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> Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of the Model

> Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line... Why is this so accusatory? Was there some guarantee made that the Model 3's production line would be 100% autonomous, ever? Sounds more like Tesla's doing what it needs to do to ship what it can. Disclaimer - I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

metaphor 9y ago
> I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context. https://outline.com/AbbLRj https://outline.com/AbbLRj
- keganunderwood 9y ago
  Thank you. This should be the link in the title. Better still, we should reassess https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 and ban direct links to pay walled sites.
  - thsowers 9y ago
    There are still numerous ways to circumvent the paywall [0], or else linking to WSJ would be against the guidelines [1] [0]: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
digikata 9y ago
The factory that one starts shipping a product with is never the same as the factory 100, or 1000, or 10000 units later...
URSpider94 9y ago
As the full story lays out, production experts commented that its highly unusual to be shipping production cars without the line being fully installed. It’s not that the process should be autonomous, it’s that workers are literally hand-muscling parts of the body into place and aligning them by hand while they hand-spot-weld them. As someone with 15 years of high-volume manufacturing experience (not in automobiles, though), I’d agree that it’s very odd to be shipping units to customers or claiming to be in mass production before your final tooling is installed on the line and qualified, even if it might change later.

metaphor 9y ago

> I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context. https://outline.com/AbbLRj https://outline.com/AbbLRj

keganunderwood 9y ago
Thank you. This should be the link in the title. Better still, we should reassess https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 and ban direct links to pay walled sites.
- thsowers 9y ago
  There are still numerous ways to circumvent the paywall [0], or else linking to WSJ would be against the guidelines [1] [0]: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

digikata 9y ago

The factory that one starts shipping a product with is never the same as the factory 100, or 1000, or 10000 units later...

URSpider94 9y ago

As the full story lays out, production experts commented that its highly unusual to be shipping production cars without the line being fully installed. It’s not that the process should be autonomous, it’s that workers are literally hand-muscling parts of the body into place and aligning them by hand while they hand-spot-weld them. As someone with 15 years of high-volume manufacturing experience (not in automobiles, though), I’d agree that it’s very odd to be shipping units to customers or claiming to be in mass production before your final tooling is installed on the line and qualified, even if it might change later.