory (Score:5, Interesting)
Something overlooked in the description, Tesla is making many if not most of the parts there in the factory right next to the assembly line. Having also been to Ford and GM assembly lines, and seen many others on TV (How it's Made!), Tesla's approach is radically different! If you have to stamp raw aluminum, put it through a bunch of processes, you're going to get a few that have blemish or minor rework issues, or are scrap. Every factory making parts from scratch has a yield. I remember when flat panels were first introduced they were super expensive because the yield was down around 30%. I would guess the current flat panel yield is up in the high 90s.
Ford and GM had parts fabricated away from the assembly line, so there was a lot less yield related issues by the time someone was bolting on a part, those were dealt with elsewhere.
As long as there's a process to catch problems before the become part of the car, who cares. I for one am extremely happy they are having production slowdowns rather than shipping flawed cars.
Re:I just had a tour of the factory (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla is making many if not most of the parts there in the factory right next to the assembly line. Having also been to Ford and GM assembly lines, and seen many others on TV (How it's Made!), Tesla's approach is radically different!
Been to Ford's River Rouge plant? Looked at a documentary of it in its early days?
The Rouge Plant was built as a machine that took in coal, iron ore, and other raw materials at one end and spit out finished cars at the other. This was how Ford tried to do it when he was the Musk of his day.
These days things are spread out more.
Also: Tesla doesn't build EVERYTHING at the plant (though they are partial to suppliers located within a few miles, so they can interact and ship stuff around in a matter of minutes to hours, rather than days or weeks. (Much like the chassis and final assembly plants at the GM complex in Detroit, which function as a two-part line with a gap measured in city blocks.)
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Defects shouldn't make it to the line though; they should be dealt with at the component testing level.
40% failure rate seems high, but how they are counting it matters a lot-- one failed component per 2.5 cars (out of thousands of components) vs 40% of front right quarter panel (or whatever).
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I appreciate the innovation and marketing skills that Tesla is bringing to the electric car market, but there does seem to be a lack of knowledge of the history of the auto industry as well. E.g. electric cars were availabl
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Not particularly picking on Ford here, but I'm wondering how many of these antique car companies were using rubber and sisal (popular stuffing fibre) or coir (ditto) which came from plantations still using child labour or indentured labour (fancy name for slave labour) in the 1950s and 1960s? I'm sure the figures would have been higher in the 1930s.
I'll just go and read an article s
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ord and GM had parts fabricated away from the assembly line, so there was a lot less yield related issues by the time someone was bolting on a part, those were dealt with elsewhere.
Either the manufacturing and inspection processes work, or they don't. It doesn't make any difference where the part is made.
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Hydro has far less serious issues than coal, nuclear or big oil.
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Since the context of Slashdot is usually the US, and you seem to be assuming the US, I'll assume that as well:
Coal usage is plunging off a cliff. In the US in the past decade alone it's plunged from nearly 50% of the grid to around 30% of the grid. Coal is dying, and nothing is going to change that, because its killer is economics.
Nuclear power and hydro are relative
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Hint : it may come from coal, it may come from nukes, it may come from hydro, but virtually NONE of those sources are without serious issues.
So because there's no perfect solution, all the existing are equal. Message received.
Heeey... (Score:3)
...just in time for that Gung Ho reboot?
Any Tesla Owner Could Have Told You That. (Score:5, Informative)
My Model X came off the line with a bad charge port that was almost impossible to supercharge. I later found out that this was a widespread manufacturing defect that occurred in cars made over a period of weeks in late 2017. As a result, they ran out of (non-defective) replacement charge ports for the entire region, and had to send out field techs to manually file down the defective plastic guides in the charge ports of a large number of vehicles.
The cost of these mistakes to Tesla has to be just incredible. They would be much better off financially if they added an additional validation step early in their supply chain, even if that meant eating the cost of a few parts.
And this doesn't just affect their new cars. These Model X charge port issues happened more than two years after production on the Model X began. That's insanely late in the production cycle for manufacturing tolerance issues to suddenly crop up. Very bizarre.
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I always find it odd, when workers complain about how bad a job fellow workers are doing. I am sorry but perhaps your contention is that Elon Musk is working the production line and doing a really bad job. It that case, Elon Musk is doing a really shitty job on that production line and should perhaps consider getting into management, rather than making bad parts. Somebody seriously wants to buy Tesla and make no mistake and buy it at a substantive discount. Especially suspect the choice of photo to show Mus
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An electric car with a defective charging port is profoundly safe. As long as it's not stuck somewhere in the way of other cars.
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That's insanely late in the production cycle for manufacturing tolerance issues to suddenly crop up. Very bizarre.
Obviously you've never worked in a factory. It isn't bizarre to have tooling wear out and cut oversized or undersized parts eventually. Especially if you are pushing massive numbers of parts with insufficient manufacturing resources.
What's really going on here is that they have shitty QA on their products.
Maybe they aren't really doing QA and are telling the guy running the part to check every ten parts, but oh yeah, also you have to hit 110% of production, not our problem how you can fit 65 minutes in an h
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Tesla's problem would seem to be the opposite: they switched to hard tooling before the assembly bugs were worked out. Now they've got an efficient production line making cars that need substantial post-prod work.
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The Tesla forums seem to confirm this, as does the fact that European owners have fewer issues because the cars are re-assembled and re-tested in the Netherlands and so get a second round of QA testing. Faults like trim not aligning, falcon wing doors not working, excessive rattle and noise when accelerating etc. that plague US owners are much less common here.
In other words the warranty repairs that US owners have to take their new cars into the service centres for are done at the factory in the EU. Even s
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Purely anecdotal, but a colleague at work has one and in 18 months about 1/4 of the car other than the chassis has been replaced, I'm not kidding.
Not because they failed as such, but each time it has a bit of a squeak or at the checks each 6 months they always replace stuff.
Sometimes small stuff like the wing mirrors squeaking when they adjust, to parts of the drive and control systems that are starting to give of diagnostic warnings. Brakes, hubs, bits of interior, all replaced at various points for free.
T
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Actually, I'd argue that they're good at manufacturing, and bad at design. Components should be designed to handle a reasonable amount of manufacturing variance, and theirs just aren't. That's also why my charge port door stopped closing without assistance on about the second or third time I opened it. Everything seems to be designed under the assum
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That's what prisons are for — to take the sorts of people who would fraudulently cut corners on parts in a way that puts lives at risk, and lock them away from civilized society for the rest of their lives.
Anti-Tesla Article #923 (Score:1, Funny)
Need some more Anti-Uber articles to balance this out!
Yet another attempt to tarnish Tesla. Thanks, news (Score:2, Interesting)
This is clearly yet another attempt by Tesla's "old-fashioned" competitors to tarnish Tesla's name. You know, the companies whose car parts are total crap and yet do pass their "rigorous testing". And news sites like this are happy to post this shit, without asking questions like "how come we suddenly see news about a car company's' manufacturing failure rates reaching mainstream news?"
Since when has stuff like this started reaching mainstream news? Oh, since Tesla, a company that makes very high quality el
Good time to buy stock then (Score:3, Insightful)
The report from CNBC has caused Tesla's stock to tumble today.
Remember all the Tesla fires? The stock tumbled then and I managed to get in at the bottom of that particular drop.
I'll never understand how or why the markets are absolutely eager for anything remotely bad about Tesla Motors so they can let their fear-ridden backbrains take over and sell in a panic. Fine I will just buy then.
As to the issue: new factories pushing the edge on new kinds of parts will inevitably have issues of this kind. I would be more concerned if they reported a zero or tiny defect rate. That would indicate that the QA dept is not doing its job and somebody is hiding something.
Bottom line: Tesla revenues are supply limited. Specifically supply of batteries. They have a huge backlog of sales. Yes a 40% defect rate of something is a problem and has to be fixed. I have seen defect rates like that and worse on stable product that hasn't changed in 5 years. That is why there is a career in supply chain management. That is why there is a career in Quality Assurance.
But if you have a backlog and you have funding (Tesla has both) these problems will be fixed. The stock price drop has to do with the market obsession with making this quarter's shipments and revenue numbers and nothing else.
Had this not made the news I would have been surprised if this had even reached Elon's desk.
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I predict that 2020 will be the year I do Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman at the same time.
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Or it might not exist at all in 2020. It's a high risk investment that will pay no dividends for years to come. Personally, I don't think Tesla will survive as a car manufacturer in its own right. The big boys will come in and eat its lunch. Volkswagen and General Motors don't seem to have all these problems getting the production lines for mass produced cars up to full capacity.
I think, if Tesla survives, it will be as a supplier of technology to other manufacturers. Elon Musk is an amateur at car producti
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What you don't understand is that some investments are based on current P/E and some based on expected future P/E (and some based on the "greater fool" theory, of course).
TSLA stock has grown 20x in 8 years. (Score:2)
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Tell that to the people making money off it.
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One reason to invest in a company is that it has a good P/E ratio. Another is in the belief that it will get one later. Which you likes depends on how conservative an investor you are. Buy companies based on long-term prospects, and some will fizzle and a few might make it big.
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It's a poorly run company run by a narcissistic Silly Valley huckster who doesn't know what he's doing and needs regular cash infusions from delusional people who either don't want to or can't read financial statements.
You would be right if he wasn't making the best cars _in the world_
Trust me, I own both a Model X and a Model S. Once you drive electric there is no way back. Other brands are starting to enter the market but are still far behind. I'm going tomorrow to a VIP event for the launch of the Jag I-Pace and am on the list for the Mission E (will be summer next year when that launches). The Audi eTron might become delivered around the end of this year.
You would also be right if he would only TALK about rockets i
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It's trivially easy to understand - Tesla is insanely overvalued and financially on the edge.
That's one important metric - equally important is how fast they're working through that backlog and converting potential sales into cash in the bank. (Actually, that's probably even more im
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Had this not made the news I would have been surprised if this had even reached Elon's desk.
You lost me. If Musk didn't make it his business to know about a 40% defect ratio, that makes him at minimum an absolutely terrible manager.
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Yes a 40% defect rate of something is a problem and has to be fixed. I have seen defect rates like that and worse on stable product that hasn't changed in 5 years. That is why there is a career in supply chain management. That is why there is a career in Quality Assurance.
Interestingly, Tesla is trying to get good product out, despite the trouble. They'll want to fix this stuff because it lowers their costs (operations cost 67% more if you have a 40% defect rate), and right now they want to get out into the market.
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Had this not made the news I would have been surprised if this had even reached Elon's desk.
You lost me. If Musk didn't make it his business to know about a 40% defect ratio, that makes him at minimum an absolutely terrible manager.
I'll never understand how or why the markets are absolutely eager for anything remotely bad about Tesla Motors
dear god I've seen almost nothing but the opposite. People are taking whatever Musk says as gospel, hook line and sinker. People believe he's going to put them on Mars, for fuck's sake. I'm so tired of the insane fawning over Musk that even his company failing wouldn't be enough to correct the karmic books.
Some people seem to need heroes to worship, and Musk has a
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Tesla's price is largely built on speculation. Having a back order of sales does not matter if you are not making money on those sales. Speculative markets are always more volatile and Tesla falls into that category. With more and more bad news it becomes less likely Tesla will make it to the black before their competitors can cut out a market share.
Further, the production of the model 3 is slow because of all these parts issues not battery supplies. In mass production the goal is not to stop the line, ever
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Yes, but nobody is going to read an article about a QA problem on a Camry.
Isn't that normal? (Score:1)
Anything as complex as a manufacturing line should have some kinks for a short while until they figure out the points of failure.
I've worked on software for manufacturing lines, making many millions of things at a time. Yes, most things are going to have 99% acceptable tolerances once you're all set - but I've also seen lots of notable manufactured things where because the run was small, they were willing to throw away the majority of the run just to avoid having to go back to re-engineering.
And yeah - the
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No I don't think it is normal. Consider Ford switched to aluminum for their F-150. Something they make more of in a month than Tesla makes all year. And yet somehow, like magic, they all pop out like cookies perfectly baked. For the 3, I keep thinking the old Lucy comedies where Lucy & her friend are on an assembly line and can't keep up. Hilarious comedy because you think it can't happen. But maybe it is over in Fremont.
Having worked at a Chevy dealer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Having worked at a Chevy dealer... (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked for an automotive parts manufacturer in the QA department I can tell you that 40% is absurdly abysmal. 1 in 1000 requires an executive meeting. 1 in 10,000 makes the line stop. 1 in 100,000 is the contractual maximum for the Toyota parts we supplied. Ford was tolerant of a few per 100,000 requiring rework (though they just threw the parts away) and was tolerant of 20% "close enough" parts, meaning the plating will wear out on salty roads in 8 years instead of 10.
Zero was the contractual maximum for BMW and Lotus. BMW will accept 5 ppm out-of-spec so long as you don't do it often. Lotus will kick back the whole shipment and threaten pulling your contract with one bad part. Do it twice in a year and the contract is gone with cancellation penalties. Every part for both was QA tested. We had to invest several million into automated multidimensional laser gauging QA equipment.
These Tesla numbers are what you would expect of a garage-based manufacturer of dude-buggies, not a modern auto manufacturer. Perhaps they need to hire engineers and workers from Detroit instead of LA.
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You are correct. Anyone who cares about quality does six sigma.
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Seriously, I don't think Lotus has made a million cars in the entire history of the company. And they certainly aren't known for their quality.
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Re:Having worked at a Chevy dealer... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The fact that you are kept busy in the parts department is not relevant unless you consider the total number of cars shipped which is in the 80M+ range. And my experience for the last 3 cars I've bought is the vast majority need nothing but an oil change for the first 3-5 years.
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People have been building cars for over a 100 years. You shouldn't have to learn that kind of stuff from experience anymore.
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Hope they get there soon.
I love my Model S and had minimal factory defect issues when I got it.
My next car will certainly be all-electric, and I really want it to be another Tesla.
90k miles in 4 years, and it still handles like day one. Battery hasn't lost any capacity and I barely do one service a year. And every service is just them replacing the windshield wipers and tightening a few bolts and such.
Frankly, my one complaint is that they don't tell me when to come back for service. Every other car I ha
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....in their parts department, I can tell you that pretty much every model of car manufactured has some certain parts from some certain providers that are notorious for failing. This is what led to Toyota achieving such dominance today: they learned the "Barney Fife" lesson - "Nip it in the bud, Anj! Nip it in the bud!". They relentlessly send their engineers into their parts provider's lines to perform front-line QA and "kaizen" (continuous quality feedback). Tesla seems like they want to get there, and will - I believe - but as with all complex systems, there is lots to learn (and relearn) along the way.
This.
There is an oft quoted statistic used by GM fanboys that goes something like "Toyota has had more recalls than " which on the outside is true but in reality it's because Toyota will fix absolutely anything where as GM waits until it's killed 17 people and there is a risk of a lawsuit.
A toyota recall looks something like: In extreme conditions above 50C a mishandled seat adjustment handle may become loose if the planets align and you fail to find the jade monkey in time.
A GM recall looks like: During n
Statistical Process Control (Score:2)
40% of what parts were bad? (Score:2)
Your post brings up my question about the original article, where some guy said "40% of parts" required rework.
What does that mean? The way it's written makes it sound like 40% of all the parts used to make a Telsa requires rework.
What, 40% overall of all the parts needed to make a Tesla are bad? I call bullshit. This sounds like a reporter that is either misunderstanding what he was told, or intentionally misquoting.
Or does it mean 40% of some certain part?
I can believe there's a 40% rate on some certain p
American mfrs still don't know who Deming was (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The company said the employees might be conflating rework and remanufacturing. It also said every vehicle is subjected to rigorous quality control involving more than 500 inspections and tests
if you need 500 inspections and tests, you're doing it wrong. My great hope when Toyota got involved was that they'd be able to teach them proper manufacturing technique. I guess they didn't. Maybe they found a culture fucked-up beyond repair and that's why they walked away...
defective parts rate (Score:2)
in china, defective parts in electronics assembly can go up to 20% of your product... that never show up in the west, but is reworked if possible, and sold as "sound" on the local markets.
Nice to see (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:2)
carts (Score:2)
It's great news (Score:2)
I am happy to hear employees confirm that Tesla invests a lot of time and energy into manufacturing a high quality car instead of pumping out critically flawed death traps the way Chevy does.
Employees (Score:1)
The Fremont factory is cursed (Score:1)
Meh.. (Score:2)
Do they work? Are they fixed under warranty if not? Sounds like Elon's learned quite a bit from Detroit, after all.
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He is not alone, he is not unique. Numerous other billionaires are not 'just trying to find new inventive ways to screw over everyone else.'
But your cynical point of view is noted.
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Hello Mr. Anonymous Coward. Please launch your own, as in designed, built and productized electric car, on your own designed, built, and commercially successful line of rockets, and then your claim that a man who has done all of these things is a flim-flamm man and huckster might actually be credible.
The grownups in the room do understand that Musk bought Tesla when it was having trouble producing a viable prototype.
We also understand that SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine is a re-worked Apollo era motor that