> . After performing a series of tests, it decided on April 12 to issue a recall after determining that an “[a]n unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal,” and that “[r]esidual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal.”
How do you have so little quality control and insight into your manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?
I guess when analysts said the incumbent auto manufacturers would have a large advantage over Tesla in manufacturing, this is what they meant?
Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a company that has done well up until now.
I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.
What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. In a different organization such a change would go in, and at the same time kick off an engineering investigation to verify that it doesn't make anything worse. If that analysis comes up clean, there is no change. If it finds a problem though, then the change is reverted/changed to something else. In regular car companies you see things like "We're recalling all cars between VINxxxx and VINyyyy" which basically delineate that time between when the change was made and the time the analysis suggesting it wasn't a good thing. If its a minor thing there won't be a recall, just a bit of extra "warranty work" at the next service opportunity which the dealer does.
As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says that all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been recalled. That isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had enough customer miles on these things yet to flesh out the more subtle issues.
There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues, mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make their own stuff. Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas pedal; they go to a company that makes them.
Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's insistence that he knows better than an industry that is extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century of being in business. He has been propped up by customers and VCs who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy", when really they didn't understand all the reasons things are done the way they are.
It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng team having made some clever app while he was a sophomore...and says "oh you're doing it all wrong" to senior engineers.
One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) ambivalence toward electric cars with incompetence. In Ford's case that is fairly accurate - the Mach E is an engineering embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably because there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up in the product line that is their bread and butter.
VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and Audi mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM really gets its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and truly fucked if they intend to keep making cars instead of just shifting to being an 'electric gas station' company...but they're on their heels there too, having slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard years ago.
A gas station is one of the least glamorous, and lowest margin business out there.
You’re basically making no money from the gas or electricity, and all your profits comes from the chips and other stuff you sell inside.
Tesla is severely problematic as a company, but its salvation does not come from pivoting to selling vapes while people wait for their charge to finish.
> There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues
Recalls are absolutely routine in this industry, though. This sounds like a semantic argument hiding behind "these issues" as being somehow different from "those" issues?
I don't think anyone thinks traditional auto is incompetent at manufacturing.
I think lots of people have their doubts about the strategic product vision of big auto executives, who traditionally have tactically chased short-term profit margins with tunnel vision that would make GE cringe.
Subcontracting everything out and being an assembly company contributed to the quality issues Boeing faces now. Perhaps the root cause is lack of focus on safety & quality.
Absolutely, its good they are proactively fixing things, this particular issue with uncontrolled acceleration was particularly dangerous.
In the US, consumer liability laws make these fixes mandatory but it is always better when a manufacturer voluntarily recalls a product than when it is ordered to by some oversight agency.
Proactive, in this case, means “before they are legally required to.”
If they waited until NHTSA performed their investigation and made a recall request (which is how the heavy majority of the recalls in the US are performed), that would be reactive.
Actually it does :-). I get that being pedantic can be fun but if you actually forcibly misinterpret things base on pedantry you might find it doesn't serve you nearly as well as actually thinking about what was "meant".
There's everyday meaning, then there's the meaning as an industry term, and then there's a legal definition. The everyday meaning is the least relevant one in this context.
A behaviour that focuses on results and actions rather than acting when something happens. This type of behaviours aims to identify and take advantage of opportunities and also to prevent potential threats or problems. On the contrary, reactive behaviour works by retaliating when an event or problem has already occured.
Seems pretty scary to me that the supposed error causing uncontrolled acceleration is a little soap near interior matts. I guess I've been called a pig for not being extremely reckless with the cars I've owned.
Yes, because recalls are a good thing, because the manuf. has acknowledged the issue and is trying to address it.
No, because what glue sniffing idiot thought glue would be the best option, instead of just riveting the damn thing down, and never worrying about the pretty little piece of garbage coming loose and sticking the accel pedal down.
Fasteners are very expensive from a production perspective because they take a long time to install. This is why products these days are designed to be assemble with conformal, friction, or snap fit as much as possible.
Deciding to sub in fasteners in the production line would have involved addition of at least one new position in the line to install the fasteners.
Agreed, to a point, but we're talking about the accel pedal in a vehicle with more torque than god.
Glue is insufficient. It was insufficient with it was decided. It was insufficient when it was implemented and while I'm not a car designer, I can
state that glue, in this case? Predictably insufficient.
> Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck,
What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything about how slow they've been to ramp up production.
Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new model into production. I find it odd that you would assume less than 4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack of interest.
> What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.
Isn’t that literally an unprofessional error? The big three already have this as standard operating procedure. Tesla still seems to be treating building cars like devops: move fast and break things, but don’t worry about the break things part until it’s bad enough that end users start complaining in a public forum.
“What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.”
So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional.
Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.
To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this:
"This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect."
If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1].
To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite.
If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see.
Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful.
You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable.
In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional.
Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing auto company?
If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.
I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects.
For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.
> You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput.
Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes.
Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.
Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.
But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse.
Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down.
The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car.
Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
> There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out.
Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact.
> Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die.
Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6.
There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee.
It's not necessary to think that one size fits all to think that 12 hours is too long. There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1] and so it could well be reasonable to say we don't know where the safe threshold is for each person so there may be some individuals who might otherwise safely work with no impairment but in the interest of safety for users of the cars we can set some cap at less than 12 hours.
Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job. There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
> There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1]
That study attributes much of the deficit to interrupting circadian rhythms, which is the thing that isn't required with 12 hour shifts, because the other 12 hours a day can contain a consistent 8 hour block for sleeping at night. Whereas the alternative where you bring on a second shift with different workers does exactly that, because now the second shift is e.g 5PM-1AM and by the time those workers go home, eat a meal and get ready for bed, they're sleeping in the daylight. Or if the business is one that operates 24 hours, using 8 hours shifts causes there to be two night shifts instead of one.
> Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job.
This is a fully generic argument. Maybe some workers have heart disease and shouldn't do a job that involves lifting. Does that mean no one should be able to do it? People over 65 disproportionately suffer from various forms of dementia. Should they be prohibited from working if they want to, even the ones who are healthy?
Most jobs don't use 12 hour shifts because they don't want to pay overtime, so it's hard to see how anyone who prefers a job with 8 hour shifts could be forced to take one of those instead of the majority of other jobs that use 8 hour shifts.
> There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
We need to be extremely careful with correlational studies. There is evidence that all kinds of negative outcomes are associated with poverty, and the people working long hours are typically doing it because they don't have enough money. What happens when you say they can't work that much and make them even poorer?
It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
While young and in as good shape as I ever have been I once worked a low-wage manufacturing job in a factory. After a long shift I once sliced through my fingernail[1] because I fell asleep while operating an industrial bench saw. At the time (before this incident) I would certainly have said that I had plenty of endurance to work long hours in the job and I definitely needed the money.
Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.
[1] It's only through a pure miracle that I didn't lose a finger. The specific miracle being I was so tired setting up the saw that this one time I set the depth of cut wrong meaning that instead of chopping my fingers completely off as would have happened had I set the saw up correctly, it just sliced through the very top of my fingernail.
> Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.
"Worker protections" exist mainly because people misunderstand the causes and solutions to economic desperation.
How does it benefit you to have to take a second job and work 16 hours a day instead of allowing your first employer to give you overtime that you actually want? Would you have been less tired by adding a second commute to your day?
What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes?
I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
> Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
> Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
> But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
> Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that easy to destroy and the typical injury would be that you get stuck with a sewing needle.
It seems like you want to assume that every job involves some kind of delicate yet fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It doesn't.
> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours, because the benefits outweigh the costs.
> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
And if they're willing to work and the output is making you money?
The proposal is to ban people from working for more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any of the cases where it isn't in the employer's interests to do it anyway. They just won't choose to do it in those cases then.
So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five? A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
> So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five?
It could just be a job that isn't that tiring.
And why does it have to be three days out of five? Paying time and a half for four out of twelve hours could be worth it over paying benefits and overhead for another employee.
> A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
How are overtime calculations even relevant? If it isn't worth it for the employer to pay overtime in some context it would be required then banning 12 hour shifts would be irrelevant there because they wouldn't be happening to begin with.
> Your concerns are a corner case.
12 hour shifts are a corner case. Stop trying to ban everything atypical.
If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package.
Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money.
So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that.
Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation.
So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees.
Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor.
Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
The compensation package was approved by the shareholders, not just the board, but then the judge didn't like the disclosures for the shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk obviously didn't like that and is now behaving in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to put it up for another vote and the shareholders are going to approve it again or they won't.
Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility.
Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family.
A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
> Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour.
Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring.
This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things.
> Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance.
These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills.
> Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%.
Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes.
Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high.
The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else.
The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house.
"Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
The problem is not regulation / deregulation. The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
> Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
Not actually that hard. You build a machine that does the work of 1000 sweat shop workers, then you have a domestic job maintaining the machine, and paying one salary when it used to be 1000 causes the transportation cost to dominate over the cost of labor so now you're back to domestic manufacturing being cheaper.
But only if you don't pass dumb laws that discourage the automation and convert it into offshoring.
> It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
Why is that hard? The majority of the population is already doing it. You learn to do skilled labor and then earn more money.
> The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
The problem is that people think these kinds of laws are the problem. If you can't afford rent working 8 hours and have to work 12, how is prohibiting you from working 12 going to help you make rent? It's misdirection to keep people from solving the actual problem, which is high cost of living.
1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it
2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]"
3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership
4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work
5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause.
In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
> I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.
I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens despite controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers who just take it upon themselves to fix a problem rather than notifying anyone. To them it is no big deal (i.e. doesn't warrant mentioning to engineering), so it must be "no big deal".
It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't have happened, but is only one of countless ways this would have inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure modes. Correct application can't be reliably tested non-destructively. Product variances are often very hard to detect. Degradation with age and physical use can't be reliably forecast.
Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.
Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you have a complex product with many components.
I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the factory workers.
Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy construction equipment) and see things like this all the time. Workers think they understand/ don't think engineers understand or want to do it faster/easier than what they were shown.
I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess:
Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on.
Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.
Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team notices."
I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it is for users to report problems. The most common problems are that the users feel ignored, like they're being a burden on the devs, or scolded (for not reporting it correctly, for "not holding it right", etc.). It's even common for there not to be an easy way to report such problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account on this website and report there", etc.)
Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into using the product.
We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.
To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies, like Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation for caring very little about customer feedback. It's a normal thing to lookup how to fix an annoyance or regression, finding hundreds of people posting about the same complaint, without ever getting any sort of response or reaction from the company.
Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a community forum that their own employees never post on, and I assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.
This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the code, so the Devs can address.
You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given system, trying 107 different versions of some framework, causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the issue.
Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.
With open source, you're usually reporting to devs. With commercial software, usually to tech support or to nobody.
> You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Yes, I know -- but it is how the majority of support actually is, if there is even support available at all. In a whole lot of cases, there is none.
I'm talking about software meant for consumer use. Software for business use is much better on these issues, although you still do find them. At my workplace, we recently took a large financial hit (and almost lost an important customer) because of bad and unresponsive tech support from a supplier. It happens.
There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.
Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice.
If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry?
That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.
Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of several:
* There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a waste of their time.
* They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place there was no need for a fix.
* Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible.
* They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it.
Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing. Then you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big critically important feature] is not working" and you'll look into it and support has adopted a process that essentially disables that feature or they have a workaround for a bug that was fixed 4 years ago and because they never entered the conversation at that time they still do the workaround.
We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point because they did a big round of updates and "none of them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the problem.
We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop excluding people from the conversation about product problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system of some sort before the company's product implodes.
There was a poorly implemented customer support system that I worked with once that due to the way the app worked, support could run a query that would essentially scan the entire database, predictably it'd hit a proxy timeout. So what happened instead was they would open 10+ tabs doing the exact same query hoping one would get lucky and succeed, and we had to figure out why our database was getting ddos'd. Trying to explain that they were actually making the issue worse with the workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well what did you change, it was working fine for months."
It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time.
By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place.
We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done.
In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?
Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal area should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud and crap in it and be cleaned regularly and be extra durable.
I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be reading a story about how important workers are at solving little production problems.
Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.
I don’t know anything about manufacturing, but the main thing that stood out when I toured the BMW plant in Munich was how ruthlessly efficient and regulated every step of the production process was. It’s hard to imagine there being any time for improvisation, or any ability for it to go unnoticed. Is Tesla’s production process just looser?
No... I've been a maintenance worker.
If you needed "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you faced everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to come to work with you every day.
If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait :).
You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really up to the technician to know when something requires notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.
I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as an SWE in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's faster to work around them to find solutions to doing your job. Both sides have good intentions but the IT dept. cannot move nimbly.
I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems. But as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so that A) we're implementing a controlled process and B) if there's a better solution out there I can make that recommendation or fix the system. When you take it upon yourself then problems only happen if you don't communicate.
> If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait
Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?
Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame / shame though.
Complex work is hard.
Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that.
So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job.
yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.
I actually blame the engineering/design department for this one.
The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them?
Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it?
If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for style.
Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to stress as much as possible that you always need to design things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest assembler will still be able to build it correctly. And often times we review drawings/instructions and find lots of poorly outlined procedures.
But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that instead". It can be a killer.
Or the Cybertruck's wheel covers coming off, or the lack of ridge next to the windshield that causes any moisture on the windshield to hit the side windows (and intrude if they're open), or the extremely failure prone Model S door handles, the cost optimizations that have lead to stalk-less steering columns, etc. You could write a book about all of the quirky little problems that Teslas have.
Incumbent manufacturers have most of this stuff figured out; Tesla seems to want to "be different" on the most minute and boring of things. They keep stubbing their toe along the way.
Don't forget saving a few dollars on a rain sensor... Tesla tried to use the cameras to detect rain in the early model S. The result was no automatic wipers for a long time.
The rest of the industry all use a standard sensor that works well.
Older model S cars have horrible intermittent wipers.
Turn them on, and invariably slow intermittent, becomes slow continuous, becomes annoying fast continuous. Really really just needed manual intermittent.
They're relearning the lessons of the auto industry they're trying to disrupt just like crypto is doing with banking, albeit slightly faster due to actual regulations to protect the public from the vaporware
When you consider who's running it, it makes perfect sense.
Only a moron of the scope of Musk would own an EV company, and then become a literal Nazi online alienating the left leaning people, you know, the kind of people interested in climate change, technology and EVs, and cater non-stop to right wingers, the kind of people who think climate change is a hoax, "EVs are for pussies", and love coal rolling.
Would you be okay with your child driving a car where critical systems were assembled with whatever ad-hoc materials were available in local home renovation stores?
My question was literally asking if/why this was unsafe.
> The trim appears to be providing some strain relief for the strap holding the LCC in place, perhaps to keep the tension from providing unnecessary stress on the condenser during vibration or flexing, or to prevent any sharp corners from severing the strap itself.
Can you explain to me why wood trim would be less safe than plastic for this?
Are the performance characteristics of that (presumably) random piece of wood well-established for a usecase like this?
If so: Sure, no problem!
If no: Then that's why.
A key part of engineering pretty much anything is understanding the characteristics of the materials. Plastics are extremely highly-engineered and well-understood (which is why they're everywhere now). Wood can be the same, but by default is not, especially in mass-production contexts where performance can vary dramatically between individual pieces of wood, which is one of many reasons you don't see it used in these contexts.
This could be totally fine, but there's absolutely no reason that should be the default assumption, especially when we know for a fact that was not the typical assembly plan and this is a company and culture known for cutting corners.
How confident are you that you not hearing about such a failure means they haven't happened? How confident are you that this is the only component that's been hacked together like this?
Oh, there's plenty of cobbled together stuff. But we were talking about strain relief. That's boring compared to some of the dumb stuff that I've seen come out of that factory. :-)
Are you willing to bet the safety of your family on the efficacy of some wood trim that someone bought at Home Depot to meet their manufacturing quota just because none of them have spectacularly failed yet? Really?
Given my knowledge of the part involved and the materials used, absolutely. I'd be doing it in the same way that I'm betting "the safety of [my] family on the efficacy" of the cheap little shim that I bought to make water bottles fit in the cup holders better.
Despite the high language involved here, there is no risk.
Although if you want to take up a career as a service advisor at a dealer, you might make good commissions from that style of rhetoric.
Whether or not you're comfortable with it, it shows that they bent their own manufacturing standards by using nonstandard parts that weren't purpose-built. When I buy a new Dell computer I don't expect to open it up to find parts taped together with electrical tape and wire nuts on connections. I similarly don't expect parts in my new Model Y to be made from materials that someone bought at Home Depot.
I am generally mildly negative on many Tesla decisions, but this has happened to the big manufacturers as well. Stock floor mats that caused stuck accelerator. Toyotas infamous stuck accelerator code that actually hurt people. Their code was reputedly a giant mess.
wrt to the code: Although NASA found many aesthetic issues with the Toyota code, it did not find a smoking gun. [1] Presumably many other of their other products are running successfully with similar code. To put the comparison bt Toyota and Tesla in perspective: Toyota is an 85 year old company which ships about 10 million vehicles per year. Tesla has shipped almost 5 million vehicles total as of July 2023.[2]
[1] "In conducting their report, NASA engineers evaluated the electronic circuitry in Toyota vehicles and analyzed more than 280,000 lines of software code for any potential flaws that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. "
"NASA engineers found no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles capable of producing the large throttle openings required to create dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration incidents."
"The two mechanical safety defects identified by NHTSA more than a year ago – “sticking” accelerator pedals and a design flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats – remain the only known causes for these kinds of unsafe unintended acceleration incidents."
Correct, but, to bring it back to the original point, there's a difference between "sloppy code" and "sloppy code that cascades into unintended acceleration". The fact that it didn't actually cascade isn't a reason to keep writing sloppy code, of course. But such sloppiness also remains a red herring until they can actually find a concrete way that code could have contributed.
An analysis by expert witnesses in the trial found that a small amount of memory corruption could trigger task death and unintended acceleration. The report did not find the cause of the memory corruption, but many software errors can corrupt memory. https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...
Last I heard there was speculation that the CPU was vulnerable to an alpha particle flipped bit error and fixing that was the eventual patch. A one in a million shot happens ten times a year (sic) when you ship ten million cars a year covering many billions of miles.
If Telsa and the article are telling the truth then these aren't anywhere near the same.
The mat was a design flaw from the beginning that missed QA, that happens in any large scale manufacturing as you can't just get everything right from the start.
If the article is telling the truth, this was a change made on the build line that wasnt' approved, that's a huge f$ck up if true and an incredible show of incompetence if someone can just start making design changes without approval on the build line.
It’s better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a production bug.
I think the point they are getting at, if I understand the commenter correctly (and assuming the wording of the article is accurate), is that someone on the line had the ability to make a change to the production process without authorization.
That would not just be a "production line mistake", instead it is indicative of a serious policy and procedure failure. No single person on the production line should have the ability to make unauthorized changes to the procedures being used in production.
I hate analogies, but to use yours, it is a rogue employee that was able to change critical code with no approval process -- and no one else noticed that code was being changed and went ahead with shipping it out.
This is basically how all construction and manufacturing jobs work out, though? It isn't an isolated "single person" that can make arbitrary changes. They can propose something and it should be reviewed.
So, I don't think it is quite as simple as an isolated bug, per se. But it is very common for changes to get introduced at build time of physical things. Depending on where and what the change is, the level of review for it will be very different.
>This is basically how all construction and manufacturing jobs work out, though?
Not really. Any place with a decent QA department would sample a part, compare it to the specification, and raise an alarm because the part differs from the specification. There also should be occasional audits on the build process itself, which should have identified this, as it would differ from the specified process.
This type of issue (again, assuming the articles wording is true -- I have no idea) can only occur if there is either bad/missing QA, or bad/missing specifications.
>But it is very common for changes to get introduced at build time of physical things
Even in construction you need to have changes approved (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect, engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built" drawings.
This is going on the idea that there wasn't a documentation event with this change? I'm positing that knowing it is a recall on all of the trucks indicates that it was, in fact, a signed off change on the assembly line.
That is to say, just because it was on the assembly line doesn't mean it wasn't reviewed. And just because it was reviewed doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting" for implementation. Which, was clearly a mistake. But isn't a sign of a broken QA system.
Relevant part of the quote which started this discussion:
>“[a]n unapproved change [...]
Unapproved, to me, implies that it was not reviewed or signed-off.
>Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting" for implementation
If you are not assuring your quality, you have a QA failure. Regardless, I initially said "serious policy and procedure failure". Which, if you change a safety-critical component in your product and don't do testing on it, that is a serious policy failure.
Ah, totally fair. I took that to be "unapproved all the way back to the designer." Which, yeah, that doesn't happen. It almost certainly has approval from a line manager at the bare minimum, if it helps perform the assembly. If it goes to more teams than a single line, it gets more approval.
I think I largely biased to the next message, which did indicate reviews would happen, but that they have some freedom at the line. And that still sounds right to me.
> Even in construction you need to have changes approved (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect, engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built" drawings.
Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience? Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would actually engage a process like the one you are describing here. Non-spec stuff happens all the time without record, even in firms with solid QA.
> Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience?
Yes, it does. I’m a construction project manager, I’m not having my crew do any work that isn’t represented in the current revision of the plans and specs without approval because that’s the only way you get paid for the extras. Also if it’s an unapproved and unwanted change, you have to pay to remove it. Anyone managing a project who cares about managing their risk is going to submit RFIs and RFCs for every change.
It’s possible that the (tiny and insignificant) residential market is different, but that’s how commercial and industrial construction works.
It’s possible some tiny and insignificant changes like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches aren’t properly documented on the as-builts, but major changes almost always are.
> Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would actually engage a process like the one you are describing here.
The firms you hire to work on your house aren’t representative of the firms who manage or work on commercial and industrial projects.
> It’s possible some tiny and insignificant changes like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches aren’t properly documented on the as-builts, but major changes almost always are.
Based on these responses I should have been more clear. These small and inconsequential things are what I'm referring to. Yes, the projects I'm familiar with track the medium and big stuff, and most of the small stuff.
I have seen multiple thousands of dollars of precast concrete get junked because an edge was less than half an inch out of tolerance. Multiple times. I have myself rejected multiple thousands of dollars of rebar because the hook length was short by less than an inch. Nothing that is shown in the plans or specs is inconsequential and payment doesn’t occur absent an approved variance.
and all I'm saying is that it doesn't make it on to the job in the first place usually and it certainly doesn't make it out to the public like with the cybertruck pedal
>Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience?
I worked in ICI (Industrial, Commercial, Institutional) construction for ~10 years. Yes, this matches my experience. Perhaps it is different where you are from.
I also experienced this while doing utility locating for oil & gas pipelines (~2 years). As-built drawings were very accurate, and detailed any deviation from the initial drawings.
In the 2000s I had a SaaS firm making software for underground utility locating companies so I learned a lot about the industry. In most parts of the country as built drawings are unusual for residential property anyway. Locating staff mostly shows up, looks at whatever drawings are available, and then has to figure out what was actually done from the clues and by using locating equipment. Many of these folks end up with a very subtle understanding of what common practice was by different utility companies in various specific areas in specific eras.
>In most parts of the country as built drawings are unusual for residential property anyway.
I was doing large transmission pipelines (i.e. NPS 24 to NPS 56), so I can't speak to residential, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was less attention paid to as-built drawings when the cost of damage/replacement wasn't in the millions of dollars.
Absolutely! Why? Because it's your ass that's on the line should any of your "self-motivated" deviations cause financial harm, injury, or death, and you are going to be held responsible for those damages.
No one with any brains wants to be "that" guy.
That's why we have "cookie cutter" houses and even office buildings. All the kinks have been legitimately worked out and they can just crank them out. Bespoke construction? Cost overrun city. Now you know why.
This sounds like standard corporate ass covering to me. "Oh, that was just an unauthorised rogue employee, they've been fired" sounds a lot better than "someone suggested lubing up the accelerator to speed up production, and no one thought to check it won't cause problems".
If you ask me the lube just accelerated the problem. The root cause remains that you have a part secured with only a friction fit, in a setting where if that friction fit fails you have a a critical failure of the system. Friction fits can be very strong when properly established between appropriate materials, but this was not that. This was a cheap plastic cover made to be a bit too small over the metal lever. Over time with heat, sand/dirt, cold, pressure, vibration, etc. cycles, this was going to fall off regardless.
For sure, I have no idea if the wording is truthful or just standard corporate blame dilution. But if the wording is truthful, this would be a significant process & policy failure.
A design error leaves a papertrail for future study and redress.
An unapproved/undocumented production change may leave only the misproduced items. Mistakes happen, but this sounds more like changing the process without review.
> It’s better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a production bug.
:) I think you're missing my point, or I 've failed to explain it clearly.
A design flaw is bad, but we can't eliminate those. According to this article an assembly line employee went rouge and introduced a change without telling anyone.
If the article is correct then clearly these two things aren't even near comparable. We expect design flaws and adapt, we don't expect employees to go rouge and change the design without telling anyone.
Now the article or Tesla could be lying here but this is the facts as we know them.
Does that help clear things up for you?
I also dont' think you deserved the downvotes I saw you got for just misunderstanding. Sorry that happend to you!
I don't believe I misunderstand anything. This would be an interesting case study. It is very convenient to blame an employee "going rogue" for a dangerous issue like this. The design wasn't even changed. They just used a lubricant (soap?) to slide it on.
This overall points out the immaturity in Tesla's manufacturing process if changes like this can happen and then occur or affect every vehicle of a particular type produced, does it not? Overall, it still seems like a "below the line" change. These can still be quite impactful (see: memory corruption bugs leading to compromise and functional exploits). But it is still more akin to a bug or production flaw than a design flaw.
That's what I thought until I saw the video. The top metal panel that covers the accelerator literally falls off, wedging itself between the accelerator and the car. It's not a fabric cover.
My Corolla was also recalled - code was a mess as with most embedded projects but no obvious bugs related to unintended acceleration - think the cases reported were less than a 300.
Never encountered the issue.
They replaced my floor mats and installed a new pedal assembly and updated to the ECU with "brake override" ability - meaning if I pressed the brake pedal it would ignore input from the throttle.
Or the Takata airbag scandal [1]. A decade worth of airbags that were compromised, over 100 million vehicles that had to have all airbags replaced, likely 100+ injured and dozens of deaths. The sheer scale of that is absolutely mind-blowing, there is virtually no car manufacturer (except Tesla, ironically - I think they manufacture in-house?) that did not get hit.
It just means Tesla bought air bags from the other manufacturers for airbags. Takata just happened to be the biggest supplier. My old v6 Honda was unaffected by airbag recalls because they used airbags from Autoliv. There is also Daicel and Nippon Kayaku and ZF.
I imagine some of the schadenfreude comes from the Tesla bulls proudly proclaiming "and unlike the other OEMs, Tesla has never had a recall" for years, when it was just a matter of time.
The preceding sentence explained why. Car wash damage is surprisingly common. I've known people who have had side mirrors damaged (not Teslas) and seeing damage to rear wipers is common enough that I've seen the results of it.
This whole story was essentially made up by mischaracterizing some guy's tiktok. :facepalm
That seems unbelievable to be honest. You mean if the car wash breaks a wiper the dealer just replaced it?
I had a hard time getting my dealer to replace what was clearly warranty work (engine issues) due to them pretending the factory warranty extension didn't apply.
And here you have dealers replacing things that are explicitly excluded? Weird.
> someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?
That's actually not unusual at all.
It's perfectly common for an engineer to order that a hole be made in a given location on a given part without specifying that coolant should be used, or the spindle speed of the drill, or how the part should be held in the machine, or that the hole should be deburred.
Bespoke manufacturing and machining is where this kind of change would be introduced. Not in a flushed out design being produced on a line. It becomes an expensive mistake when these types of decisions are made this late in the process. Seems like they rushed the design in a number of places.
>How do you have so little quality control and insight into your manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?
To me both sound plausible (that the process was added, and that it’s a fabricated story). Either way we will never know, and ultimately it’s Tesla’s responsibility to make sure the accelerator pedal doesn’t get suck in the on position due to manufacturing defects.
I picked up a car from a mechanic the other day and we got to riffing about my own Tesla. He admitted to having friends that worked at Tesla on the manufacturing line. In his own words, these guys are “complete idiots,” and “do shrooms before assembling cars.”
I want to take his words with a grain of salt, but…I kinda believe it. Obviously hearsay means nothing, though.
I mean I don’t doubt that the some people working the assembly lines are getting a little messed-up before their shifts.
Our classic mini from Australia has other production anomalies, you kinda just chock it up to the workers being a little drunk during its construction.
And additionally, using dish soap to lubricate parts for assembly is standard procedure elsewhere in many industries. It's sometimes even recommended in the standard manuals as part of a repair procedure (I've had refrigerator gaskets that call out using a bit of soap on them before installation).
A crucial difference being that there's no risk of your refrigerator gasket sending a 3 tonne metal box into a crowd of people if it comes loose, unlike the gas pedal on a truck.
Playing fast and loose with the processes surrounding something as important (and dangerous) as the gas pedal is recklessness of the highest order.
An ‘unapproved change’ getting in to the process seems way worse to me than just the [‘approved’] production process having an unforeseen flaw that’s being corrected now it’s been found.
I’m not a Tesla-stan but I can give this one a “it could have happened to any manufacturer” explanation.
Soap is a common method for getting rubber pads onto metal pedals in the aftermarket world. Dish soap dries out and becomes less slippery, unlike lithium grease or other options. It is possible it was carried over from an appropriate and approved installation method for top hinged pedals, where pressing down will push the rubber pad’s grove deeper into the metal shoe and not cause removal. For bottom hinged pedals, preferred for performance cars, I wouldn’t recommend that at all.
One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way to Tesla ownership.
I don’t disagree with the takeaway though. If they were trying to Toyota Method/Six Sigma this assembly line properly, they’d have reviewed and approved the change as part of a periodic process and it wouldn’t have been “unapproved” and probably would not be the process they used.
Adding to my “it could have happened to any manufacturer” my EV Porsche comes with a NEMA 14-50 plug/pigtale that was previously only approved for use in 16 Amp EVSEs. The wire says 16A only (10 or 12ga wire is in use). However, they kept using these on 40 amp capable EVSEs. Over the years many 14-50 outlets and these plugs have melted. Through that time Porsche blamed low quality outlets and recommended an industrial model, but the plugs then melted instead of the outlet. Only this year did they issue a recall. This is extremely similar to an issue that happened with Tesla’s EVSE plug adapters. Porsche managed to make the same exact mistake years later despite that being an easy situation to reference.
> One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way to Tesla ownership.
Good point. While this was in Texas instead of there, it likely still applies. Given that this is early production, they were likely using some of their most experienced workers, possibly even as transfers from the other plant.
It is easy to imagine them transferring an approach like this ("it was approved before") without realizing that the consequences might be different.
Work instructions are kind of like programming - at ‘runtime’ you’ll find out all the different ways the technicians can misinterpret them, or ‘fill in the blanks’ for things you overlooked.
The hate is so deep that people lose their minds when it comes to a minor Tesla issue and conveniently forget the HUGE list of problems and recalls from all manufacturers over the years.
In many cases they just don't know about them because they're not pushed so hard in the media and people don't upvote negative stories about other car manufacturers like they do with negative Tesla stories on HN and Reddit.
It's very affective, that's why the oil lobby pushes negative EV news so hard in the media, especially right wing media.
That's a gross mis categorization and wildly reductionist to boot. The issue is this: a cult of personality has developed around a loudmouth sociopath with a track record of making wildly arrogant statements (See: I know more about manufacturing than anyone else on the planet) that are not, and never have been, backed by observational data. When Tesla set out to make cars they intentionally adopted the move fast and break shit approach, tossing over a century of industry knowledge overboard in the process. Net result: grotesque body fitment issues that are reminiscent of automobiles built in the 1920s, constant dumb software issues, trivially avoidable production bottlenecks, and borderline malicious marketing around half-baked assisted driving features (this list is incomplete). Then there is the comprehensive travesty Tesla calls a cybertruck. This much stupidity wouldn't be tolerated from any other auto manufacturer.
I'm prepared to change my stance on the matter the moment someone produces evidence that suggests other manufacturers have had instances of on-the-fly changes made on their production lines.
You honestly think other manufacturers have NOT had instances of on-the-fly changes made on their production lines. Ever? Really? You need 'evidence' to believe that manufacturing lines don't work perfectly, and technicians never make assumptions because the instructions are not always perfect.
You know nothing about manufacturing. People with experience try to correct you and you still think you know 'something' when you don't have a clue. Just accept you're wrong sometimes and move on.
"every other major auto manufacturer on the planet seems to avoid this problem" - just the worst assumption. As if you know anything about other auto manufacture's problems. Recalls aren't new. You are new and naive, and over confident in your ignorance.
Until evidence is supplied otherwise, no I don't. Incidentally I've worked in several manufacturing environments ranging from boutique hand-built to global scale mass production lines. Any outfit that has their shit together already has fitment and assembly issues thoroughly debugged before a process gets to production. You probably don't want to make assumptions about what I don't know. So what are you shilling anyway?
"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome". I do not know anything of the culture of Tesla and am not commenting on it specifically, and that quote could apply just as much to a company like Boeing. But at companies working on safety-critical products, the problems usually arise from employees acting in their own self interest to do what will get them rewarded for shipping on time, or to avoid punishment for causing delays.
I'm kind of uneasy about this being possible at all. Obviously this is just because of the power of hindsight, but should things that can wedge the accelerator in full throttle position be using adhesive for fixation at all?
Manufacturing is super complex - employees and robots performing thousands of interconnected tasks, sometimes requiring a little bit of judgement, and never 100% supervised.
Even a mature operation like Toyota and Ford can blunder.
For me it was a situation where I've never heard of another case, so I guess highly anecdotal, but can see how it might have applied to millions of regular old Ford ICE cars that were on the road.
At one end of the accelerator linkage is the "user interface" (gas pedal) and at the other end it's the entire V8 engine. Where the linkage connects directly to the throttle using optimized leverage and failure-mitigating springs that can overcome a number of foreseeable failure scenarios. Which had gradually been improved since the Model T and through the entire Space Age.
Runaway acceleration wasn't a problem with the pedal.
Engine was running properly too. And the linkage was perfect.
Well the engine is heavy and is not bolted directly to the frame of the car, instead it uses motor mounts, which consist of a metal plate which bolts to the motor, and an opposite plate that bolts to the frame, separated by a thick hard rubber shock absorbing pad.
Motor mounts are doing some of their isolation duty when you see an idling engine under the hood shimmying a little while the fenders and hood are nicely stationary.
Anyway it took years to figure out because it happened so seldom, and the cause & effect were so widely separated in time, but one day while navigating a jeep trail the engine had bottomed out, and that must have been the time one of the motor mounts separated, while the engine was momentarily forced an inch or more away from its normal position.
Nothing ever seemed any different, but every once in while when I would accelerate from a stop, the pedal would drop almost to the floor and it would really take off until I got my foot under the pedal and pulled it back.
Turns out the torque was occasionally capable of twisting the engine in the direction away from the broken mount, enough to be pulling on the linkage, opening the throttle further, and resulting in more torque. Might have had something to do with the octane of the gasoline in use.
I guess at either end of the linkage you want the rubber to be bonded to the metal a lot better than you might think at first.
I think Tesla has tons of problems, and I think the Cybertruck is a ghastly creation, and I think there have been many worse examples of QA problems at Tesla in the past (e.g. steering wheels falling off).
But at this point, this just feels like piling on. "OMG, how can their processes be so immature that something like this happened?!?!" Nearly all new models have significant recalls, and I'm not surprised for a vehicle as soup-to-nuts different as the Cybertruck. These are incredibly complicated engineering processes, so it's always easy to point out one thing (out of potentially millions) and yell "How could this happen?!"
I'm certainly not excusing Tesla for their overall QA issues, but at the same time this pearl clutching and what seems like undue attention every time there is a Tesla recall just seems over the top at this point.
Haven’t there been widespread complaints about manufacturing defects (poorly-fit panels, unexpected braking, wheels falling off, suspensions collapsing, axles breaking). They tend to rank at or near the bottom in quality surveys. Alfa Romeo comes out ahead of them. Even before Elon Musk’s antics turned me off the idea of buying a Tesla, I held off the possibility of buying one because the price/quality proposition was not great.
In the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, design engineers have their offices next to the manufacturing line. So they see and hear everything going on. It probably wasn't just "someone on the production line".
This seems like first generation vehicle problems to me. There is an old saying that you never buy the first model year of any vehicle, especially if it is a brand new vehicle and not just a refresh.
You just don't hear about things like that because every single Tesla recall makes the HN front page and is all over the media, even if it's just a software update, a details that omitted on purpose in the headlines.
I’m specifically referring to introducing steps into the manufacturing process with no oversight, which the (now flagged) post was saying Musk couldn’t foresee.
There was a major airbag flaw which affected most cars from Japan for like a decade, and it just kept growing. I always kind of assumed that was if there was a recall of that magnitude out of the blue it would rock a lot of boats so it was trickled out. *Takata I believe.
I’m specifically referring to introducing steps into the manufacturing process with no oversight, which the (now flagged) post was saying Musk couldn’t foresee.
I’m specifically referring to introducing steps into the manufacturing process with no oversight, which the (now flagged) post was saying Musk couldn’t foresee.
I’m specifically referring to introducing steps into the manufacturing process with no oversight, which the (now flagged) post was saying Musk couldn’t foresee.
This is an area where recalls is a bad metric. It could be that a company with high rates of recalls is actually very good and just issues recalls for smaller things while other companies don’t.
I’m specifically referring to introducing steps into the manufacturing process with no oversight, which the (now flagged) post was saying Musk couldn’t foresee. I’m not talking about recalls, which obviously do happen.
Recalls are automotive equivalent of security updates. Testing catch bugs but not all of it, and while a bug-free software won't ever get a patch release in theory, in reality it means the software is not maintained.
How do you have so little quality control and insight into your manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?
I guess when analysts said the incumbent auto manufacturers would have a large advantage over Tesla in manufacturing, this is what they meant?
Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a company that has done well up until now.