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> 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 t

> 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 ago
Unless 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.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Its not cheaper, and it won't result in better quality. Any time rework is done outside of the normal process it is a big deal. There are whole organizations meant to make sure things like that happen as little as possible.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    It seems significantly cheaper than stopping production to fix the initial problem, test it, ensure it doesn't cause any other problems, ensure it doesn't upset the supply chain, ensure it is reliable, and more.
    - Skunkleton 8y ago
      Yeah, it is cheaper than stopping the world. It is much more expensive than not making the mistake in the first place. So much so that I would guess that Tesla is losing money on each car that they had to rework. And remember, Tesla had so many production issues that they _did_ have to stop the world and move into a tent of all places.
      - Klathmon 8y ago
        You think Tesla is losing money because of 37 minutes per car that needs rework? Roughly $15 per car of labor? Not making the mistake in the first place isn't possible at this point... Your options here are "stop everything and fix it at the source, burning piles of cash every second it's down" or "hire some workers to spend 37 minutes per car to fix these known issue while you work on solving them at the root". And going with option 1 seems like a fast track to bankruptcy.
        joshuamorton 8y ago
        Do you know how long it takes to build an entire vehicle? If its 60 hours, then 37 minutes probably isn't breaking, but if its 8 hours, then that 37 minutes is 7.5% of a vehicle's construction time. If Tesla is wasting 7.5% of its time fixing defects, its running at at least 7.5% less than peak efficiency, and if margins are less than 7.5%, that does indeed mean that the vehicles are being produced at a loss.
        Klathmon 8y ago
        I'm sorry but that math makes no sense at all... It's a matter of throughput vs latency. Who cares if it takes an extra 37 minutes per car, if they can maintain the same throughput, it won't matter a single bit (except possibly someone having to wait an extra 37 minutes to get their car...) The extra time spent on manufacturing has as much to do with margins as the delivery truck getting stuck in traffic does. As long as it's not holding anything up, then there isn't an issue. And it sounds to me like this is a temporary solutions while they fix the root cause, which seems like a really goddamn good idea vs just shutting the whole operation down and giving up.
        Retric 8y ago
        Exactly, it's a question of capital costs vs burn. If you need say 100 million in hardware and 1,000$ in manpower to build a car then spending an extra 100$ in manpower is cheap even * (5,000 * 0.14) = 70k per week. Meanwhile you might be paying 70k per hour the line's stopped. Granted, you don't want to wait a full year to fix a production issue, but you can batch things so you are fixing several parts of the line at the same time. And if one of those batched fixes was not 100% correct but is re-workable then you can wait another few weeks for the next batch of fixes. Conversely, if you where producing 50,000 cars per week then rework costs go up and shutting things down quickly to make a minor fix is more viable.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Having poor FPY means difficulty scaling, which is indeed one of Tesla's problems--their production scales not-quite-linearly with the number of bodies they throw at the problem.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    It depends on the difficulty of the "fix". half an hour per car doesn't seem that bad, and while they will clearly try to fix that (and I'm not trying to imply they shouldn't), I don't think the fact that they are continuing to pump out cars with a "flawed" system (while presumably working on solving the problem internally) is any indication that they are unable to scale forever.

> 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 ago

Unless 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.

Skunkleton 8y ago
Its not cheaper, and it won't result in better quality. Any time rework is done outside of the normal process it is a big deal. There are whole organizations meant to make sure things like that happen as little as possible.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  It seems significantly cheaper than stopping production to fix the initial problem, test it, ensure it doesn't cause any other problems, ensure it doesn't upset the supply chain, ensure it is reliable, and more.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    Yeah, it is cheaper than stopping the world. It is much more expensive than not making the mistake in the first place. So much so that I would guess that Tesla is losing money on each car that they had to rework. And remember, Tesla had so many production issues that they _did_ have to stop the world and move into a tent of all places.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      You think Tesla is losing money because of 37 minutes per car that needs rework? Roughly $15 per car of labor? Not making the mistake in the first place isn't possible at this point... Your options here are "stop everything and fix it at the source, burning piles of cash every second it's down" or "hire some workers to spend 37 minutes per car to fix these known issue while you work on solving them at the root". And going with option 1 seems like a fast track to bankruptcy.
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        Do you know how long it takes to build an entire vehicle? If its 60 hours, then 37 minutes probably isn't breaking, but if its 8 hours, then that 37 minutes is 7.5% of a vehicle's construction time. If Tesla is wasting 7.5% of its time fixing defects, its running at at least 7.5% less than peak efficiency, and if margins are less than 7.5%, that does indeed mean that the vehicles are being produced at a loss.
        Klathmon 8y ago
        I'm sorry but that math makes no sense at all... It's a matter of throughput vs latency. Who cares if it takes an extra 37 minutes per car, if they can maintain the same throughput, it won't matter a single bit (except possibly someone having to wait an extra 37 minutes to get their car...) The extra time spent on manufacturing has as much to do with margins as the delivery truck getting stuck in traffic does. As long as it's not holding anything up, then there isn't an issue. And it sounds to me like this is a temporary solutions while they fix the root cause, which seems like a really goddamn good idea vs just shutting the whole operation down and giving up.
        Retric 8y ago
        Exactly, it's a question of capital costs vs burn. If you need say 100 million in hardware and 1,000$ in manpower to build a car then spending an extra 100$ in manpower is cheap even * (5,000 * 0.14) = 70k per week. Meanwhile you might be paying 70k per hour the line's stopped. Granted, you don't want to wait a full year to fix a production issue, but you can batch things so you are fixing several parts of the line at the same time. And if one of those batched fixes was not 100% correct but is re-workable then you can wait another few weeks for the next batch of fixes. Conversely, if you where producing 50,000 cars per week then rework costs go up and shutting things down quickly to make a minor fix is more viable.
gamblor956 8y ago
Having poor FPY means difficulty scaling, which is indeed one of Tesla's problems--their production scales not-quite-linearly with the number of bodies they throw at the problem.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  It depends on the difficulty of the "fix". half an hour per car doesn't seem that bad, and while they will clearly try to fix that (and I'm not trying to imply they shouldn't), I don't think the fact that they are continuing to pump out cars with a "flawed" system (while presumably working on solving the problem internally) is any indication that they are unable to scale forever.