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Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target
- kenjackson 8y agoIf this impacts the total time to make each car, wouldn't that impact your production volume? It seems weird that something that should make you slower is what allows you to hit your target? Unless they're saying the target doesn't take this into account -- which would just seem stupid.
- mikeash 8y agoRework can happen in parallel with production, so it won’t necessarily affect your rate.
- kadenshep 8y agoIt definitely affects labor productivity.
- ben1040 8y agoI'm wondering if what they're saying is that there was a large enough quantity of to-be-reworked assemblies from a prior week that reworking them and calling them done gave them enough "completed" vehicles to put them over the target for a later week.
- dgritsko 8y agoIt's not that it affected the time to make each car, it's that a large majority of the cars needed to have some issue addressed after they were manufactured (86% according to the article).
- michaelt 8y agoIf your production line has 10 machines that break the car windscreen, the long-term most efficient thing would be to fix those 10 machines. But that'll take time, and in the short term putting a guy at the end of the line replacing all the windscreens gets cars out the door today.
- setr 8y agoI think what it means is that they gave up on correcting the automation process in favor of just pumping out cars and fixing them up manually. The former having longer-term benefits, but stalling car production until its complete. In other words, they just threw more bodies at the problem to get it out asap
- wongarsu 8y agoI think the title "Tesla hit Model 3 target by reworking thousands of cars" should be read as "Tesla hit Model 3 target by not only producing the cars, but also reworking them in time". It's confusing, I prefer the article's headline "Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target" (the submission title is from the URL)
- gsnedders 8y agoClassic case of throughput (i.e., how many cars are completed per month) v. latency (i.e., how long it takes one car from start to end) — the targets are almost always about throughput and not latency.
- xkjkls 8y agoTesla was always accused of some chicanery when they claimed to hit a 5000/week of "factory gated" cars -- a term they had never used before. Also, last quarter, they had more than 10,000 cars "in transit" between the factory and delivery, which they didn't fully explain how much re-work might be needed on before a customer can accept delivery. It's part of a pattern of a company being misleading with its metrics.
- GuB-42 8y agoSo what? They talk about it like it is a bad thing. Their cars work, they met their target, who cares about the details of the manufacturing process? Yes, there is room for improvement, there is always room for improvement, I let the guys at Tesla deal with their priorities. It is a nice insight on how things are done at Tesla but that's about it.
- deelowe 8y agoIt's terrible from a supply chain and logistics standpoint.
- dgritsko 8y agoManufacturing rate is one measure of success. First Pass Yield (FPY - % of cars that don't require rework) is another. It seems like Tesla is sacrificing the latter in service of the former, or at least they were towards the end of Q2. I want to see Tesla succeed, but it seems like they really need to focus on increasing FPY in order to improve their long-term odds of success.
- wongarsu 8y agoWhat makes FPY an important factor seperate from manufacturing rate? (if we assume a car is manufactured once it is ready to ship) Of course it impacts your manufacturing rate, since anything not passing on first pass needs rework and possibly additional parts, making logistics more difficult etc. But all of that just influences manufacturing rate and cost per vehicle.
- dgritsko 8y ago> all of that just influences manufacturing rate and cost per vehicle. It seems like you answered your own question? These are really important for a company that's trying to make money.
- Klathmon 8y agoUnless it's found that it's cheaper and faster to crank out the cars with a poor FPY, and fix most of them up afterwards. Especially if the problems are known problems. If a specific step needs a person or 2 to fix a problem on 90% of cars, but afterwords it works 100% of the time, what's the issue? Changing that step to fix that problem might introduce other issues, or cause problems with the supply chain, or could possibly just not work. Hiring a few extra people to fix the problem that you know about in order to keep moving forward not only gives you the time to really design and think about a "proper" solution, but also keeps the money flowing in.
- titanomachy 8y ago37 minutes of rework per car doesn't sound like very much. It would be interesting to know what fraction of the total time that is.
- dgritsko 8y ago37 minutes * 4300 cars = 2,651 hours of work.
- strig 8y agoSo basically one full time employee for a year.
- anticensor 8y agoIt depends on what parts need rework. It may not be doable by one employee.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoIf it's $80K a week, isn't that more like ~50 full-time employees for a year?
- strig 8y agoOh I didn't realize it was per week. You're right.
- jakelarkin 8y ago2,651 hours/week * $30/hour = ~$80k/week. on a volume of cars that brings in $200m/week. so what? its a minor inefficiency.
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- LoSboccacc 8y ago
- wongarsu 8y ago>14% of the vehicles made didn't need rework [...] >The most common reason Model 3 cars require rework is a "failed manual task," followed by cosmetic issues Given how entirely ad-hoc their entire production line still is, and how the car doesn't seem to be designed for easy assembly at all, this is unsurprising. But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control.
- compcoffee 8y ago>But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control. Then why are so many deliveries being canceled/postponed for quality issues? Their quality control, from what I read, is horrible.
- Analemma_ 8y ago> But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control. I don't think this is true (remember, reworking only addresses the problems you can see). Last weekend I rented somebody's Model 3 on Turo to see what it was like, and while I enjoyed it, the QC problems are real. The touchscreen crashed twice, and the cupholder in the center spar doesn't close unless you push it very slowly. This is in a $60,000 car! Things like that don't inspire confidence in long-term reliability and I definitely won't be spending my own money on a Model 3 until I see some assurance that they are overhauling their QC in a big way.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago> The touchscreen crashed twice In this case, do you lose the speedometer etc while it resets? Does it reset automatically or do you have to press something? Genuinely curious. Edit: this will become the go-to excuse for speeding in the future - "I'm sorry officer, I don't know how fast I was going, the speedometer had crashed and needed to reboot".
- Shivetya 8y agoanother example was a P3D version with mismatched interior door panels. how that ever got to a customer is mind boggling. still I have a deposit on a M3 since 8/5, will take a large number of pictures when it ever arrives and hopefully by then it comes out fine
- throwawaymath 8y agoIs Insider an especially important source? Why is the title editorialized to include it?
- dang 8y agoIt wasn't; it was part of the doc title. Most publications do this. We take those bits out.
- Theodores 8y agoSeems that a lot of people think that car making begins and ends with the production line. The bit you see on TV - 'final assembly' - is not the whole car making process, it is just the coming together of the many parts that have been assembled elsewhere into bigger parts that then get put together in this 'final assembly'. Sounds as if Tesla's 'final assembly' is not that final with a little bit of work being picked up in quality control. The spin of the story is that Tesla are cheating their figures by just repairing a few extra cars to get them out the door, but there is probably a happier story than this - at least those defects were not shipped to customers. It is okay for a new company to take time to re-learn what has gone on before. I jokingly imagine Tesla to be actually catching up to 1970's British Leyland quality control 'circles' with the next step being a relearning of the 'Toyota Way'. It takes time to build a culture of quality control, efficiency and all these good things. The only thing is that soon our friends in China are going to be offering plenty of very nice electric cars to customers who just want electric rather than dinosaur power. Will Tesla be able to compete once China have enough EVs for their own market?
- Barrin92 8y ago>It is okay for a new company to take time to re-learn what has gone on before. I jokingly imagine Tesla to be actually catching up to 1970's British Leyland quality control 'circles' with the next step being a relearning of the 'Toyota Way'. This would be okay if we actually were living in the 70s right now. The problem is of course that Tesla consumes money (like basically nobody else) and the real Toyota is still around and produces as many cars on a weekend as Tesla does in an entire year. It's not like people are going to stop buying Toyota cars out of goodwill for Tesla. > who just want electric rather than dinosaur power. this too seems to be part of the reality distortion field around Tesla. All big manufacturers already produce hybrid and electric cars, and their research budgets dwarf Tesla, they will be ready in a few years as the market grows.
- trixie_ 8y agoWith this company so shorted how are we supposed to tell the difference between actual news and a hit piece?
- ralusek 8y agoRead the article and then use your noggin.
- xkjkls 8y agoI think you can normally say the opposite more often. With billions invested in the company, how can you tell the difference between actual news and a puff piece. There is way more money long Tesla than short it.
- zorkw4rg 8y agoIts one hell of a gigantic conservative industry Tesla is up against. When jeremy clarkson (top gear) did his hit piece [1] there were (probably still are) a lot of people who were completely convinced by it and who saw nothing wrong with it at all. I think its quite prudent to admit to uncertainty instead of being foolishly opinionated in either direction and wrong. But people are so full of themselves, its rather disconcerting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_(series_12)#Tesla_Roadster_review_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_(series_12)#Tesla_Roa...
- melling 8y agoTesla is almost at 6000 Model 3’s a week. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/ And I believe that they’re building almost 2,000 Model X,S cars a week. At almost 400,000 cars a year, Tesla has got to be doing better than many expected. Elon seems to be doing fine in this recent interview: https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08 https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08
- SilasX 8y ago"Impulsively calling rescuers 'pedos'" and "impulsively violating securities laws with false claims about secured funding for going private in order to screw short-sellers" are just about the opposite of "doing fine". Edit: the heck? How is that not evidence against "Elon doing fine"? Is this just "don't feed the trolls", or auto-downvotes of anything anti-Musk?
- nickik 8y agoOne slipup on twitter during an argument and and one incident where there is a question weather it is totally legal or not, lets wait for the ruling on that. Overall his companies are doing fantastic.
- xkjkls 8y agoI'm not sure having only $1.3 billion in available cash, when you've been burning $700 million a quarter, and with $10 billion in debt is ever what someone would judge a company as "doing fantastic" on.
- nickik 8y agoThose are the wrong things to focus on, and its also only about Tesla. The important thing is that they are producing 8k cars a week and that will allow them to raise money if they really need it. Specially because they have 100'000s of reservations.
- 8y ago
- bryanlarsen 8y agoThat headline could also be read as "Tesla hit Model 3 target DESPITE reworking thousands of cars". Presumably they've got technicians both doing the rework, and also technicians and engineers working on solving the underlying issues causing the rework. Once the latter is done, they'll have freed up a lot of technicians for other tasks, and making 5000 cars a week will be almost trivial in comparison.
- mcguire 8y agoWhich is good since other manufacturers are making 200,000 or so.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danhak 8y agoIt's almost as if scaling an operation > 100% YOY poses different challenges than continuing to run a stable and mature enterprise.
- MBCook 8y agoExcept they set this goal for themselves. And they couldn’t don’t without an 85% defect rate. That doesn’t look good.
- jonathankoren 8y agoTesla is 15 years old, and operates out the NUMMI plant, that that was building 428,633 cars a year.[0] Auto manufacturers changes models, every year. They either tweak them, completely redesign them, or launch new models. Ford even changed the entire frame and welding setup when they transitioned from steel to aluminum for the F150. None of them has these problems. I'm sorry, but Tesla's growing pains should be over. And if they shouldn't be over, when should they? Does it take 20 years to figure out how to mass produce an item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now? At some point, you've got a man that has no previous experience running a manufacturing plant, repeating the same mistakes the industry made 40 years ago. Including most damningly trying to automate final assembly[1], because he thinks he's being clever. Let's be honest here. Building a car with zero defects is possible. It's done every day at scale, at every Toyota plant in the world. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI [1] https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in-the-foot-by-trying-to-hyper-automate-its-factory/ https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in-the-...
- RayVR 8y agoNot sure why this would be flagged. Seems like an article of general interest.
- MBCook 8y agoI’d imagine the large contingent of hyper-pro-Tesla people who argue virulently against an any thing that makes Tesla/Elon look bad. He’s turned into an almost political topic in that way, unfortunately.
- reustle 8y agoI sit in neither camp but I see almost as many anti-Tesla commenters, too
- Animats 8y agoWhy was this flagged? This has been a big issue in auto manufacturing for decades. At one time, the Detroit automakers ran "dealer preparation centers" to finish what the production line hadn't done. Toyota's big innovation was figuring out how to get it right the first time, which got costs down and quality up. In a Toyota plant, if you have to stop the line for 10 seconds to get it right, a worker can do that. Videos of Toyota plants show a cycle time display and a vehicles per hour display over the line. It's expected that a car will take an extra few seconds every once in a while.
- reaperducer 8y agoAt one time, the Detroit automakers ran "dealer preparation centers" to finish what the production line hadn't done. Is that the "dealer prep" line that always seems to appear as a non-optional line item in the price of a new car?
- rootusrootus 8y agoThese days dealer prep mostly involves taking off the plastic paint protection film, removing any other hardware that protects the car during shipping (suspension blocks, door bump pads, etc), checking functionality of major components, verifying fluid levels, etc, and finally detailing the car (well, washing and vacuuming at least). You can actually find the dealer prep checklist for a lot of cars with Google, for example GM has theirs freely published on their public web site.
- lostlogin 8y agoThat’s the dealers dealer prep. The dealer prep the op refers to is an area where they fix all the stuff done wrong in the production line.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI can't speak for all manufacturers and/or dealers, but it is almost certainly the same people, or at least the same process. During dealer prep they will definitely fix anything broken, or damage to the car that made it past the factory inspector or happened during transit. And they will install certain options that you can buy but are not done at the factory, including installing parts that are prone to being damaged during transport (for example, the spoiler on my GM car is not optional, supplied by the factory, and has to be installed by the dealer body shop after the car arrives).
- hevi_jos 8y agoThis is great. Mr Musk is a perfectionist, like Japanese are. He is not selling bad finished cars(like other companies will do). They are also using lots of automation. This means there are lots of problems at first. With automation, once you solve a problem, it is solved forever. How you could compare Tesla rework with other companies rework, where the threshold that determines if a car needs reworking is decided by the executives of the same companies? I could make rework zero just selling broken cars. I bought a European car with a problem in one valve of the engine when it was brand new. I told the dealers about the strange sound, they told me it was normal. It was not and gave me lots of headaches later.
- gamblor956 8y agoMost other companies would fire a factory manager if even a fraction of the cars produced at the factory required rework of any kind, let alone the majority of the cars requiring 37 minutes of rework. Take your Eurocar example, and then multiply that by multiple systems. And then apply that to almost every purchaser of the vehicle. And now you understand Tesla's problem. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Musk's "perfectionism" is interfering with the actual production and quality control of the vehicles and resulting in vehicles that are very far from perfect....when they easily could be, if he were to let the professionals run the company.
- sytelus 8y agoThe article hasn't described the root cause but Musk had hinted at it in one of the interviews. I think what happened was that when gigafactory started, they had this huge vision of complete end-to-end automated assembly. So there were robots designed for each portions of assembly, including some robots which were supposed to operate in inperfect situations through vision data, for example, locating a dangling hose, grasping it and connecting it within a car. The big learning was that robotic functions that operated in uncertain environment, relied on vision and tried to perform manipulation tasks failed big time to do the job consistently. Musk mentioned that human would pick up a gangling hose and connect to its expected position effortlessly in a second while a robot will fumble around and dig in to car even damaging it. In past few months, I think they have put a lot many more humans at work turning in to more traditional way of assembly, although more automated than other car manufacturers.
- chmike 8y agoI can't stop myself thinking that this looks like short seller's propaganda. Producing a new car require adjustments in the process. This info tells me the feedback loop is in full swing to enhance production quality. I fully understand why Elon Musk wants to make Tesla a private company again. Short seller's activity is toxic for the US industry. Allowing to make profit on other peoples failure is a good recipe to pull down an economy. Good luck with that.
- slivym 8y agoI think you're being a bit too sensitive. I agree with you - building a whole new production line, and Tesla's share holders understand that too. This is just more information for those shareholders. It's important that there's accurate information about Tesla's manufacturing process for the market to correctly value the stock. It's no more objectionable for short sellers to emphasise bad news to drive the stock down than it is for Tesla to emphasise good news to drive it up.
- chmike 8y agoIdeally, information should be objective. The efforts and pressures should go toward this goal. What you say, if I understood correctly, is that it is normal to have disinformation news and that they will cancel themselves out. Unfortunately, information doesn't add up like numbers.
- threeseed 8y agoAnd you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Negative news comes about companies every single day and I never hear people go on about it being caused by short sellers.
- chmike 8y agoMy point is that it is not negative news. It is presented as a negative and dramatic news.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]