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It is disappointing that Tesla uses much of its engineering prowess to design products that are inherently difficult for owners or small shops to modify, mainta
by foxtr0t 6y ago
It is disappointing that Tesla uses much of its engineering prowess to design products that are inherently difficult for owners or small shops to modify, maintain, or repair. Taken directly from Apple's playbook.
- agumonkey 6y agoIf Musk wants to have another glory moment, he should make people design modular couplings for parts
- mcot2 6y agoThey are now in the insurance business and Musk has already stated this will drive them to produce cars that can be repaired more cheaply. I cited his statement on the earnings call elsewhere in this thread.
- justapassenger 6y agoMusk says many things
- londons_explore 6y agoApple didn't do it to prevent repair, but because you can build a better product by making things non-standard, closer fitting, single piece machined, etc. Tesla is probably doing the same. Remember a good number of repairs Tesla will end up paying for - through various warranty schemes - so they care about repairability too, just to a lesser extent than they care about product performance and cost.
- justapassenger 6y agoYou need to understand Elon to understand that. He talks ton about sustainability. But what he means by that, is sustaining lifestyle of rich people, while feeling good about themselves. He's actively against public transport (which is by far most ecological), pursuing dreams of living on Mars (which is unpractical on so many levels, that if it'll be ever complete, it'll be trip of lifetime to fifthly rich people), building expensive toy cars (car that does 0-60 in less than 6s? who would even want that?) and many more.
- dencodev 6y agoHow can two of Elons biggest projects be public transportation oriented while you claim he's against it?
- justapassenger 6y agoWhich ones? Boring company, aka, private tunnels for Model 3/S/X (https://electrek.co/2020/07/20/elon-musk-boring-company-tesla-model-s-x-3-loop/ https://electrek.co/2020/07/20/elon-musk-boring-company-tesl...)? It's as much of a public transportation as Uber. Hyperloop, aka vaporware?
- Reason077 6y ago> "Tesla uses much of its engineering prowess to design products that are inherently difficult for owners or small shops to modify, maintain, or repair." Teslas (especially the Model 3 and Y) are not inherently difficult to repair. The problem is that Tesla's restrictive policies make it difficult for individuals to access the documentation and parts to do so.
- gibolt 6y agoThe reduction in size/complexity at Tesla/Apple scale may actually be an overall benefit. Thought experiment: Imagine that the overall material required is cut by 10-20% by tons of optimizations and reductions. That means the supply chain and associated energy/costs vanish. If you have a failure rate of less than that (probably much less) scrapping is likely still better.
- fomine3 6y agoUnibody would cut shell materials by 10-20% but there are many other car parts like interior, battery. So entire cut rate won't so high. Also dropping a broken car and building a new car takes manufacturing costs.
- gibolt 6y agoI'm talking about every optimization that reduces repairability. While I'd prefer to be able to fix things, just producing and shipping a whole new unit to a small subset may be less wasteful overall (at that scale) than designing for repairability.
- ahupp 6y agoAll of these things are tradeoffs. How much worse of a product would you accept in exchange for repairability? I'm not even sure there's a tradeoff here, since bending a frame of any car is bad news whether or not its one piece.