12 ms·

Tesla employees say Gigafactory problems worse than known

121 points by ugwigr 9y ago

lumberjack 9y ago
>Which leaves only one possible reason: the layoffs could only have been a Union-busting move, Is that legal?
- leereeves 9y ago
  No. There are a number of open complaints about Tesla's union-busting efforts at the National Labor Relations Board. But nothing's been proven yet and Tesla claims the complaints are "entirely without merit".
fermienrico 9y ago
I recently interviewed for Tesla's module department. Module engineering is essentially the gear between engineering and manufacturing. They're the heavy lifters. They're the front line grunts. They're the ones accountable for everything - LVM to HVM feasibility, process development, metrology, selection of suppliers, qualifying the manufacturing cell, process control and sustaining(operations, efficiency, continuous improvement, training etc.) and troubleshooting lines down situations. The interviewer was very polite and told me this is probably the most demanding job at Tesla, especially at this time of the company's state when they're ramping up the production lines for Model 3. I was intrigued and went to second round interview, and it eventually led to an offer. That is where things got interesting. Tesla needs to invest heavily in their Module engineers. The pay package was extremely disappointing and I am not willing to let go of the golden years of my life (late 20's) for this kind of a job unless it is heavily incentivized. I've had similar demanding job offers from oil companies, but at least they offset with a very compelling pay package (15% Alaska bonus, 4 weeks off, presumably amazing yearly bonus).
- kilroy123 9y ago
  How much under what you were expecting, exactly? 10% under? 50%?
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    It is hard to say the exact percent because of my unfamiliarity with the cost of living; but I was expecting about 30-40% higher...perhaps even more. I interviewed with several engineers and really got to understand (and appreciate) the kind of work they do.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - baseethrowaway 9y ago
      Why not share the numbers?
      - fermienrico 9y ago
        Apologies, I will be very transparent: Offer was about $100-110k in the Bay Area + other perks (bonus/stock). I have 4-7 years of experience. This offer was before negotiation (which I didn't end up doing as I thought it was a fruitless endeavor). If I did negotiate, I always negotiate the base salary - that is a guaranteed pay. Bonus/Stock could be slashed, altered and neutered in future. The funny thing is that I currently make more than that outside of California (I wish to not disclose my location if that's ok). I am hearing from others that Bay area housing is approximately $2k / bedroom and that's not super nice. This leaves a bad taste for working in the Bay area where competition is insane, cost of living is through the roof, and compensation isn't adequate. Others are pointing out the thrill of working for Tesla/SpaceX has some value - that is, to work for the next gen American manufacturing. I am a bit more objective and less emotional I guess. I do have a question: Is expecting $130-140k too much for a Mechanical Engineer running one of the most critical areas in their manufacturing line? Edit - removed personally identifiable information.
        9y ago
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  Tesla isn’t know to pay particularly well. Unfortunately, on average, non-software engineers, esp in the Bay Area, are not paid comparably very well.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    That's pretty unusual. Tesla is cool but nearly as glamorous as spacex.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      If that is generally true, then Tesla is squandering a golden opportunity. If they have the cachet to attract top-tier talent, they should take it.
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    Indeed, I certainly noticed this disparity. My background is in Engineering (Robotics) and I am very capable of writing full fledged software - from FreeRTOS/ARM Cortex apps for embedded robotics to your typical engineering scripting (Matlab, Python). I've worked on a few major ROS projects and have an excellent grasp of C/C++. I find this "Education degree" based pay bias a little bit absurd. Of course, there is the demand/supply thing that should settle the equilibrium in a fluid job market -- but the reality is that non-software engineers that can also write software are underpaid. There is equal or more complexity in dealing with the interface of hardware and software (Robotics) as with any other "pure" software development task. I would love to hear more from the software folks on HN. I think pay should be based on the specific job role not Engineering degree. Edit: removed personally identifiable information.
    - zpatel 9y ago
      I wonder why people get a masters in mechanical engineering or other field and code webapps or services just because they get a good job offer ? A software / compute engineer would never be able to get a mechanical or civil engineering job without appropriate degrees or certs in the field.
- postmeta 9y ago
  Wow, oil company offers vs Tesla... I think you should choose Tesla and burn some of those golden years for the future of American manufacturing rather than scooping out more dead dinosaur goop.
  - schwap 9y ago
    Pay them the difference then.
    - philsnow 9y ago
      To be clear you're saying postmeta should pony up the difference right? (agreed)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - omegaworks 9y ago
    Why are you blaming the individual for a institutional and societal failure? Tesla should pay - at minimum - market rate for this person's skills, to do otherwise is a failure at the institutional level. We should be valuing people that perform labor in service of jumpstarting a post-fossil economy higher than those that perform labor in service of the existing, damaging fossil economy. To do otherwise a failure at the societal level.
- dkersten 9y ago
  It boggles my European mind that 4 weeks of holidays is considered a lot...
  - flunhat 9y ago
    How many weeks off are you guys given? 4 weeks sounds like quite a lot (it's a whole month!)
    - to3m 9y ago
      It’s 28 days in the UK. Those weeks include the weekends!
      - stuaxo 9y ago
        They include bank holidays (various fridays off), but the rest of it is just time you would've worked anyway, not time you would've had off.
        to3m 9y ago
        Righ - I mean it’s 4 full weeks of 7 days, so 28 in total, rather than 4 working weeks of 5 apiece, totalling 20.
    - Trundle 9y ago
      4 weeks of annual leave is the minimum here in Australia. Not including the 10 days of sick leave as well.
      - whatusername 9y ago
        4 weeks. plus 11 public holidays. plus sick leave.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  I wonder at what point people will realize that Musk is a shyster who uses his media profile to underpay and overwork his employees. Can you imagine working for someone who engages in media spectacles as a way to induce death marches? "I told every media outlet that we're going to have fully autonomous cars next year, so you better deliver!"
  - ctdonath 9y ago
    So long as people are willing to do that work for that pay, he will. Nobody has to.
- TaylorGood 9y ago
  A buddy from childhood took a similar role there, albeit six years ago. He, now 31 is grinded down and wanting out. This of course stems from ~16 hr. workdays for the last couple years. That works perfectly against your dating and health. He did receive options and built a mini fortune but still.. his plan is to leave soon, relocate to a small mountain town, buy a fixer upper and essentially defrag himself. Edit/ Fun fact: paint was still wet on the Model X’s on stage at the press event. The parts to build them came in ten days before showtime. Groups of five or six were assigned one to build. He was one of them. He said he slept like 8 hours during the press build. To clarify, I love the ambitious nature of Tesla, SpaceX etc. but I have done 100+ work weeks and it sucks. Controlling your schedule or at least your queue is what I’d consider one of the most important things in life.
  - eganist 9y ago
    The culture wasn't really any different at SpaceX from what I can tell. I can tag a few friends to elaborate further, as I'm only operating on hear-say.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  There's a lot of unnecessarily personally identifiable information about yourself in this thread. Although I appreciate your honesty and what you say is really interesting, for your benefit I think you should delete the posts with personally identifiable information before the 2 hour limit on HackerNews prevents you from doing it.
  - hutzlibu 9y ago
    https://xkcd.com/137/ https://xkcd.com/137/
    - loorinm 9y ago
      ^^^^^^^^
  - Strom 9y ago
    Can you share any examples of what type of data they shared that is going to cause problems? Seems like a very non-revealing post to me.
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    Thank you, I will add some ambiguity.
jccooper 9y ago
> It's looking more and more like the official reason for the layoffs - "…As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures" - doesn't hold water. Why not? If you can't find 2% dead wood at your company you're miraculously good at hiring or are not looking very hard. Stack ranking companies tend to use 5-10% as the bottom tier subject to "yank". I'm not saying it is just performance reviews, because I have no more idea than whomever wrote the article what's really going on inside Tesla, but the idea that it couldn't make sense for a big employer like that to do a small round of firings doesn't hold water.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Stack ranking is stupid. Eventually you'll be firing good people. Idk why people think that Jack Welsh had good management practices or that GE is a company to aspire to. If nothing else, GE has 300k employees. Your company probably doesn't.
  - Strom 9y ago
    > Eventually you'll be firing good people. Not good enough to be in the top 98% though! I think the issue here is that we don't have a good way to even assign ranks. It's either a social game of politics, or some sterile metric based system that no doubt prefers short-term gains over long-term investment. Thus there's no eventuality about it, you'll be firing all sorts of good people right from the get-go.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    “Idk why people think Jack Welsh had good management practices...” Prior to Mr. Immelt GE was headed by Jack Welch. During his tenure at the top of GE the company created more wealth for its investors than any company ever in the recorded history of U.S. publicly traded companies. GE’s value increased 40-fold (4000%) from 1981 to 2001. He expanded GE into new businesses, often far removed from its industrial manufacturing roots, as market shifts created new opportunities for growing revenues and profits. From what was mostly a diversified manufacturing company Mr. Welch led GE into real estate as those assets increased in value, then media as advertising revenues skyrocketed and finally financial services as deregulation opened the market for the greatest returns in banking history. Jack Welch was the Steve Jobs of his era. Because he had the foresight to push GE into new markets, create new products and grow the company. Growth that was so substantial it kept GE constantly in the news, and investors thrilled. That’s why. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2015/04/15/ge-a-total-leadership-failure/#7a43845b5699 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2015/04/15/ge-a-tot...
Shivetya 9y ago
recent reddit post where an owner was on his second attempt to take delivery of a III https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect_for_major_panel_gapalignment_defects_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect... the annoying part was the take it or leave it that they felt they received, apparently the first car was worse
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Just take it to an independent third party repair shop.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    That isn’t possible for Teslas – Tesla does not offer manuals or replacement parts, and if a third-party is found to have modified the car, Tesla reserves the right to remotely disable it.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      I thought that was illegal in the US? How exactly are they getting around the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act?
      - omgwtfbyobbq 9y ago
        It is illegal as far as I know, and I've never heard of Tesla remotely disabling a car unless it's been stolen. The only thing I've read about is them not doing in-warranty repairs and/or recalls on salvage vehicles, but that's normal. They'll apparently recertify a salvage car for $3k-$6k though, if an owner really wants support.
- mdekkers 9y ago
  I am deeply excited about Tesla's cars, technology, and vision, and as things stand today, I will not buy one. How they can roll out brand new, very expensive car in this state, and tell the customer "take it or leave it" is strongly indicative of where the customer is placed in terms of importance to Tesla. The photo's in the reddit post are shocking.
ggm 9y ago
Anti union company finds workers need investing in.. Who knew?
dang 9y ago
Url changed from http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued-by-inexperienced-workers-after-they-laid-off-700/ http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued..., which quotes heavily from this yet links not to it.
- JeremyBloom 9y ago
  Hi, I'm the author of the piece in question, and, being a professional, of COURSE I linked to the CNBC article. Twice. When I introduce the CNBC material, in the first paragraph, and again when I introduced the (fully credited) blockquote. Just saying....
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
omgwtfbyobbq 9y ago
So layoffs in Fremont and Roseville are somehow causing Tesla employees at the Gigafactory to become less experienced? https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/ Yeah... OK.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Elon Musk is spread out way too thin. He should never have bought SolarCity, and he needs to relinquish SpaceX entirely. He needs to be laser-focused on getting the Model3 out of the door because his whole company depends on it. I think people are sensing a hell of a lot of weakness, and if Tesla starts running out of money, he could literally find himself and the company bankrupt, especially if banks stop lending money because it looks like a bad credit risk. This feels like the type of company that could crumble down to single digits in stock value because of some catastrophic set of financial issues.
- philwelch 9y ago
  I’d rather Musk give up owning a car company than give up working on the most plausible near-term route for humans to enter low earth orbit that doesn’t enrich the Putin cartel.
- kitsunesoba 9y ago
  He’d give up everything else before he’d give up SpaceX. Green energy, EVs, AI + autonomy, etc a priority for him, but if he had to go exclusive on anything it’d be SpaceX, no question. Even now he’s plainly stated that his primary interest in his other companies is building the kind of capital needed to run a space program without being tethered to the whims of whoever is currently in office.
pooya13 9y ago
The author argues that they are not careful enough and not taking their time to fully inspect the battery packs, while saying that they should stop taking their time and ramp up the production already! Appears to me that she would blame Tesla either way.
true_tuna 9y ago
Tl;dr I hope they upgraded the the DB backing their battery manufacturing process. I had a buddy who worked at Tesla. The first step of the battery manufacture process involves a robot taking a little cell out of the box, discharging it, charging it back up and testing to see if it shows the right voltage. Super easy quality control test. But all that needs to be written to a database. The database was hosted on a vm using a shared raid array of spinning disks. Their battery manufacturer process was literally gated by a slow ass disk drive. My buddy pointed this out. Asked that they just throw an SSD in there (we’re working on it). Followed up, asked if he could just do it himself (no). Followed up a third time asking for the authority to fix the problem (no). Finally quit in disgust because they refused to solve a simple problem so how are they going to solve hard ones?
- ysleepy 9y ago
  Was it limiting the testing in some way? In can't really imagine it was. Changing working things in a critical phase of the core business without reason does not seem like a good idea. I agree the setup seems bad and should be addressed, but if there are better things to do maybe do those first.
  - true_tuna 9y ago
    They had to slow down the robots so they didn’t outpace the database. Slapping an SSD in a database increases write speed by 4X. They probably could have increased battery production by 15% for a total of $99. Slow database meant slow robot meant slow battery pack production meant slow car production. Replacing a working thing might be bad, but when your expert says your thing can be drastically improved with a trivial upgrade, you should do it. Especially if it’s in the critical path of production. You can’t know everything, but you can employ experts. But they can’t help you if they’re not empowered.
    - thedoops 9y ago
      Was this a bottleneck to the end product? If at some point in the process there's a different bottleneck, I'd expect it to be reasonably construed as dangerous. That being said it sounds like an ownership problem. Red tape made from past fires (not the pink slip kind ) can easily become the real problem in a complex operation like this.

121 points by ugwigr 9y ago

lumberjack 9y ago

>Which leaves only one possible reason: the layoffs could only have been a Union-busting move, Is that legal?

leereeves 9y ago
No. There are a number of open complaints about Tesla's union-busting efforts at the National Labor Relations Board. But nothing's been proven yet and Tesla claims the complaints are "entirely without merit".

fermienrico 9y ago

I recently interviewed for Tesla's module department. Module engineering is essentially the gear between engineering and manufacturing. They're the heavy lifters. They're the front line grunts. They're the ones accountable for everything - LVM to HVM feasibility, process development, metrology, selection of suppliers, qualifying the manufacturing cell, process control and sustaining(operations, efficiency, continuous improvement, training etc.) and troubleshooting lines down situations. The interviewer was very polite and told me this is probably the most demanding job at Tesla, especially at this time of the company's state when they're ramping up the production lines for Model 3. I was intrigued and went to second round interview, and it eventually led to an offer. That is where things got interesting. Tesla needs to invest heavily in their Module engineers. The pay package was extremely disappointing and I am not willing to let go of the golden years of my life (late 20's) for this kind of a job unless it is heavily incentivized. I've had similar demanding job offers from oil companies, but at least they offset with a very compelling pay package (15% Alaska bonus, 4 weeks off, presumably amazing yearly bonus).

kilroy123 9y ago
How much under what you were expecting, exactly? 10% under? 50%?
- fermienrico 9y ago
  It is hard to say the exact percent because of my unfamiliarity with the cost of living; but I was expecting about 30-40% higher...perhaps even more. I interviewed with several engineers and really got to understand (and appreciate) the kind of work they do.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - baseethrowaway 9y ago
    Why not share the numbers?
    - fermienrico 9y ago
      Apologies, I will be very transparent: Offer was about $100-110k in the Bay Area + other perks (bonus/stock). I have 4-7 years of experience. This offer was before negotiation (which I didn't end up doing as I thought it was a fruitless endeavor). If I did negotiate, I always negotiate the base salary - that is a guaranteed pay. Bonus/Stock could be slashed, altered and neutered in future. The funny thing is that I currently make more than that outside of California (I wish to not disclose my location if that's ok). I am hearing from others that Bay area housing is approximately $2k / bedroom and that's not super nice. This leaves a bad taste for working in the Bay area where competition is insane, cost of living is through the roof, and compensation isn't adequate. Others are pointing out the thrill of working for Tesla/SpaceX has some value - that is, to work for the next gen American manufacturing. I am a bit more objective and less emotional I guess. I do have a question: Is expecting $130-140k too much for a Mechanical Engineer running one of the most critical areas in their manufacturing line? Edit - removed personally identifiable information.
      - 9y ago
dawhizkid 9y ago
Tesla isn’t know to pay particularly well. Unfortunately, on average, non-software engineers, esp in the Bay Area, are not paid comparably very well.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  That's pretty unusual. Tesla is cool but nearly as glamorous as spacex.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    If that is generally true, then Tesla is squandering a golden opportunity. If they have the cachet to attract top-tier talent, they should take it.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  Indeed, I certainly noticed this disparity. My background is in Engineering (Robotics) and I am very capable of writing full fledged software - from FreeRTOS/ARM Cortex apps for embedded robotics to your typical engineering scripting (Matlab, Python). I've worked on a few major ROS projects and have an excellent grasp of C/C++. I find this "Education degree" based pay bias a little bit absurd. Of course, there is the demand/supply thing that should settle the equilibrium in a fluid job market -- but the reality is that non-software engineers that can also write software are underpaid. There is equal or more complexity in dealing with the interface of hardware and software (Robotics) as with any other "pure" software development task. I would love to hear more from the software folks on HN. I think pay should be based on the specific job role not Engineering degree. Edit: removed personally identifiable information.
  - zpatel 9y ago
    I wonder why people get a masters in mechanical engineering or other field and code webapps or services just because they get a good job offer ? A software / compute engineer would never be able to get a mechanical or civil engineering job without appropriate degrees or certs in the field.
postmeta 9y ago
Wow, oil company offers vs Tesla... I think you should choose Tesla and burn some of those golden years for the future of American manufacturing rather than scooping out more dead dinosaur goop.
- schwap 9y ago
  Pay them the difference then.
  - philsnow 9y ago
    To be clear you're saying postmeta should pony up the difference right? (agreed)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- omegaworks 9y ago
  Why are you blaming the individual for a institutional and societal failure? Tesla should pay - at minimum - market rate for this person's skills, to do otherwise is a failure at the institutional level. We should be valuing people that perform labor in service of jumpstarting a post-fossil economy higher than those that perform labor in service of the existing, damaging fossil economy. To do otherwise a failure at the societal level.
dkersten 9y ago
It boggles my European mind that 4 weeks of holidays is considered a lot...
- flunhat 9y ago
  How many weeks off are you guys given? 4 weeks sounds like quite a lot (it's a whole month!)
  - to3m 9y ago
    It’s 28 days in the UK. Those weeks include the weekends!
    - stuaxo 9y ago
      They include bank holidays (various fridays off), but the rest of it is just time you would've worked anyway, not time you would've had off.
      - to3m 9y ago
        Righ - I mean it’s 4 full weeks of 7 days, so 28 in total, rather than 4 working weeks of 5 apiece, totalling 20.
  - Trundle 9y ago
    4 weeks of annual leave is the minimum here in Australia. Not including the 10 days of sick leave as well.
    - whatusername 9y ago
      4 weeks. plus 11 public holidays. plus sick leave.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
alphonsegaston 9y ago
I wonder at what point people will realize that Musk is a shyster who uses his media profile to underpay and overwork his employees. Can you imagine working for someone who engages in media spectacles as a way to induce death marches? "I told every media outlet that we're going to have fully autonomous cars next year, so you better deliver!"
- ctdonath 9y ago
  So long as people are willing to do that work for that pay, he will. Nobody has to.
TaylorGood 9y ago
A buddy from childhood took a similar role there, albeit six years ago. He, now 31 is grinded down and wanting out. This of course stems from ~16 hr. workdays for the last couple years. That works perfectly against your dating and health. He did receive options and built a mini fortune but still.. his plan is to leave soon, relocate to a small mountain town, buy a fixer upper and essentially defrag himself. Edit/ Fun fact: paint was still wet on the Model X’s on stage at the press event. The parts to build them came in ten days before showtime. Groups of five or six were assigned one to build. He was one of them. He said he slept like 8 hours during the press build. To clarify, I love the ambitious nature of Tesla, SpaceX etc. but I have done 100+ work weeks and it sucks. Controlling your schedule or at least your queue is what I’d consider one of the most important things in life.
- eganist 9y ago
  The culture wasn't really any different at SpaceX from what I can tell. I can tag a few friends to elaborate further, as I'm only operating on hear-say.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
There's a lot of unnecessarily personally identifiable information about yourself in this thread. Although I appreciate your honesty and what you say is really interesting, for your benefit I think you should delete the posts with personally identifiable information before the 2 hour limit on HackerNews prevents you from doing it.
- hutzlibu 9y ago
  https://xkcd.com/137/ https://xkcd.com/137/
  - loorinm 9y ago
    ^^^^^^^^
- Strom 9y ago
  Can you share any examples of what type of data they shared that is going to cause problems? Seems like a very non-revealing post to me.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  Thank you, I will add some ambiguity.

jccooper 9y ago

> It's looking more and more like the official reason for the layoffs - "…As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures" - doesn't hold water. Why not? If you can't find 2% dead wood at your company you're miraculously good at hiring or are not looking very hard. Stack ranking companies tend to use 5-10% as the bottom tier subject to "yank". I'm not saying it is just performance reviews, because I have no more idea than whomever wrote the article what's really going on inside Tesla, but the idea that it couldn't make sense for a big employer like that to do a small round of firings doesn't hold water.

adamnemecek 9y ago
Stack ranking is stupid. Eventually you'll be firing good people. Idk why people think that Jack Welsh had good management practices or that GE is a company to aspire to. If nothing else, GE has 300k employees. Your company probably doesn't.
- Strom 9y ago
  > Eventually you'll be firing good people. Not good enough to be in the top 98% though! I think the issue here is that we don't have a good way to even assign ranks. It's either a social game of politics, or some sterile metric based system that no doubt prefers short-term gains over long-term investment. Thus there's no eventuality about it, you'll be firing all sorts of good people right from the get-go.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  “Idk why people think Jack Welsh had good management practices...” Prior to Mr. Immelt GE was headed by Jack Welch. During his tenure at the top of GE the company created more wealth for its investors than any company ever in the recorded history of U.S. publicly traded companies. GE’s value increased 40-fold (4000%) from 1981 to 2001. He expanded GE into new businesses, often far removed from its industrial manufacturing roots, as market shifts created new opportunities for growing revenues and profits. From what was mostly a diversified manufacturing company Mr. Welch led GE into real estate as those assets increased in value, then media as advertising revenues skyrocketed and finally financial services as deregulation opened the market for the greatest returns in banking history. Jack Welch was the Steve Jobs of his era. Because he had the foresight to push GE into new markets, create new products and grow the company. Growth that was so substantial it kept GE constantly in the news, and investors thrilled. That’s why. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2015/04/15/ge-a-total-leadership-failure/#7a43845b5699 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2015/04/15/ge-a-tot...

Shivetya 9y ago

recent reddit post where an owner was on his second attempt to take delivery of a III https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect_for_major_panel_gapalignment_defects_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect... the annoying part was the take it or leave it that they felt they received, apparently the first car was worse

Spooky23 9y ago
Just take it to an independent third party repair shop.
- kuschku 9y ago
  That isn’t possible for Teslas – Tesla does not offer manuals or replacement parts, and if a third-party is found to have modified the car, Tesla reserves the right to remotely disable it.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    I thought that was illegal in the US? How exactly are they getting around the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act?
    - omgwtfbyobbq 9y ago
      It is illegal as far as I know, and I've never heard of Tesla remotely disabling a car unless it's been stolen. The only thing I've read about is them not doing in-warranty repairs and/or recalls on salvage vehicles, but that's normal. They'll apparently recertify a salvage car for $3k-$6k though, if an owner really wants support.
mdekkers 9y ago
I am deeply excited about Tesla's cars, technology, and vision, and as things stand today, I will not buy one. How they can roll out brand new, very expensive car in this state, and tell the customer "take it or leave it" is strongly indicative of where the customer is placed in terms of importance to Tesla. The photo's in the reddit post are shocking.

ggm 9y ago

Anti union company finds workers need investing in.. Who knew?

dang 9y ago

Url changed from http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued-by-inexperienced-workers-after-they-laid-off-700/ http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued..., which quotes heavily from this yet links not to it.

JeremyBloom 9y ago
Hi, I'm the author of the piece in question, and, being a professional, of COURSE I linked to the CNBC article. Twice. When I introduce the CNBC material, in the first paragraph, and again when I introduced the (fully credited) blockquote. Just saying....

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

omgwtfbyobbq 9y ago

So layoffs in Fremont and Roseville are somehow causing Tesla employees at the Gigafactory to become less experienced? https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/ Yeah... OK.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Elon Musk is spread out way too thin. He should never have bought SolarCity, and he needs to relinquish SpaceX entirely. He needs to be laser-focused on getting the Model3 out of the door because his whole company depends on it. I think people are sensing a hell of a lot of weakness, and if Tesla starts running out of money, he could literally find himself and the company bankrupt, especially if banks stop lending money because it looks like a bad credit risk. This feels like the type of company that could crumble down to single digits in stock value because of some catastrophic set of financial issues.

philwelch 9y ago
I’d rather Musk give up owning a car company than give up working on the most plausible near-term route for humans to enter low earth orbit that doesn’t enrich the Putin cartel.
kitsunesoba 9y ago
He’d give up everything else before he’d give up SpaceX. Green energy, EVs, AI + autonomy, etc a priority for him, but if he had to go exclusive on anything it’d be SpaceX, no question. Even now he’s plainly stated that his primary interest in his other companies is building the kind of capital needed to run a space program without being tethered to the whims of whoever is currently in office.

pooya13 9y ago

The author argues that they are not careful enough and not taking their time to fully inspect the battery packs, while saying that they should stop taking their time and ramp up the production already! Appears to me that she would blame Tesla either way.

true_tuna 9y ago

Tl;dr I hope they upgraded the the DB backing their battery manufacturing process. I had a buddy who worked at Tesla. The first step of the battery manufacture process involves a robot taking a little cell out of the box, discharging it, charging it back up and testing to see if it shows the right voltage. Super easy quality control test. But all that needs to be written to a database. The database was hosted on a vm using a shared raid array of spinning disks. Their battery manufacturer process was literally gated by a slow ass disk drive. My buddy pointed this out. Asked that they just throw an SSD in there (we’re working on it). Followed up, asked if he could just do it himself (no). Followed up a third time asking for the authority to fix the problem (no). Finally quit in disgust because they refused to solve a simple problem so how are they going to solve hard ones?

ysleepy 9y ago
Was it limiting the testing in some way? In can't really imagine it was. Changing working things in a critical phase of the core business without reason does not seem like a good idea. I agree the setup seems bad and should be addressed, but if there are better things to do maybe do those first.
- true_tuna 9y ago
  They had to slow down the robots so they didn’t outpace the database. Slapping an SSD in a database increases write speed by 4X. They probably could have increased battery production by 15% for a total of $99. Slow database meant slow robot meant slow battery pack production meant slow car production. Replacing a working thing might be bad, but when your expert says your thing can be drastically improved with a trivial upgrade, you should do it. Especially if it’s in the critical path of production. You can’t know everything, but you can employ experts. But they can’t help you if they’re not empowered.
  - thedoops 9y ago
    Was this a bottleneck to the end product? If at some point in the process there's a different bottleneck, I'd expect it to be reasonably construed as dangerous. That being said it sounds like an ownership problem. Red tape made from past fires (not the pink slip kind ) can easily become the real problem in a complex operation like this.