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Tesla Model Y Owners Find Cooling System Made with Home Depot-Grade Fake Wood
- maxharris 6y agoI think this is cool! It reminds me of how Ferrari did a very similar thing with the dabs of yellow paint they used to mark bolts that had to withstand intense vibration: http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm
- sedatk 6y agoFerraris aren’t mass produced though.
- greedo 6y agoIt could be argued that neither are Teslas...
- Scramblejams 6y agoSame deal with GM restoration judging. Judges at Bloomington Gold will get very specific about the bolts used on a car, but a panel was held with a retired GM factory employee who put together first or second-gen Corvettes, and he said something similar: Sometimes they ran out of bolts at the factory, and when they did somebody would run down to the local hardware outlet and just buy whatever bolts fit the spec.
- dan_quixote 6y agoThat's standard operating procedure in a whole lot of industries where proper torque is mission critical. If you ever find yourself near high precision manufacturing or industrial lifting equipment (think hooks and lifting eyes where a crane picks a load up) you can't miss the torque marks on bolt heads and/or nuts.
- xeromal 6y agoIf I recall correctly, I think spacex used a bunch of bolts from the lowes nearby when doing some crucial work due to time constraints.
- ryandrake 6y agoThis kind of thing is done in aviation, and the stuff is called Torque Seal or Inspection Lacquer. You tighten the nut to the proper torque, and put a dab of lacquer across the thread and nut. Whenever you inspect the part later, if you see the seal broken or mis-aligned, you know the part has vibrated out of spec, and need to replace and re-torque the bolt.
- slg 6y agoStories like this are a Rorschach test for how one views Tesla. This can be a lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism or it can be a smart hack to get the job done while minimizing costs and supply chain restraints.
- dleslie 6y agoWhere's the evidence of danger?
- whymauri 6y agoLaziness at one point of a design process could imply a theme, is what I think they're getting at. I still think about this Twitter thread, for example: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
- jrootabega 6y agoSo it's the brown m&ms
- xattt 6y agoIt’s indirectly implied with the juxtaposition of cooling, wood and Home Depot in one sentence.
- happytoexplain 6y agoSurely the burden of proof is opposite for manufacturers of big consumer machines? I'm not sure how regulation works here.
- gpm 6y agoI think there are two sets of burdens of proof here. The engineer who made this decision has a burden of proof to his boss (and maybe regulators, don't know) to show that this is safe. The random internet commenter suggesting it is unsafe has a burden of proof to show that either it is actually unsafe, or that at least that Tesla didn't internally meet it's burden of proof.
- temp0826 6y ago>> so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for the job Well, yah. Is it that big of an ego-blemish to have "something so cheap" in your space-chariot?
- xeromal 6y agoYeah, if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.
- mikelyons 6y agoIf safety and longevity weren't concerns I would say: If it's stupid and works it's not stupid. There's a difference between quality, and the perception of quality.
- happytoexplain 6y agoHow do you know it works? If it is indeed a cut corner that has a negative impact, it wouldn't present itself immediately or in all cases. I couldn't even begin to guess.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThat doesn't apply to automotive. Many, many things that work in the factory will fail miles down the road. We don't know the design criteria for this and whether they were verified for the replacement. Maybe it needed to be free of a specific chemical or have specific properties within a temperature range and the supply chain can't guarantee that in the replacement. Sure, it's more likely than not that the fix was signed off on and totally acceptable, but the story doesn't have enough information to be certain of that.
- cbhl 6y agoSometimes parts from China get stuck in customs or are otherwise delayed, and this affects Tesla as much as the rest of us. Here's an interview Elon did with Sal Khan back in 2013. He literally had employees running around to buy as many USB cables as he could. https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31 https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31
- happytoexplain 6y agoThis looks and sounds bad, but is it actually bad? Regardless, beyond the simple perception of "cheapness", the humor value lent by the specific choice of material certainly doesn't help the optics.
- jeffbee 6y agoIf there's any reason for that metal strap to exist (i.e. it meaningfully prevents the part from falling off the car) then the crush strength and so forth of that wood needs to be considered.
- jlarocco 6y agoBesides looking like a kid's go-cart, I think it's bad in the sense that cars go through safety testing and are governed by a ton of rules and regulations, and it's unlikely they've tested the cars with parts scrounged from Home Depot. Assuming it's safe, then the worst part, for Tesla, is probably just the terrible optics. It's one thing for a do-it-yourselfer to hack their own car, but I suspect nobody really wants to drop $60k on a new car that's hacked together.
- jeffbee 6y agoRarely do you see such a literal take on cutting corners.
- msoad 6y agoHold my beer https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrinkflation_used_by_cadbury_to_literally_cut/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrin...
- OJFord 6y agoUnfortunately it's more the opposite - literally cutting this corner would be not bothering with the extra material that's presumably there to keep the strap off the heatsink, i.e. so giving it a wider corner. It looks like a bit of a bodge, but plenty of that goes on, and the less automated a process the more it will happen. (Because if highly automated it's more difficult/expensive vs. ditching the problem unit, or waiting for the designed-in part rather than re-tool.)
- werber 6y agoI'm not a car person, but doesn't a car get hot enough to burn wood?
- mikeyouse 6y agoElectrics don't.. all of the intense heat from an internal combustion car comes from the combustion process itself. There's probably some heat built up in the drive components on the Tesla and surely by the wheels from the braking, but not in the 'engine bay'/frunk.
- legitster 6y agoThis is literally attached to a cooling system.
- mikeyouse 6y agoRight.. but the liquid cooled condenser that the wood is attached to isn't going to approach anything close to the ignition temperature of wood... whereas the temp inside the cylinder of an ICE car can reach 2,500ºC. I think the Tesla hack in the article is ridiculous but 100x safer than a similar hack in an ICE engine bay would be.
- webignition 6y agoWood will not self-combust until reaching around 300°c. Hopefully that temperature is never reached.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> Wood will not self-combust until reaching around 300°c Staying below the "fail fast" temperature does not make it safe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo? I don't know and likely no-one does ... because it hasn't been rated or approved for that task. it isn't even a standardised part, how can it be?
- winrid 6y agoImagine if GM did this... Anyway it looks like poor supply chain management. They ran out of the plastic corner pieces.
- fred_is_fred 6y agoWhat's interesting is going to be just how polarizing the discussion below plays out. Discussing Tesla has become so Balkanized that it quickly moves beyond rational. Musk/Tesla is either a low quality sham of a company with inflated stock price or a genius undervalued company sticking it to big oil and stodgy old car companies.
- msoad 6y agoI was on a call with Tesla salesperson to purchase a Model Y. After watching a few Youtube videos on quality and now this I'm 100% backing off from it. A BMW is cheaper and much better built
- et2o 6y agoWhat comparable BMW is cheaper?
- msoad 6y agoModel Y vs. X1
- cwhiz 6y agoThe base Model Y is $50k but the seats and comfort are straight out of the Model 3. It’s not exactly the peak of luxury and comfort. However, luxury and comfort aren’t necessarily what people are paying for when they buy a Model Y. For me personally, I’d rather daily drive the X4. The Model Y wins in pure track performance but the X4 is serviceable. Where the Model Y really falls behind is comfort and luxury. The X4 is just miles and miles ahead in those two categories. There are other considerations, like maintenance, resale value, gas, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily buy either of these cars but if I had to choose I would rather have the BMW.
- et2o 6y agoI have a recent X3. Have to say the Model Y seems much nicer. I’m going to buy that once I get rid of my BMW.
- happytoexplain 6y agoI can understand the perception that this is an unreasonable cut corner with potential consequences, or that it's unknowable if it's reasonable or not without knowing more, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the 3rd option I keep seeing: That this is obviously a harmless example of scrappy ingenuity. Where do people get that kind of confidence in something with so many variables, both physical and financial?
- Grustaf 6y agoIn what scenario wouldn't you just 3d-print it instead?
- xeromal 6y agoYou can buy a bazillion feet of this trim in the time it takes to print like a 1000 of these.
- perardi 6y agoIn a scenario where the thermoplastic would melt? I imagine there’s industrial-grade 3D-printing material, but if they’re in such a time crunch to get these out the door for Q2, it was probably quicker to just send an intern to Home Depot.
- extremeMath 6y ago"The original poster of the thread had reportedly spent more than ten hours disassembling their Model Y to correct poor panel fitment when they came across a large chunk of metal secured with green tape and a small strap." Bad quality followed up by bad quality. When I benchmarked Tesla years ago, the exterior(and interior) panels were awful in their Autoshow build. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't fixed it yet. I gave them a pass at the time because everything was new and in low runs. Now with 500k/yr, there's really no excuse. Tesla is the Apple of Automotive.
- Grustaf 6y agoThat looks like real wood to me, not just the grain but the way it flaked from sawing. Who would use fake wood for trimmings anyway?
- AlliedEnvy 6y agoHis handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends. When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut. "You’re going to have to shim those out," I said. "What’s shim?" "It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines." "Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?" "I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand. He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?" "Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world." I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money. But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all. As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can! Ach, du lieber! Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it. You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why. I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect. In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect. For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it. That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge. What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk? -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- dawnerd 6y agoThis title is so bad. 'Home Depot-Grade' is just editorializing to make it more clickbaity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 6y agoThese can be from the same Chinese supplier that supplies home depot and Tesla: "Ok send the fake wood ones instead." Or it can be sign that Tesla still runs their supply chain management in a style that works for small volume luxury sports cars.
- legitster 6y agoThis is something you saw all the time back in the day from normal car manufacturers (heck, some GM cars were famous for coming off of the production lines with bottles and trash inside of panels). This only seems so chintzy to us today because of how much we take for granted from manufacturing today. Modern automakers are running lean operations that are insanely optimized (being able to keep consistent production with barely any inventory). Tesla has famously had problems achieving lean production (keeping huge inventories of other parts, and consistently running out of others). This wouldn't be so embarrassing if Musk had not spent so much time throwing shade on other car manufacturers.
- stiray 6y agoI would expext this on Yugo. I dont mind the fix if it works, but I would expect this from someone doing it at home not from a $50k car. If I would find this in my car I would just return it to the factory and the linked article is right. What else can be found?
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoI’m still kind of in shock that Tesla still sells software upgrades for things like disabling traction control “Drift Mode” or for turning on the rear seat heaters. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but if I’m purchasing a vehicle I can be allowed to wrench on it without being banned from supercharger stations
- stunt 6y agoThere is a lot of room for cutting corner in manufacturing and it all translates to quality and consistency. My brother in law has a law firm and he happen to work with two different car manufacturing brands. He was explaining how two brands choose the glue differently to build the same part of their products. While for the Chinese brand it was only important that the glue has the minimum standard to be used in their production line, the Japanese brand was very specific about which exact glue from two particular brands can be used there. Which both happen to be more expensive than similar products with same standard on paper. But Japanese would only use that particular product because they did all their quality and durability tests with that.
- rasz 6y ago>ROB STUMPF: so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for the job. Rob, I hope you never look at the welds on Ferrari Testarossa, F40, Dino, or any Maserati from the <=80s for that matter.
- Tarragon 6y agoFrom Jalopnik, Munro is quoted as saying: “The metal bad routes through the Plastic housing for the Thermal system and the band cracked a portion of it.” https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-depot-shit-used-to-1844999285 https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-de...