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Ford paid $199,950 to tear down a Tesla Model X
- emdd 10y agoThis seems very reasonable to me. Why not essentially try to reverse engineer it? See what Ford can learn from Tesla.
- rocky1138 10y ago$200k USD for R&D on such a market-changing item is peanuts. I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is all about.
- CosmicShadow 10y agoHaha, I was just about to say the same damn thing!
- joezydeco 10y agoThe public never usually hears about it, that's why. There are entire companies that specialize in tearing down products and selling reports to customers.
- Retric 10y agoIt's not the total price that's a shocker rather they needed to pay $55,000 over the list price. That's way above average even if it's chump change for a major car company.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoThis is a company with a $54B market cap and a 2015 pre-tax net income of $10B out of $150B in revenue. Yeah, I think they can spare an extra $55,000 now and again.
- Retric 10y agoCan spare sure, but this looks more like how a middle manager can quietly hand 50k to a friend.
- quakenul 10y agoI get it now. What a story.
- monkeyprojects 10y agoGiven that the car was a freebie for referring 11 Model S sales I doubt it was a friend.. See http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/20/11466810/tesla-model-x-ford-purchase http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/20/11466810/tesla-model-x-for... My guess is that this was the first one Ford was able to buy at any price....
- Retric 10y agoYea, I think this is a case of looks sketchy but is fine. Still, journalism often focuses on the interesting even if it's not that big a deal.
- jasonjei 10y agoExactly. In fact, $200,000 is a rounding error for a company with $150B in revenue.
- mikeash 10y agoThey didn't even need to, they just didn't feel like waiting in line, or locating a non-Founder's unit to purchase. They must have enough cash allocated for buying cars that they just don't care. And of course there's nothing wrong with that.
- sliverstorm 10y ago"Just didn't feel like"? Presumably they believe there is tremendous time-value attached to the information they want.
- mikeash 10y agoIf they were in that much of a hurry they wouldn't have waited until March to buy the thing.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoThis makes me think of the iPhone + RIM (Blackberry) and what a shift in thinking they had after pulling apart the first iPhone they could get hold of. "RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn’t do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant." From: http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-disbelief-following-the-introduction-of-the-iphone-in-january-2007/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-disbelief-f...
- wrong_variable 10y agoI remember reading that article - It was really insightful. This is what innovation looks like - its so absurd that it might actually work !
- dajohnson89 10y agoWhy not poach an engineer?
- brianwawok 10y agoLegally - you can do some things you figure out in reverse engineering that you could not do if you had the engineer. Plus, does 1 engineer really know all parts of the Tesla? Can he tell you about the types of lugs used on the wheels? Can he also tell you about the type of glass used in the windows, or the type of leather used in the seats? If cars are anything like software, each engineer knows like 5% of the total product..
- findthewords 10y agoMusk surely does...
- mikeash 10y agoThere's no way any one person understands every aspect of a car that takes hundreds or thousands of people years to develop.
- varjag 10y agoMost students are able to understand calculus without reproducing the work of Abel, Cauchy or Lagrange..
- mikeash 10y agoAre you trying to say that there is no human endeavor which cannot fit within a single person's mind, or is there some relationship between calculus and a car here?
- varjag 10y agoI'm saying that understanding things thought up and formulated by others is orders of magnitude easier than doing them from scratch. This simple property gets most of us through the schools and to the workplaces. It is certainly possible to fully understand a car down to minute detail. It's even easier if you get briefed on design decisions.
- CameronBanga 10y agoThe CEO of Ford made over $17 million last year in compensation, but it was worthwhile to write an article about a 200k R&D expense, with a senior industry analyst giving a quote seriously questioning the $50k spent over sticker price in order to get the vehicle immediately instead of waiting in line. Is this really a story? Or just clickbait because it has Tesla in the title?
- Spooky23 10y agoIt's probably PR fed to the author by Tesla.
- mfoy_ 10y agoI think it's just supposed to be noteworthy because it is unusual for them to pay that much, and it was specifically to get an early iteration of this particular model. I wonder if there's some reason they specifically went for one of the earliest ones sold. Maybe as one of the first ones made, it would be more in "prototype" mode versus one of the latest versions.
- jasonwen 10y agoThe news is not about the amount indeed, it's basically pocket money for Ford. However, they go in great lengths to acquire a Tesla through unusual channels. The founders edition are very limited and rare and only given to close friends & board members. They wouldn't do this with a new Honda I imagine. What makes it interesting is to see how the car industry reacts to Tesla's disrupting the industry, which in this case is one reaction (of many). Thats what I think is fascinating.
- ghaff 10y ago>They wouldn't do this with a new Honda I imagine. Long waiting lists aren't the norm for most cars. I have very little doubt that Ford routinely does timely teardowns of major vehicles that it competes with.
- digitalneal 10y agoIt doesn't surprise me at all they would drop this kinda cash to get an early one off the line. They do the same with all their competitors. (Yes even hondas) Get one early, measure tolerances, get one 6 months later, see if their manufacturing practices got better.
- oldmanjay 10y agoI suppose if I were carrying your particular axe I would have to take this story as a grindstone but since I'm not, I didn't get any outrage out of this puff piece. I have to imagine I'm lucky in that regard. I'd hate if something so innocuous were able to stoke unrelated class anger so easily. It would mean I'm cheaply manipulable.
- oldmanjay 10y agoFor instance, if I were carrying that particular grindstone, I would feel immediately compelled to downvote any comment that pointed out my emotional shackles in plain language
- dang 10y agoWe've asked you before not to be personally abrasive on HN. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Also, please re-read the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, specifically the two at the bottom) and don't post any more comments about getting downvoted. Those are out of bounds for good reason. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11534726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11534726 and marked it off-topic.
- cm3 10y agoWhy is is that reverse engineering gets people cease and desist letters, especially in the software and electronics community? Is the difference that Ford keeps the findings internal and doesn't share them with the public? If so, that's pretty bad, because someone dissected a product and now everyone else should do the same instead of sharing the result. It's a waste of money and work force, all in the name of trying to hide stuff even though patents and copyrights are abused already for similar purposes.
- HillRat 10y agoIt's not the act of disassembling that's important, it's what you do with the knowledge afterwards. For example, the team doing the Tesla teardown is now poisoned; they can write up their findings from the clean room and provide them to other engineering teams for implementation (IP issues aside), but they are now barred from working on any derivative technologies themselves. It's a bit cumbersome, but this is how engineering espionage is done.
- ddorian43 10y agoWhy can't they work themself on derivatives? As long as there aren't any patents it should be ok? What am I missing ?
- snowwrestler 10y ago> As long as there aren't any patents it should be ok? What am I missing ? There are patents.
- ghaff 10y agoPatents are public information. That's one of the main reasons they exist. (Making information public in exchange for period of exclusivity.)
- sliverstorm 10y agoThere are patent/IP concerns all over the place. This would be a form of white box reverse engineering.
- pandemicsyn 10y agoIts pretty common practice[0]. IMHO the take away is that Ford is taking Tesla (and electrics) serious enough to do it. [0] http://www.wired.com/2014/07/go-inside-the-lab-where-gm-tears-apart-its-competitors-cars/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/go-inside-the-lab-where-gm-tear...
- shogun21 10y agoTesla already makes all its patents public.
- reitanqild 10y agoAs well as licensing them to competitors I think. Making them public is part of patenting anythong I think.
- EA 10y agoSeems like a good deal for Ford. I know some entities that would pay millions to get a hold of a rival entity's competitive materiel.
- IE6 10y agoYeah - this type of stuff is what I would expect Ford to be doing. It might be different if they bought a gasoline Subaru but this is a Tesla which is a brand that is supposed to be revolutionizing the automotive market. If they paid twice or three times the price to get something as early as possible I still wouldn't be surprised.
- acomjean 10y agoIn the book "Soul of a new machine" there is described a moment in 1978 when an Data General engineer (Tom West) gets to go look at and take apart a newly installed DEV VAX at a friends company. Oddly VAX cost $200,000. Very short exert http://kottke.org/14/07/the-soul-of-a-new-machine http://kottke.org/14/07/the-soul-of-a-new-machine Long exert of the book which continues the story of the VAX disassembly was published in the Atlantic called "flying upside-down". http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/07/flying-upside-down/306467/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/07/flying-u... Soul of a new machine is a really good book. highly recomended.
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoThe comments here are really interesting. I agree that I'm not sure why this is news worthy since it seems like companies spend much more than this doing the exact same thing in other verticals. I'm sure Google and Samsung have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, doing the same thing to Apple products. R&D includes trying to understand how others do it. Spending nearly $200K to tear apart a Tesla seems pretty reasonable to me.
- csours 10y agoAssuming that Apple has 10 products on the market at any time, and you buy one per month at $1,000 each, that's $10,000 dollars a month, so for $120,000 you could fund the teardowns for a year.
- asimuvPR 10y agoWhen Lexus launched the LS400 two percent of the sales that year came from auto manufacturers. They could not believe how the car was so good. They still haven't caught up in many ways. *Edit: Here is more about the history of the car itself: http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/lexus-ls400/ http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/lexus-ls400/
- dsr_ 10y agoOT: the letters PR have a primary association with Public Relations, i.e. people who are paid to spin the truth on the behalf of others. I see from your profile that those are your real-life initials... but it's not a great first impression. You might want to open an account as Pablo-asimuv, or, really, anything else. (I checked because this comment sounded an awful lot like a PR exercise for Lexus.)
- asimuvPR 10y agoI thought about it when creating the account, but decided to go with it. Since everything I post represents ASIMUV as well its kind of a weird PR kind of thing too... I do appreciate you making the check. HN is a very important community for me and following its rules is crucial. The post does sound like a PR exercise for Lexus, but do a quick web search and you will be impressed with how good the Lexus was back then. They still are great cars. I have never nor do I have any future projects or connections with Toyota/Lexus or any of its affiliates. I just think they build good stuff. :)
- mc32 10y agoGood for Ford. They'd be negligent to not try their hardest to get some competitive advantage any above board way possible. I don't see what the fuss is about. OMG AMD buys Intel chips and checks them out!!! Sometimes they pay over market price.
- alexc05 10y agoHow much did the engineers who took it apart cost? Strikes me that a reasonable sized team would cost that per-day.
- tcpekin 10y agoCarmakers continually buy all sorts of competitors' models for comparison testing and R&D purposes. From what I remember, the company I interned for (one of the big 3 in Detroit) bought Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, etc to compare drive quality and for R&D. Additionally, sometimes they don't want a new car, they want one that is 10 years old and has real world wear and tear. They essentially have a broker who will find any car they ask for. I worked on the alloy design team, and one of the more unique stories I heard was about 10 years ago, they bought a 20 year old Mercedes to essentially cut into pieces. Why? The model they bought was one of the first cars with a unique alloy in the body IIRC, and they wanted to run mechanical as well as characterization tests on it to see how it aged.
- ck2 10y agoEveryone thinks it is for R&D ? What if it is to try to find patents they can sue over?