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Is the intellectual asymmetry between creating a design and analyzing it so large that a small teardown team can reliably analyze trade-offs in a design created
by tlb 9y ago
Is the intellectual asymmetry between creating a design and analyzing it so large that a small teardown team can reliably analyze trade-offs in a design created by a large engineering group?
For example, when they say "this flange is larger than necessary", how can they know all the possible reasons it might be necessary? Perhaps it adds stiffness or crash energy absorption, or is used to grasp the part during assembly, or avoids a resonant frequency.
- solarkraft 9y agoMunro claims to have a lot of engineering an tear down experience. I guess that's what they sell. That said I don't expect them to be 100% correct on all the trade-offs.
- rando444 9y agoIt seems as they can't reliably analyze the decisions. >highlighting areas where Tesla needlessly added weight with things like excess metal flanges and overlapping layers of steel. "This adds weight without value," he said. it feels rather presumptuous to assume that the added value isn't safety.. which isn't something you can assess in a teardown. In the next paragraph: "He was also puzzled by Tesla's unconventional use of multiple welding techniques in close proximity to one another. "I don't get it," he said. "There's a lot of technology [used] here, but what we don't understand is why they used the technology they did." Not understanding something != bad
- falsedan 9y agoFor a lay person, sure. But these are experts at automotive engineering. Imagine if you were reviewing a new developer's code, and you were puzzled by a particularly non-idiomatic implementation where you can't see the reasons for avoiding the idiomatic version. Are you going to think that maybe this is some technique you're unfamiliar with, or that the person who'se still quite new to developing might not be aware of the idiomatic verions?
- rando444 9y agoI get where you're coming from, but Tesla engineers have seen those flanges and that extra steel in crash tests where these engineers have not. Your example would be more akin to assessing someone's code and pointing out potential flaws without ever executing it.
- sangnoir 9y ago> Your example would be more akin to assessing someone's code and pointing out potential flaws without ever executing it. You've just described a code review, which is standard practice and not controversial. If an expert doesn't understand your code, maybe the criticism is informed by their experience.
- andrewflnr 9y agoOn the other hand: "take note that I have only proven this code correct, not tested it." Code review is performed in the understanding that its results are basically heuristic. Everyone knows that actual behavior trumps anything you get from just looking at something.
- derekp7 9y agoSo a good example of this in code would be: a = a xor b; b = a xor b; a = a xor b; In this case it is a technique for swapping two variables without using a third variable. But it really serves no efficiency purpose in most applications (however it is fun to use).
- mygo 9y ago> Is the intellectual asymmetry between creating a design and analyzing it so large that a small teardown team can reliably analyze trade-offs in a design created by a large engineering group? Is it easier to verify a solution to a problem than it is to produce it? million dollar question.
- me_again 9y agoVerifying a solution is harder than producing one. Identifying a flaw in a solution is easier than either.
- kreetx 9y agoNot sure what you are referring to -- at least in the P/NP problem complexity classification verifying the solution is easy, coming up is P/NP-hard, i.e hard.
- ben_jones 9y agoI think that really depends on the problem space. If I had to hire a sales team to increase revenue, then I hire them and check the revenue numbers (with basic accounting for other secondary variables), its pretty straight forward to validate.
- mygo 9y agoSo if I gave you a flawless solution to a sudoku problem, would you tell me that it was harder for you to verify it than it was for the solution to be produced?
- twodave 9y agoI had to do exactly this in a practical coding interview. Fun was had.
- jannotti 9y agoQuite literally! http://theconversation.com/millennium-prize-p-vs-np-4246 http://theconversation.com/millennium-prize-p-vs-np-4246
- Nelson69 9y agoThey've been in the business, probably are experts at cost reduction engineering. Their business is selling this information to other auto companies so they must be right enough that they can get paid for it. There are potential reasons why the mentioned flange might be oversized, I'm having a hard time imagining how they tested frequency resonance and decided to just fix it by leaving a little extra material near where the welds go though. Or likewise deciding that the extra material in the weld zone increases safety by some margin. Those possibilities seem like they'd require and extremely nuanced and subtle understanding of the car and the whole process, It's possible, I guess. What's far more likely is that they just haven't done a round of cost reduction as they're just struggling to get the initial manufacturing done for the pre-orders.
- rando444 9y agoOr what's more likely is that Tesla didn't decide to make giant flanges because they're idiots, and they're not going to outright tell M&A what the reasoning is, because this is exactly the information they want to be able to sell to other auto manufacturers.
- Xunxi 9y agoMunro and Associates was an engineering consultancy known for reverse-engineering not just automobiles, but everything from airplanes to household items like rice cookers, to learn how they work. A previous tear-down was a lot harsher https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-3-teardown-by-engineering-firm-reveals-qual-1822678045 https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-3-teardown-by-engineering-f...
- justin66 9y agoBelieve it or not, that's referring to the same teardown as this article. It is a multi-month process.
- egypturnash 9y agoMonroe & Associates has been tearing down cars and other things as their sole business for quite a while. https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars-apart-to-find-o-1787205420 https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars... is a pretty good overview of their business and the insane depths of knowledge that their engineers have. They’ve accumulated a ton of knowledge about How To Cars. Of course it is possible that Tesla is making a bunch of design decisions that M&A thinks are weird because they are optimizing for very different things than most other carmakers; it would be pretty interesting to be a fly on the wall in a discussion between Tesla’s engineers and M&A’s.
- TrainedMonkey 9y agoThe only reason Tesla is making bad decisions is because of schedule, everything else stems from that. That said I am pretty positive on Tesla because even thought they release half baked products they still improve and innovate at a breakneck pace. Turns out shit happens when you have a charismatic leader attracting a bunch brilliant and driven people and telling them to go change the world.
- ams6110 9y agoWould you be happy that your $70K car was "half baked" so that Tesla could improve more rapidly?
- TrainedMonkey 9y agoI would not, which is why I do not have a model 3. People who have Teslas right now are early adopters. A question back: would you be happy if Tesla did not kick-start electric car ramp up?
- ams6110 9y agoI don't own one; don't plan to buy one. So I'm indifferent.
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- swypych 9y agoagree, and would like to add that businesses can either spend time on figuring out the most efficient flange design or spend that time on improving a feature that will bring higher customer value. I would suspect most people are not buying cars because the flange is not the perfect size, or that there are overlapping panels. Take any gen 1 product apart from an innovative company, I am sure you will find skeletons.
- bdcravens 9y agoSo long as customers buying those gen 1 products know what they are buying. No company will transparently disclose their skeletons, so I'm glad we have reviewers that do.
- thisisit 9y ago> Is the intellectual asymmetry between creating a design and analyzing it so large that a small teardown team can reliably analyze trade-offs in a design created by a large engineering group? I don't understand this. So you are saying the reviewer's small team doesn't understand the expertise which might have gone in the car. But isn't that true for every product review and article out there? Take for example a phone. If a reviewer doubts the CPU benchmark on a phone, are we going to talk about how a single reviewer cannot understand the trade-off a bigger team at Apple/Samsung/Google has put? Or if a journalist talking about FB's decision on data sharing has the capacity to know the trade-offs made by a much larger technical and business group at FB. We can only look at the past work. If HN is voting this up then we know these guys have done some good work in the past. Unless of course we think everyone who doubts Tesla's expertise doesn't understand their genius.
- jaggederest 9y agoMunro and Associates is the firm that does this kind of analysis in the automotive industry. It's really fascinating. For the record, it would be hard to produce a design that Munro couldn't find something to talk about, good or bad. They employ extremely gifted engineers with a ridiculously large amount of experience at doing this exact task. As a software engineer, I wish there were an equivalent firm in the industry that did teardowns like this so that we could, as an industry, improve over time the way that the automotive industry does. I feel like it may be one of the factors holding software engineering back from achieving true professional engineering standardization.
- decacorn1 9y agoNo they are not. Car companies do not go to Munro, period. There are far more reputable sources, speaking from someone in the industry. Munro is just trying to get free advertising with this sh*t.
- luckydata 9y agoThat's interesting. Which sources are in your view more reputable? Where do you work? One of the big three or a Japanese carmaker?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoWouldn’t those larger flanges provide stiffness for a car that is much heavier, and can deliver to the wheels a boat load more torque, than similar sized ICE powdered cars. And yeah, an electric motor is going to have vastly different vibration characteristics than an ICE.