Elon Musk's Alleged Email To Employees on Tesla's Big Picture (jalopnik.com) 186
An email allegedly sent by Elon Musk to Tesla staff has announced that the Model 3, which has faced a number of production issues, will go into "24/7" production by June, resulting in 6,000 Model 3 units made per week. But apart from this update, in the email, Elon Musk sheds light on how much he values precision in his cars. An excerpt: Most of the design tolerances of the Model 3 are already better than any other car in the world. Soon, they will all be better. This is not enough. We will keep going until the Model 3 build precision is a factor of ten better than any other car in the world. I am not kidding.
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
Some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That's ok, there are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. They just can't work with Tesla.
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
Some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That's ok, there are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. They just can't work with Tesla.
Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason of the "X per week" argument is to appease Wall Street analysts, so called "experts" who have never built anything in their lives.
What Musk needs to do is maintain the vision but turn over operations to those more qualified to eek out every optimization in logistics and the assembly line.
There's plenty of those folks available in Detroit but I guess he wants to DIY...
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
What Musk needs to do
He had delegated this work. He's back in the middle now because they failed. I don't know why, and you don't either; Tesla doesn't share enough information to know and the stuff appearing in the media about all this isn't credible for a whole bunch of reasons.
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Re: Meh (Score:2)
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"There's plenty of those folks available in Detroit"
Do it old school then?
I don't think you understand what Tesla is all about. Sure they are only making 2,000 cars/week at the moment, but give them time. They can keep doing things their way and still get to 6,000 cars/week. Their cars are expensive but nobody else has higher customer satisfaction rates.
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Their cars are expensive but nobody else has higher customer satisfaction rates.
The same can be said for Scientologists and Mormons.
And your point in mentioning a very subjective metric?
Here's MY point: Tesla has a cult following - like 1990's Apple. It's purely psychological.
It's also the reason why the Tesla board approved Elon's obscene compensation package: share price is based upon his cult of personality.
Those of us who have actual accounting training see the fact that Tesla has LOST money in all of its 15 years. Cite: Its financial statements filed with the Securities and Exch
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Tesla has a cult following - like 1990's Apple. It's purely psychological.
I beg to differ. Many Apple customers in the 90's were self identified 'apple people' and continued to use what was - at that time - a far inferior and far more expensive product.
I've been driving BMW's for decades, they are excellent vehicles. I now own Tesla S and I enjoy it far more then the BMW I previously owned.
The Tesla is not perfect by luxury car standards. There is many places where it can be improved. But that said, it is a
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Many Apple customers in the 90's were self identified 'apple people' and continued to use what was - at that time - a far inferior and far more expensive product.
Inferiour to modern Macs? Yes.
Inferiour to a unix workstation? Arguable, depending on what you wanted to do.
Inferiour to an Amiga? Probably, again depending on what you wanted to do, much more expensive, yes.
Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.
Macs at those times had Mac OS and Apple/UX (Apples Unix) as operation systems. The development environment was a kind of Cygwin for Macs running a tc-shell and most unix tools (under Mac OS), the environment was called MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Inferiour my ass.
I've been driving BMW's for decades, they are excellent vehicles. Then you are very lucky, BMW had a quality crisis in the 1990s. But it might be it mostly hit the bikes, don't remember, never had an BMW.
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Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.
From a hardware bang-for-buck perspective, it was. This ended up being a good thing when we resold some of our old equipment.
From a software perspective, it didn't start out that way (System 7 was much more pleasant for me to use than Windows 3.1), but NT 4.0 came out in 1996. A/UX only ran on some 68k-based Macs, which were getting long in the tooth by the late 90s.
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All Macs that time where 68k based. A/UX ran on all Macs. ... the never really was a Windows PC compareable with a Mac, still not now.
And the bigger ones had 68030 and 68040 processors, far far far superior to an 80286 or 80683
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.
In the Windows 3.1 era, that may have been the case. However, once Win95 became available, it completely spanked the Mac in every possible way, including reliability and window management. Apple made no headway on Copland and aggressively defied adapting a taskbar or similar mechanism for window management to avoid the stigma of copying Microsoft. By 1995, productivity was way, way higher on a PC as Apple refused to adapt to new ways of working, and continued pushing their views of apps using fixed amounts of memory and having multiple windows open per app, a la Desk Accessories. That just covered the usability, mind you -- I don't even talk about performance per dollar. It was a mess, and every student at my university saw Macs as a joke. Only the teachers were die-hard Apple fans.
It was actually school policy that our departments were only allowed to buy Macs, no matter how much we begged the school to let us buy PCs. It was much easier and faster for me to leave class, go to my dorm, do my assignment on my $800 PC, print everything out, and walk back to class than to do the work in the lab on a brand new $5,000 Mac.
Having recently seen Amiga die, I was certain Apple would also be out of business by the end of the century. That very nearly happened, had Apple not reached an epiphany: they finally accepted they couldn't design or maintain their own OS, and they should give up and buy someone else's. Classic Macs were a trainwreck.
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I had a Win 95 PC, it was the first 'useable' Windows.
But it was in no way better than a Mac, hint: Y2K problems, no working internationalization, short file names (in the GUI looking long, but cut off on disk)
It was much easier and faster for me to leave class, go to my dorm, do my assignment on my $800 PC, print everything out, and walk back to class than to do the work in the lab on a brand new $5,000 Mac.
That does not make any sense. Why would working on a PC be faster? My first PC bought 1993 costed $5
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The joke was always that the best Mac was an Amiga, running Shapshifter and MacOS under an early kind of virtual machine. The Amiga was faster, cheaper, had better hardware and could also run all the Amiga stuff.
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I never had one. :)
Half my friends had Amigas, the others Ataris. And like 4 or 5 Macs.
I miss the Midi Maze parties on Ataris
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If it's all about cults, then just like with Apple, it's funny how another company with better products and/or prices hasn't created their own cult via a marketing campaign, and driven Tesla out of business.
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The problem with Tesla is Elon Musk.
That's a rather silly statement.
Without Musk, Tesla would not exist. At the beginning, Musk was more hands-off at Tesla - he was running SpaceX, and Tesla was a sort of side investment. That did not really turn out well for Tesla. Then Musk kind of strongarmed himself into being the CEO, and took things over directly. Tesla has done a lot better since. Under previous management, Tesla was struggling to build the Roadster. Now it builds three models, in much greater numbers.
Yeah, Elon Musk is a sociopath. Pr
So...did you also predict the failure of AAPL? (Score:2)
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Not to mention that most of the problem with American car MFGs are the people left in Detroit. They offshored most of the MFG, but it was the management (corporate and union) that was the actual problem.
I'd stay the hell away too. I'm happy with my made in the USA Honda's, and my made in the USA Tesla. When I had cars from American companies, none of them were actually made in America, and all of them had real problems before the first 5 years was up. So again, why does Elon want to use Detroit? I think he'
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I walked in the door, here in TX, and was greeted by a white guy with a Boston accent, not that it should matter. Now I know some Texans who would like Mass. to be declared a foreign state, but at present, it is not. The sales people I worked with were what I think is fairly representative of the US: mostly white, some hispanic, some black and one asian, based on his accent born in America. 0% indian "visa workers".
In fairness, that has been my experience with Ford, GM and Honda as well, so I'm not even rea
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I didn't say Old School, I indicated that there are people who are well versed in logistics and assembly line optimization. People may bitch about US car mfg. quality but I'll also add that some of that is old history.
I also view those who buy a Tesla are also looking for a status symbol, but the same can be said by the people who buy Ferraris etc. It's a status symbol and people are reluctant to complain about issues with their favorite toys especially when it drives them into a wall.
I do respect what Musk
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Because outsourcing manufacturing is cheaper. And when the quality goes down and you can't fix it because the 2nd world country you outsourced to doesn't give a fuck, you outsource again to a third world country and throw quality out the window in the race to the bottom.
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The whole reason of the "X per week" argument is because it's the thing upon which all the capital requirements hinge.
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That never seems to bother Amazon.
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You don't think analysts watching Amazon are thinking about whether they're going to run out of cash (looking less likely these days ;)? Same thing for Tesla-- if they can produce enough units per month, they can drastically improve their cash flow situation. If not, they will require increasingly harsh measures to borrow and raise capital and remain a going concern, which are harmful to existing shareholders.
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I dunno, Amazon has a pretty good record of shipping on time.
Elon's problem isn't (only) that he's not making a profit, it's that he's not even delivering the product that was ordered.
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Problem is how far behind deliveries are - only ~12k Model 3s built thus far. Tesla has finally reached a reasonable rate of building the Model 3, but only by moving away from the degree of automation originally planned.
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The only reason of the "X per week" argument is to appease Wall Street analysts, so called "experts" who have never built anything in their lives. What Musk needs to do is maintain the vision but turn over operations to those more qualified to eek out every optimization in logistics and the assembly line. There's plenty of those folks available in Detroit but I guess he wants to DIY...
The problem with this is that the valuation of Tesla is based almost entirely on the dream that they will be very profitable in the future. Tesla can't be sold for anywhere near this amount, and their technology isn't so special that licensing it would result in a huge check either.
Re: Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass production (making all parts within exacting tolerances so they can be swapped, as opposed to being custom fit together in the end product) and the assembly line are the twin juggernauts of modern manufacturing, working hand in hand.
However, his statement for needless 10x improvement on the formet smacks more of justification FUD for delays than any real need.
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Re: Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Does he think other manufacturers make sloppy parts on purpose?
The process defines the margin. Tesla injection molds/presses/machines tools will _not_ be 10x more precise then others. I don't care how often Musk has them change the tooling.
I worked for a manager that didn't understand dimensioning. She added two 0s to a dimension on a drawing before sending it to a contract manufacturer. Those would have been some insanely expensive 0s, if they hadn't been just undoable. Specing an O.D. to 0.25000 inches. How do you even do that?
Tesla has _much_ bigger problems. If the documented test cars are a guide, Teslas will _all_ be junked within a few years of going out of warranty. Motor sets (22k$US) are being replaced, on average, every 2 years. Cars are being totalled by insurance companies after being caught in heavy rains with the windows open (flooded battery pack, about 50% probability that seal will hold). 'Fender benders' cost 30k$US to fix.
He is distracting. The fact is that Tesla has made some incredibly bad decisions beyond electric power...The door handles jump to mind (talk about a _dumb_ unnecessary complication). 100% aluminum body. Auto Driving vapor. An electric drivetrain was a reach, adding all sorts of 'seemed like a good idea' bells and whistles doom the company.
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So besides your completely incorrect information, do you have any more nonsense to share? It's amusing if nothing else.
Your predictions about Tesla's being junked are also comical and completely disproved by the Roadster. Even Tesla's FIRST car ever shows how very wrong you are and they've massively improved since then. Feel free to conjure up 'proof' of your nonsense claims though so we can all laugh at how stupid they are. Might as well mix in some vaccines-cause-autism 'proof' while you're at it too.
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You have a theory. I have cars on the road whos warranty repairs are being tracked.
Electric motors shouldn't have to be replaced every 2 years. Clearly they are doing something wrong.
One stupid $1000 door handle/year replaced is the average.
Re: Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
However, his statement for needless 10x improvement on the formet smacks more of justification FUD for delays than any real need.
It's not entirely justification FUD on his part. It's counter-FUD to one of the most frequently repeated slurs against Tesla: that their fit and finish is poor. We see it here on Slashdot constantly, so constantly and consistently that it's obviously a concerted smear campaign. Personally I think it's an overreaction on Elon's part. An order of magnitude improvement in tolerances in wholly unnecessary to achieving their goals, and mostly tangential to ending the smear campaign.
All Tesla has to do to make the FUD stop is to make Model 3s, fast and well. When enough of the short sellers go bankrupt, the FUD campaigns will run out of funding too and stop.
Re: Meh (Score:4, Informative)
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Head over the Tesla Motors Club forum and look at the number of posts complaining about poor fit and finish. The new car checklist mentions checking it multiple times, many people say they either rejected cars immediately or made the mistake of believing that the service centre would fix it...
It's hard to make a complex car that all fits together perfectly. Other manufacturers have spent decades perfecting it. Tesla has some unique issues too, like the falcon wing doors on the X that have always had trouble
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This. Making things 10x more precise comes with a lot of cost, and without clear gain.
Toyota makes crazy-reliable things. They design for parts to have a certain set of tolerance, and when they get to tolerance that it was designed to work with, it holds up to kids spilling things on it, people driving them as taxi cabs, and every imaginable type of weather. And they work and work well for hundreds of thousands of miles.
10x more tolerance... may not be worth it, or will likely cost a lot more than it bri
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However, his statement for needless 10x improvement on the formet smacks more of justification FUD for delays than any real need.
That's not FUD. That's exaggeration to tickle your suppliers.
Bad workmanship and shoddy production quality ruined the British car in the 70's and 80's and the American car suffered from the same issues. Musk does not want Tesla to suffer that fate. They need to be on par with the Japanese and the Germans WRT build quality if they are to survive. The first series Model S was good enough for early adopters and has impressive technology, but it is not a very well built car.
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I dunno... Intel and AMD?
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Can't get more optimized than that!
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The man invented e commerce,
Amazon would be pretty surprised to realize it isn’t an e-commerce business. Secondly, Musk’s site, X.com, is younger than Confinity which it merged with to become PaypL (Confinity from Dec, 1998 and X.com was founded Nov, 1999). Amazon preceding both by going online in July of 1994.
electric cars,
*trollface* Electric cars have existed for over a hundred years before Tesla ever existed. The race car driver [wikipedia.org] who set a land speed record in an EV [wikipedia.org] in 1899 would probably have been amazed to know that electric cars w
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And, yes, I realize GP is probably a Poe’s Law post, but some of these Musk cocksuckers really are that delusional.
Re: Meh (Score:5, Informative)
As for reusable rockets, I see you're unfamiliar with NASAs space shuttle, a far more practical design than anything he's created. For starters, it doesn't lose several tons of lift capacity by having to reserve fuel for landing.
No, the shuttle lost several tons of lift capacity by having to lug up a giant, heavy orbiter. The shuttle was an impressive technical feat, and it provided unmatched capabilities (e.g. the Hubble repair mission), but i was an economic disaster. Especially since the orbiter essentially had to be rebuild after each mission. NASA in general suffers from too much congressional interference, which means they have to source their parts and labour from the constituencies of key congress critters. In particular, they are more-or-less forced to use and reuse old technologies, so that no existing contractor starts to whine to loud.
The Falcons are certainly not perfect, but they are impressive achievements.
Re: Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the parachute way is needlessly complicated. Parachutes would add more weight than just putting some extra rocket fuel on would, you've added hardware that is ONLY used for recovery and has additional failure modes, and on top of that it has been established that the rocket wouldn't survive without an entry burn, because the engine exhaust pushes the entry shockwave away from the rocket and keeps it from melting. With propulsive the whole way, the only needed complications are the software needed for landing and the ability to relight engines - the latter of which they would need anyway for the final landing.
I'll add to this that SpaceX *tried* the parachute way first, and the stage broke up in the upper atmosphere every time before it could even deploy the parachute.
Re: Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Both ebay and amazon predate paypal, his first venture into e commerce
Viaweb predated at least e-Bay, doesn't it?
I see you're unfamiliar with NASAs space shuttle, a far more practical design than anything he's created
Oh come on, that's just dumb, isn't it? What's "far more practical" about throwing 60% of your hardware mass away each time?
For starters, it doesn't lose several tons of lift capacity by having to reserve fuel for landing.
Reserve fuel that is cheaper than throwaway hardware. When will you people finally learn to use a calculator? And how about the Shuttle losing forty tonnes of payload by having wings and a heat shield, that doesn't bother you? How's that for your hypocrisy? :-p
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Viaweb beat eBay by two *months*. Also, it was started by Paul Graham, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Which of those three men is Elon?
Why would he have to be? The point is that Amazon and e-Bay are hardly the first ones to the game. Very rarely a randomly picked well-known company is.
Oh, and are you really touting a company almost nobody remembers (and which few even heard of in the first place), which only existed for three years before being absorbed into Yahoo and quickly forgotten, as an example of Elon Musk's genius?
What?
Because it wouldn't be, even if he had anything to do with it.
What again?
Re: Meh (Score:2)
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You might want to look up the golden age of electric vehicles and Michael Aldrich.
Re: Meh (Score:2)
Re: nope (Score:2)
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Apparently Space X predates the Space Shuttle and its reusable SRBs.
I'm with you on most of it, but not this. Calling the SRBs 'reusable' is misleading. They we're recoverable and refurbished similar to the shuttle itself. Also, the massive difference between solid rockets and liquid put these in rather different categories (even though it wasn't specified originally).
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In an architectural drafting class I actually had the instructor tell me carpenters can get a house square to a 1/16th inch. I argued with him briefly and put him in my list of someone to never take advice from.
Perfect example of those who can, do, and those who can't, teach.
You're damn lucky if a house's variances are within 2%.
Musk must be kicking himself (Score:2)
He forgot the confidentiality clause at the end of that email.
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
Re:Musk must be kicking himself (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would he kick himself? This email is clearly intended to be leaked. "We're doing great and we're going to do better!" Why wouldn't he want the press to repeat that message?
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This one... (Score:5, Insightful)
We will keep going until the Model 3 build precision is a factor of ten better than any other car in the world.
That's so ordinary. When you're 10x better than everyone else, you're fully cranked up, you want to go further, where can you go? Nowhere...
Not even new . . . (Score:2)
These could all but be direct from Henry Leland from the early days of Cadillac.
He basically tacked on an entire digit and then some to tolerances, and was able, for example, to build rings and pistons that all fit one another, rather than a crafter sitting down to adjust them in pairs.
The precision meant, for example, that it was possible to stock spare engine parts for Cadillacs rather than needing to custom build or repair in machine shops.
So, yes, this strategy has been used before, and worked.
Cadillacs
That's only the same as other car manufacturers. (Score:5, Informative)
Other cars with the cost of Tesla are also built to those standards. Modern car assembly is incredibly precise - if you see any panel fit that is visibly misaligned it is either damaged or has been repaired or replaced. Over the length of (say) the gap at the side of the bonnet where it meets the wing you can detect a couple of millimeters mis-alignment with a glance, and less than 1mm if you look carefully. Body panels are also either very rigid, or elastic enough to retain their shape.
Cheaply produced vehicles, or large truck type vehicles, may not be this well built, but the people selling passenger cars at Tesla's prices are this good already. Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise. If I get a new car from any of them and the measurement is not as specified, indeed my measuring tape should be replaced.
It is good to see that Musk realises he has to have consistent and precise manufacturing quality, but he's not as superior as he claims.
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So nothing you are saying makes any sense to me. Its as if you are talking straight out your ass. You do not have the visual fidelity to even grok the tolerances, let alone "see" them.
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He's talking about panel gaps. Which have long been a point of pride in high end cars.
I presume you're talking about grinding carbide mills in some custom profile.
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Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise.
I worked in a Detroit factory. We made parts for Ford, GM, Toyota, BMW, and Lotus. Same machines. Same processes. A dirty secret of Japanese and German precision that Musk needs to learn is they both outsourced the finer details to suppliers with a century of experience in Michigan.
Precision manufacturing only coming from Germany or Japan is marketing copy. Today, parts are like programmers. They can come from anywhere.
Unnecessary precision? (Score:4, Insightful)
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
If this is genuine, it seems a bit dumb. Tighter tolerances cost money to achieve, so in general, you do not use higher tolerances than you actually need. Now I haven't read the article, so maybe he goes on to give perfectly valid reasons as to why he wants such precise tolerances, but otherwise it just sounds like a way to pointlessly push up production costs. Since I don't believe Elon is that dumb, I'm questioning whether this email actually is genuine.
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It is a bit dumb, unless you're still able to get there within the mathematical precision. The problem is, many times the precision is not only not feasible, but don't help any actual value (which is your point). Sometimes, people do (and say) things "just because". In this case, I suspect the memo was initially leaked for "image" (marketing) purposes. And for that reason alone, may make it worth it.
Re:Unnecessary precision? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason to require 3 nines when only 2 nines are needed is so that when someone misses the spec the vehicle still works. Consider two scenarios:
1) A car with 10,000 parts is assembled. The tolerances were exactly specified, so any tolerance miss creates a non-working car. All vendors meet tolerance 99.999% of the time. 10% of the cars coming off the line won't work. (So you will have to spend money ripping them back apart, more testing of the parts to find the 0.001% of the parts that are bad, etc. Tests with false positive rates lower than 0.001% are hard)
2) A car with 10,000 parts is assembled. The tolerances were over specified, so only 10% of tolerance misses create a non-working car. All vendors meet tolerance 99.999% of the time. 1% of the cars coming off the line won't work.
This appears to be an extension of the "Kanzen" technique originally used by the Japanese car manufacturers. It took them from essentially not competitive in the US to a dominant position in very few years.
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It was the combination of Japanese cars being smaller and more fuel efficient, and a gas crisis in 1980 that led to Japan taking a huge position in US car sales.
Re: Unnecessary precision? (Score:2)
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2001 is after "up to 2000," you know.
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Okay, then how about my dad's '79 Suburban (three-speed standard w/5.7L V8)? He bought it new in 1978 and put 300,000 miles on it. I bought it from him in 1996 and sold it in 1998 with another 50K miles on the clock. Still ran great and the only real maintenance needed was replacing the clutch at about 200,000 miles, wheel bearings, brakes, and other consumables. I occasionally see it around town, and I'm guessing it's got half a million miles on it by now. It looks pretty ratty now, but it still moves.
Re:Unnecessary precision? (Score:4, Interesting)
Klipstein's Law: Tolerances will accumulate unidirectionally toward maximum difficulty of assembly.
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That's what a hammer is for.
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This appears to be an extension of the "Kanzen" technique
"Kaizen"
And this isn't anything unique to Japan or their car industry. It's just a fancy management term that describes doing the same thing. Examples include:
Toyota called it the Toyota Production System
Motorola called it 6Sigma
Other variants include 5S
All together it's called Continuous Improvement and frankly every company in the Fortune 500 has some kind of system like this in place.
This email is not targeted to the employees... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but rather to customers, investors and suppliers, I think.
order of operations (Score:2, Informative)
He wants to get production up and running and THEN tighten down tolerances? Oh boy, where have I heard that before, oh yeah, from every marketing wanker anywhere. Reality is that equipment does the best job it can, once it's in mass production the bills are payed and the equipment vendors wont lift a finger to make the machines any better without getting payed for it. Meanwhile machinery starts experiencing wear and tear... Machines are not like fine wine, they don't get better with age, they make their mos
Esoteric (Score:3)
I won't pay one cent for an amount of 'precision' on those parts of a car which would be in perfect order with ten or twenty times less 'precision'. If Musk doesn't want me to sell a sensible car with high investments in engineering and manufacturing only where it counts, making it unnecessarily expensive, there are still other manufacturers (even if Tesla does have a certain lead right now).
all those sunroofs leaks were precise leaks (Score:4, Funny)
Variation Simulation (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if Tesla has failed to use variation simulation tools?
There is no need for precision 10 times greater than other car companies. That is just wasteful! They need to find out WHERE the precision is needed, and HOW MUCH precision is needed. Blindly improving precision "10 times" is ridiculous.
I worked on variation simulation technology in the 1980s. This is the current version of the product I worked on:
https://www.plm.automation.sie... [siemens.com]
Hopefully, Tesla is using this or something similar.
I originally ported this code from code written by a university professor at Wayne Statue University in Detroit, and then designed a domain-specific language and implemented a compiler for it, to make models easier to write. (Probably the most important thing I did, though, was to strong-arm my boss into hiring a mathematician to help clean up what was some pretty awful and buggy statistical and geometric-transform code...) The product has changed hands a couple of times since then, before landing at it's current home at Siemens.
The original company that developed this (where I worked) both created the product, and worked with the Detroit automakers on several breakthrough projects that address just where Tesla should be applying this.
For example, the 1984 Corvette C4 was the first car out of Detroit to use BOLT HOLES instead of slots in hood hinges. This was made practical with VSA analysis.
There was a big push for lowered emissions at the time - VSA allowed auto companies to model variability between engines, and predict what percentage would be rejected with a given design.
An important re-design of the FA-18 used VSA modeling extensively, and solved many manufacturing problems with the airframe.
I recall MANY door clearance and other similar fit-and-finish projects.
You could not build today's disk drives at a practical cost without VSA. Every drive manufacturer uses it.
Before VSA, it was largely guesswork. Once you get past a liner stack, it is nearly impossible to work-out by hand. There was some prior use, during WWII. One of the first - if not the first - uses of VSA was in WWII when the technique was developed at Willow Run Labs to solve manufacturability problems with planes being built for WWII. It was done crudely, with a room full of workers on manual calculators...
Professor Greg Gruska at Wayne State dusted off the mothballs in the early 1980s, and wrote some Fortran code to implement it on their mainframe (the code I had to port to IBM PC...) and taught a class in variation simulation analysis. I was the first technical employee at the company that commercialized it.
I believe there was some parallel work in Japan at the time, and there are a couple of competing products.
Did Tesla somehow miss this important analysis technique?
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Just curious, but you sound like a good guy to ask.
I heard a rumor that the window sealant on early Teslas sold to Finland won't survive multiple Scandinavian winters.
No idea whether that's true or not, just curious about the amount of localization that needs to occur. Similarly, how much work is done ON that localization? I'd expect quite a bit, and presume that Tesla can't buy, say, Ford's knowledge base.
Is it actually reasonable to expect a well-finished product on the first couple of attempts?
Re:localization (Score:2)
I'm a software guy, and away from the auto industry for many, many years, so can only relate a famous "oops" that I'm aware of from consumer experience. (Actually, consumer near-miss, as I didn't own the specific BMW models with this "oops", just aware because I bought one used, and educated myself...)
BMW had a big problem with aluminum engine parts and the high sulfur levels in American gasoline. They don't have those high levels of sulfur in European gas, and didn't anticipate the problem. One little thin
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That is just wasteful!
Unless it becomes a marketing point. There's whole product markets that exist on the sole premise of 10x more precise than the competitor.
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So, about this "staff" email (Score:4, Insightful)
Did Elon include various journalists' email addresses right there in the "To:" field, or did he at least go to the trouble of putting them on the "Bcc:" line?
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Too much effort. The Apple approach of simply putting "Do not leak this" in bold at the top of the email works far better.
Chain of Command (Score:2)
I'm sure that everyone will be talking about the tolerances and the production targets, but the one bone I'd like to pick is the "chain of command" comment. Elon seems very hostile to the very idea, which is to be expected given his origins in tech. However, in a production environment a well-working CoC is an important part of effective communications. I agree that it's important for workers to feel comfortable talking to any level supervisor if needed, and if you need to report a problem to another depart
Wonderfully batshit insane (Score:2)
I just hope he doesn't end up a hermit hiding inside a hotel room for years and years, and marrying a duck.
Fix "Autopilot" first, then worry about panel gaps (Score:2)
If I were a potential Tesla customer I'd be much more interested in knowing that much touted the "self-driving" capabilities were actually working to save my life than I would be in whether there was a slight gap in some decorative panel.
I'd think that Tesla investors would also.
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Why? Just don't use the autopilot if you're worried about it not being safe. Nobody's forcing you to turn it on.
1 million dollar approval by CEO (Score:2)
I don't know what the norm is on companies that size. If it is going up from half mill, it is good news I guess. If it is coming down from 5 mill, it is bad news and the stories of impending cash crunch has more credibility.
Disclaimer: Booked a 3 on 1 april 2016, got the invite, configured the car, got the wall charger, working on getting it installed. Expecting vin in three weeks, delivery two weeks after.
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The cancellation is around 7%, some 450K pre orders are still on the books, they seem to show no sign of deserting in droves
Fan base is maintaining a detailed google spreadsheet of preorder date, invite date, VIN date and delivery date, configuration and destination. They are reporting all preorders before 3/31/2016 got invite, all line standees got preference and die cast model 3 as a gift. 19 inch wheels are getting delivered within 10
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Do you have a link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
Utter stupidity (Score:2)
Those tight tolerances get rid of necessary flex room. Pay more attention to the people that make the parts for a living and know this shit first-hand, Elon, and get the fuck out of your bubble.
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"That's not how manufacturing tolerances work."
That is in fact how many manufacturing tolerances work in many industries, including automobiles (Imagine what happens when you do tight tolerances on engines that constantly expand and contract with temperature. The only thing that should have ultra-tight tolerances is the engine bearings. Everything else too tight will make the engine fail, starting at pistons/heads and going to the cam.) Wanna know why the AK47 doesn't jam nearly as often as the old M16? Loo
Precision does not mean reliability or no defects (Score:2)
Musk got the message. In a good way. (Score:2)
Musk long since has noticed that the Japanese and the Germans have this car thing pretty much squared away and that tolerances and quality with US cars are shit. His bar isn't other US cars, his bar are the Nipponese and the Germans. That's why US once again is building one of the best cars in the world with Tesla. A first in a long time.
I personally would like to see BMW and Volkswagen and their ilk get a massive kick in the bollocks for dragging their heels on the electric front.
What I don't like is Tesla
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Someone who doesn't know what they're doing? And apparently Tesla's QA department, but maybe I repeat myself?
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