16 ms·

Tesla employees say they took shortcuts, worked through harsh conditions

138 points by sorenjan 7y ago

michaereyess 7y ago
That's the price you gotta make when you want to sell cheap cars
mu_killnine 7y ago
As someone who works in manufacturing, I can't count the number of times I've been told to "just make it work". And, in reality, sometimes that truly is the best option in the immediate term to get a system working so you can make enhancements later. But I think that's the operative phrase: so you can enhance later. The challenge is that once the immediate fire is out, it's easy to simply leave things in a half-baked state. That accumulates as technical debt. Thankfully, most of the instances where I have had to deal with this has been purely software and not affected the lives and comfort of operators on the floor like with Tesla. But I can see how this happens. Even if the 'tent' becomes a permanent installation, I hope they spend the time and money to improve it to the necessary working standards that employees deserve.
- majjam 7y ago
  Normalization of deviance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770562
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >And, in reality, sometimes that truly is the best option in the immediate term to get a system working so you can make enhancements later. well that depends on the industry. Toy manufacturer probably, aeorospace engineer, not so much. I would think of cars without drivers of belonging into the second category.
  - just_myles 7y ago
    Me too. Given the importance of the part and what would happen should it go out during operation do to cutting corners.
- m463 7y ago
  I wonder what is an acceptable "make it work"? I had an old GM car and looked at it on a lift once and... "hey, what are those?" shims. It had lots of shims from the factory to make the body straight. I suspect there are lots of these "fixers" in many products that will work unnoticed, but people might not want to know they exist.
close04 7y ago
> In fact, we have a large number of employees who request to work on GA4 based on what they hear from colleagues and what they have seen first-hand Wonder if the Tesla spokesman has a desk there. Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work. Equal maybe but certainly not better than a factory building that was not put up in a hurry to meet demands. In any manufacturing job the "get it done" mantra is pretty much guaranteed to rear its head from time to time. Issuing such a strong blanket rejection for every single point really undermines the rejection.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work. It's in Fremont California where the weather averages 49-69F with extremes being 42F and 79F. It's outside so constantly moving fresh air, and it's covered so no sun beating down. The ends of the tent appear to be open letting natural light in and allowing you to look out at the sky. Contrast that to a typical factory that's a climate controlled coffin. I have no experience working in a factory setting but it seems like it's the difference between running outside vs indoor on a treadmill.
  - fasicle 7y ago
    I worked in a factory for a couple of weeks putting radiators on Defenders [0]. The work was extremely boring (30 second task repeated 8 hours a day) but temperature / conditions were never an issue. Workers were looked after seemingly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      I guess my point is that the climate of the region is such that I don't see it being an issue to be "outside" and that it might be more pleasant than an actual factory, then again I'm ignorant to the dress code or actual temperature of a typical automotive factory.
mbrumlow 7y ago
> pressured to take shortcuts I work in software, and this happens all the time and it is not the end of the world. It normally means doing even more work later, or shipping without all the features. Its done by not coding in most cases. But this is a car. What sort of shortcut could you make when assembling parts to a car that has already had every part planed out? Edit: never-mind, I skipped a entire paragraph somehow. Tape, it is tape guys.
- wil421 7y ago
  It seems like another shortcut they took was over automation. Looks like some areas are better off with a human. Can robots apply tape?
  - api 7y ago
    The general contention among all the manufacturing people I've talked to or read is that Tesla went way too crazy with automation and wasted a lot of money. They vastly overestimated the capabilities of current manufacturing automation tech at scale.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  That's fantastic. I just love what happens to electrical tape in hot cars. I can't wait to reach up into there to try to fix something a few years from now.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  What concerns me is that shortcuts in industrial manufacturing processes are often directly detrimental or even fatal to workers. Heavy industry uses toxic chemicals and large, powerful machinery; cutting corners around those things is actively dangerous. Using some electrical tape in places where you'd otherwise use shrink tubing is not a big deal. But like you said, trying to cut corners on a finished hardware design sounds orders of magnitude harder than doing so on software, and I worry about what else workers are being forced to do to cover for management's failures. [edit] added word "else" for clarity
  - 7y ago
taf2 7y ago
Keep in mind this is from cnbc - they consistently push an anti-tesla position https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/28/40-tesla-headlines-on-cnbc-in-2-days-31-negative-2-positive/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/28/40-tesla-headlines-on-c... https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9b71x0/40_tesla_headlines_on_cnbc_in_2_days_31_negative/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9b71x0/40_tesl... And for more insight google “why does cnbc hate tesla”
- bagacrap 7y ago
  It seems very Musk-y to paint Tesla as a victim like this. It's entirely possible that CNBC critiques all [tech] companies equally, or that Tesla actually deserves this scrutiny. Personally I feel like I see a lot more negative than positive mentions across all media. Given the way Musk handles bad press, deflects blame and plays fast and loose with safety, I tend to think it's deserved. Nice battery technology isn't enough to excuse their countless missteps.
- adrr 7y ago
  Can we get away from the logical fallacies here? If you have a problem with the facts in the article list them instead of attacking the author/publisher.
  - loceng 7y ago
    I think it's valuable to know if a source is generally biased in one direction or another, whether there's accuracy in comparison to other major media sources - who knows, we unfortunately don't have a system that makes that easy and obvious, yet.
  - jerf 7y ago
    I think people overestimate the fallaciousness of examining the motivations of the speaker. It only applies to the factual and logical matters; the fact that CNBC may or may not hate Tesla or Elon Musk does not affect whether or not tape was used to correct cracks in parts or whether or not people were asked to work in low-quality conditions on pain of firing, or any strictly logical conclusions you may draw from those facts. Those purported facts may be true or false, but whether someone at CNBC has it out for Elon is not a relevant consideration in whether those facts are true or false. However, it is entirely relevant in determining whether or not the slant of the piece is necessarily factual or whether it has bias, and in determining the probability that the speaker may have left out information unfavorable to the cause they are advancing. It is a logical fallacy, but it is only a logical fallacy. It is completely relevant in arenas other than pure, strict logic, such as meta-logical analyses about potential biases. (There's a few other "fallacies" for which this is true too; many of them like affirming the consequent are just straight-up errors, but "appeal to authority", for instance, is a fallacy in Aristotelian binary true/false logic, but in a more realistic probabilistic logic, it can be valid to use it to update your probabilistic beliefs about the world. You just are not logically justified in taking an authority and setting your belief in their statements to a true, mathematical 100.0000...% (which is what the fallacy would be in Aristotelian logic), and you are obligated to make judgments about the quality of the authority as you make the updates.)
vxxzy 7y ago
musk slept on the floor of the factory... Safety issues with giant pieces of metal going down the road aside (though it is paramount!), at least the leader struggled with his underlings.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  I'd be very surprised if he slept on the factory floor more than once. For a guy who "works" 100 hours a week he does post a lot on Twitter.
- entropea 7y ago
  There are people sleeping on the streets blocks away from his factories. Sleeping on the floor of his hundred million dollar factories is not proof of anything.
  - sabertoothed 7y ago
    How does the price of the factory matter? It does not make the floor (couch or whatever he slept on) any more comfortable.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  Well, even as he did that he was saying to the press, "Nothing unusual, everything is completely as normal."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
DanCarvajal 7y ago
Real car companies don't make cars in tents.
- willio58 7y ago
  Hmm. Didn’t some _real_ car companies need bail-outs from the US government?
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    That has nothing to do with the parent comment, which was about manufacturing processes and planning. The bailouts were the result of overproduction and high labor costs in an unexpectedly shrinking market.
    - greenhatman 7y ago
      Parent comment doesn't have much to do with anything. Who decides what a 'real' car company does?
  - DanCarvajal 7y ago
    You mean like how every U.S. Tesla ever sold has been heavily subsidized with tax rebates? And how they actually got a U.S. Government loan? And how they got further tax credits from Nevada for building the Gigafactory there?
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      As opposed to oil subsidies that are reported at $4 billion annually with estimates that they're actually somewhere between $10 and $40 billion? The tax rebates amount to ~$4 billion subsidy for a BEV manufacturer. Maybe we should just eliminate subsidies on both and see what happens.
      - DanCarvajal 7y ago
        "Maybe we should just eliminate subsidies on both and see what happens." I am completely in favor of that proposal.
htkibar 7y ago
Tesla has shown time and time again that they care for their customers, giving free services and even upgrades. This is just another CNBC attack on TSLA for whatever reason.
- shareIdeas 7y ago
  I got a bad feeling, if something is free, it's because it was unsafe.
  - Whatarethese 7y ago
    That's irrational.
RocketSyntax 7y ago
This article should read: "CNBC reporter eggs on engineers and then betrays their trust by running their mouth to the world about it."
- entropea 7y ago
  What you're describing kind of sounds like journalism to me.
Lazare 7y ago
What I find interesting is how vigorously Tesla denies everything, always, even when they're clearly wrong. They lose a lot of credibility that way; I wonder if Musk[1] realises that if he admitted the things Tesla is obviously doing wrong, he might have a hope of convincing people about the ones they're not obviously doing wrong? And it's especially odd because so much of the article is just a bunch of nothing, but Tesla makes it newsworthy by denying everything. And 50 cents says Musk has a team analysing the photos right now to try and track down the employees who took them. ...to ensure they're fired and/or sued, of course; obviously Tesla would never see people who had identified problems as a potentially valuable resource. There's a lot more interesting details if you dig into it, but wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the Toyota Production System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System). An interesting contrast, perhaps. [1]: I mean, we all know who's behind this PR strategy, right?
- SEJeff 7y ago
  I'm not defending Musk at all, but if those pictures were leaked from a Tesla employee, they're in breach of their NDA, a legally binding contract. Why wouldn't they go after someone breaching their NDA? I get that there are whistleblower protections and whatnot, but that is for lawyers and judges to decide. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a team analysing those photos.
  - angstrom 7y ago
    It's also worth remembering that innovations in manufacturing are quite often 'short cuts' that have the same or better result with less process.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      Agreed. I do wonder why people are downvoting me for pointing out the truth though. Breach of a legally binding contract is grounds for a civil lawsuit. This is how the country works!
      - 7y ago
simion314 7y ago
>Tesla is able to build the safest and best-performing cars Am I out of date with the news? Are Tesla the safest cars? I am not a car enthusiast so I recall that Volvo has most safety features, did things change or is Tesla PR so deluded, at least I would use something like "one of the safest cars", provide some modesty,
- Whatarethese 7y ago
  Tesla's are inherently very safe because they have such a large frontal crumple zone with no engine and the floor is a solid battery which helps with side collisions. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/04/watch-how-tesla-model-3-earned-its-5-star-safety-rating-from-euro-ncap/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/04/watch-how-tesla-model-3-ea...
  - simion314 7y ago
    Are the safest though? I know that there are ICE cars witht eh engine at the back, and there are cars that are very safe in crash tests. So your answer is not responding at my questions, I know there are probably cars that are for sure less safe then Tesla
    - F_r_k 7y ago
      Go to the ncap website and find out, then... That is if you're really interested by it
- perishabledave 7y ago
  https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings You can check the safety ratings by the NTHSA.
  - simion314 7y ago
    The link does not contain rankings, but I did some searching, on the European system in fact Tesla is one of the safes ts car. the "safest car" thing appears if you Google related with the american system in a lot of EV related articles around 2911, I can't find anything more recent and more impartial on the first google page.
williesleg 7y ago
Not like Ford, vw, gm, etc, they're all good.
infecto 7y ago
Genuine question that is unrelated to this but has always bothered me about Tesla. Why does his brother, Kimbal, draw a $6million/year total comp for sitting on the board. He has zero relevant experience related to manufacturing and that salary is very high compared to the rest of the industry....this always bothered me about TSLA.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gkfasdfasdf 7y ago
Wow, my Model 3 has been serviced for both the issues mentioned in the article: a loose connection in the 12v subsystem (which completely locked me out of the car and required a tow!) and moisture in one of my tail lights. I hope they are able to work these issues out.
usbseeker 7y ago
I doubt these vehicles made it onto the road with the half fixes, they most likely just used the tape to allow the vehicle to move down the line then when the parts were available replaced them before customer delivery. This is probably not apparent and not explained to the untrustworthly assembly line worker.
magwa101 7y ago
Yeah, what are their shares worth? They're taking on huge incumbents, be realistic, they must take risks or disappear.
WhyKill 7y ago
Hey, lets ignore Toyota Production System (which was invented by a startup, Toyoda Automatic Loom) and then perfected on building cars with small amounts of resources and minimal failure. It's pretty clear they don't use TPS at Tesla, which will be their downfall...

138 points by sorenjan 7y ago

That's the price you gotta make when you want to sell cheap cars

As someone who works in manufacturing, I can't count the number of times I've been told to "just make it work". And, in reality, sometimes that truly is the best option in the immediate term to get a system working so you can make enhancements later. But I think that's the operative phrase: so you can enhance later. The challenge is that once the immediate fire is out, it's easy to simply leave things in a half-baked state. That accumulates as technical debt. Thankfully, most of the instances where I have had to deal with this has been purely software and not affected the lives and comfort of operators on the floor like with Tesla. But I can see how this happens. Even if the 'tent' becomes a permanent installation, I hope they spend the time and money to improve it to the necessary working standards that employees deserve.

majjam 7y ago
Normalization of deviance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770562
Barrin92 7y ago
>And, in reality, sometimes that truly is the best option in the immediate term to get a system working so you can make enhancements later. well that depends on the industry. Toy manufacturer probably, aeorospace engineer, not so much. I would think of cars without drivers of belonging into the second category.
- just_myles 7y ago
  Me too. Given the importance of the part and what would happen should it go out during operation do to cutting corners.
m463 7y ago
I wonder what is an acceptable "make it work"? I had an old GM car and looked at it on a lift once and... "hey, what are those?" shims. It had lots of shims from the factory to make the body straight. I suspect there are lots of these "fixers" in many products that will work unnoticed, but people might not want to know they exist.

close04 7y ago

> In fact, we have a large number of employees who request to work on GA4 based on what they hear from colleagues and what they have seen first-hand Wonder if the Tesla spokesman has a desk there. Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work. Equal maybe but certainly not better than a factory building that was not put up in a hurry to meet demands. In any manufacturing job the "get it done" mantra is pretty much guaranteed to rear its head from time to time. Issuing such a strong blanket rejection for every single point really undermines the rejection.

cptskippy 7y ago
> Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work. It's in Fremont California where the weather averages 49-69F with extremes being 42F and 79F. It's outside so constantly moving fresh air, and it's covered so no sun beating down. The ends of the tent appear to be open letting natural light in and allowing you to look out at the sky. Contrast that to a typical factory that's a climate controlled coffin. I have no experience working in a factory setting but it seems like it's the difference between running outside vs indoor on a treadmill.
- fasicle 7y ago
  I worked in a factory for a couple of weeks putting radiators on Defenders [0]. The work was extremely boring (30 second task repeated 8 hours a day) but temperature / conditions were never an issue. Workers were looked after seemingly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    I guess my point is that the climate of the region is such that I don't see it being an issue to be "outside" and that it might be more pleasant than an actual factory, then again I'm ignorant to the dress code or actual temperature of a typical automotive factory.

mbrumlow 7y ago

> pressured to take shortcuts I work in software, and this happens all the time and it is not the end of the world. It normally means doing even more work later, or shipping without all the features. Its done by not coding in most cases. But this is a car. What sort of shortcut could you make when assembling parts to a car that has already had every part planed out? Edit: never-mind, I skipped a entire paragraph somehow. Tape, it is tape guys.

wil421 7y ago
It seems like another shortcut they took was over automation. Looks like some areas are better off with a human. Can robots apply tape?
- api 7y ago
  The general contention among all the manufacturing people I've talked to or read is that Tesla went way too crazy with automation and wasted a lot of money. They vastly overestimated the capabilities of current manufacturing automation tech at scale.
noonespecial 7y ago
That's fantastic. I just love what happens to electrical tape in hot cars. I can't wait to reach up into there to try to fix something a few years from now.
stefco_ 7y ago
What concerns me is that shortcuts in industrial manufacturing processes are often directly detrimental or even fatal to workers. Heavy industry uses toxic chemicals and large, powerful machinery; cutting corners around those things is actively dangerous. Using some electrical tape in places where you'd otherwise use shrink tubing is not a big deal. But like you said, trying to cut corners on a finished hardware design sounds orders of magnitude harder than doing so on software, and I worry about what else workers are being forced to do to cover for management's failures. [edit] added word "else" for clarity
- 7y ago

taf2 7y ago

Keep in mind this is from cnbc - they consistently push an anti-tesla position https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/28/40-tesla-headlines-on-cnbc-in-2-days-31-negative-2-positive/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/28/40-tesla-headlines-on-c... https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9b71x0/40_tesla_headlines_on_cnbc_in_2_days_31_negative/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9b71x0/40_tesl... And for more insight google “why does cnbc hate tesla”

bagacrap 7y ago
It seems very Musk-y to paint Tesla as a victim like this. It's entirely possible that CNBC critiques all [tech] companies equally, or that Tesla actually deserves this scrutiny. Personally I feel like I see a lot more negative than positive mentions across all media. Given the way Musk handles bad press, deflects blame and plays fast and loose with safety, I tend to think it's deserved. Nice battery technology isn't enough to excuse their countless missteps.
adrr 7y ago
Can we get away from the logical fallacies here? If you have a problem with the facts in the article list them instead of attacking the author/publisher.
- loceng 7y ago
  I think it's valuable to know if a source is generally biased in one direction or another, whether there's accuracy in comparison to other major media sources - who knows, we unfortunately don't have a system that makes that easy and obvious, yet.
- jerf 7y ago
  I think people overestimate the fallaciousness of examining the motivations of the speaker. It only applies to the factual and logical matters; the fact that CNBC may or may not hate Tesla or Elon Musk does not affect whether or not tape was used to correct cracks in parts or whether or not people were asked to work in low-quality conditions on pain of firing, or any strictly logical conclusions you may draw from those facts. Those purported facts may be true or false, but whether someone at CNBC has it out for Elon is not a relevant consideration in whether those facts are true or false. However, it is entirely relevant in determining whether or not the slant of the piece is necessarily factual or whether it has bias, and in determining the probability that the speaker may have left out information unfavorable to the cause they are advancing. It is a logical fallacy, but it is only a logical fallacy. It is completely relevant in arenas other than pure, strict logic, such as meta-logical analyses about potential biases. (There's a few other "fallacies" for which this is true too; many of them like affirming the consequent are just straight-up errors, but "appeal to authority", for instance, is a fallacy in Aristotelian binary true/false logic, but in a more realistic probabilistic logic, it can be valid to use it to update your probabilistic beliefs about the world. You just are not logically justified in taking an authority and setting your belief in their statements to a true, mathematical 100.0000...% (which is what the fallacy would be in Aristotelian logic), and you are obligated to make judgments about the quality of the authority as you make the updates.)

vxxzy 7y ago

musk slept on the floor of the factory... Safety issues with giant pieces of metal going down the road aside (though it is paramount!), at least the leader struggled with his underlings.

seem_2211 7y ago
I'd be very surprised if he slept on the factory floor more than once. For a guy who "works" 100 hours a week he does post a lot on Twitter.
entropea 7y ago
There are people sleeping on the streets blocks away from his factories. Sleeping on the floor of his hundred million dollar factories is not proof of anything.
- sabertoothed 7y ago
  How does the price of the factory matter? It does not make the floor (couch or whatever he slept on) any more comfortable.
FireBeyond 7y ago
Well, even as he did that he was saying to the press, "Nothing unusual, everything is completely as normal."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

DanCarvajal 7y ago

Real car companies don't make cars in tents.

willio58 7y ago
Hmm. Didn’t some _real_ car companies need bail-outs from the US government?
- mdorazio 7y ago
  That has nothing to do with the parent comment, which was about manufacturing processes and planning. The bailouts were the result of overproduction and high labor costs in an unexpectedly shrinking market.
  - greenhatman 7y ago
    Parent comment doesn't have much to do with anything. Who decides what a 'real' car company does?
- DanCarvajal 7y ago
  You mean like how every U.S. Tesla ever sold has been heavily subsidized with tax rebates? And how they actually got a U.S. Government loan? And how they got further tax credits from Nevada for building the Gigafactory there?
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    As opposed to oil subsidies that are reported at $4 billion annually with estimates that they're actually somewhere between $10 and $40 billion? The tax rebates amount to ~$4 billion subsidy for a BEV manufacturer. Maybe we should just eliminate subsidies on both and see what happens.
    - DanCarvajal 7y ago
      "Maybe we should just eliminate subsidies on both and see what happens." I am completely in favor of that proposal.

htkibar 7y ago

Tesla has shown time and time again that they care for their customers, giving free services and even upgrades. This is just another CNBC attack on TSLA for whatever reason.

shareIdeas 7y ago
I got a bad feeling, if something is free, it's because it was unsafe.
- Whatarethese 7y ago
  That's irrational.

RocketSyntax 7y ago

This article should read: "CNBC reporter eggs on engineers and then betrays their trust by running their mouth to the world about it."

entropea 7y ago
What you're describing kind of sounds like journalism to me.

Lazare 7y ago

What I find interesting is how vigorously Tesla denies everything, always, even when they're clearly wrong. They lose a lot of credibility that way; I wonder if Musk[1] realises that if he admitted the things Tesla is obviously doing wrong, he might have a hope of convincing people about the ones they're not obviously doing wrong? And it's especially odd because so much of the article is just a bunch of nothing, but Tesla makes it newsworthy by denying everything. And 50 cents says Musk has a team analysing the photos right now to try and track down the employees who took them. ...to ensure they're fired and/or sued, of course; obviously Tesla would never see people who had identified problems as a potentially valuable resource. There's a lot more interesting details if you dig into it, but wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the Toyota Production System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System). An interesting contrast, perhaps. [1]: I mean, we all know who's behind this PR strategy, right?

SEJeff 7y ago
I'm not defending Musk at all, but if those pictures were leaked from a Tesla employee, they're in breach of their NDA, a legally binding contract. Why wouldn't they go after someone breaching their NDA? I get that there are whistleblower protections and whatnot, but that is for lawyers and judges to decide. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a team analysing those photos.
- angstrom 7y ago
  It's also worth remembering that innovations in manufacturing are quite often 'short cuts' that have the same or better result with less process.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    Agreed. I do wonder why people are downvoting me for pointing out the truth though. Breach of a legally binding contract is grounds for a civil lawsuit. This is how the country works!
    - 7y ago

simion314 7y ago

>Tesla is able to build the safest and best-performing cars Am I out of date with the news? Are Tesla the safest cars? I am not a car enthusiast so I recall that Volvo has most safety features, did things change or is Tesla PR so deluded, at least I would use something like "one of the safest cars", provide some modesty,

Whatarethese 7y ago
Tesla's are inherently very safe because they have such a large frontal crumple zone with no engine and the floor is a solid battery which helps with side collisions. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/04/watch-how-tesla-model-3-earned-its-5-star-safety-rating-from-euro-ncap/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/04/watch-how-tesla-model-3-ea...
- simion314 7y ago
  Are the safest though? I know that there are ICE cars witht eh engine at the back, and there are cars that are very safe in crash tests. So your answer is not responding at my questions, I know there are probably cars that are for sure less safe then Tesla
  - F_r_k 7y ago
    Go to the ncap website and find out, then... That is if you're really interested by it
perishabledave 7y ago
https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings You can check the safety ratings by the NTHSA.
- simion314 7y ago
  The link does not contain rankings, but I did some searching, on the European system in fact Tesla is one of the safes ts car. the "safest car" thing appears if you Google related with the american system in a lot of EV related articles around 2911, I can't find anything more recent and more impartial on the first google page.

williesleg 7y ago

Not like Ford, vw, gm, etc, they're all good.

infecto 7y ago

Genuine question that is unrelated to this but has always bothered me about Tesla. Why does his brother, Kimbal, draw a $6million/year total comp for sitting on the board. He has zero relevant experience related to manufacturing and that salary is very high compared to the rest of the industry....this always bothered me about TSLA.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gkfasdfasdf 7y ago

Wow, my Model 3 has been serviced for both the issues mentioned in the article: a loose connection in the 12v subsystem (which completely locked me out of the car and required a tow!) and moisture in one of my tail lights. I hope they are able to work these issues out.

usbseeker 7y ago

I doubt these vehicles made it onto the road with the half fixes, they most likely just used the tape to allow the vehicle to move down the line then when the parts were available replaced them before customer delivery. This is probably not apparent and not explained to the untrustworthly assembly line worker.

magwa101 7y ago

Yeah, what are their shares worth? They're taking on huge incumbents, be realistic, they must take risks or disappear.

WhyKill 7y ago

Hey, lets ignore Toyota Production System (which was invented by a startup, Toyoda Automatic Loom) and then perfected on building cars with small amounts of resources and minimal failure. It's pretty clear they don't use TPS at Tesla, which will be their downfall...