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The put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing. The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and

by zaroth 5y ago

The put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing. The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and they weren’t at a stage in their company where they could design their own. They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they were determined to bring into the world given the technical constraints of the age. I’d say overall it paid off. IMO it wasn’t arrogance.

jsight 5y ago
Yeah, and their typical failure mode, yellowing around the edges, still looked better than a lot of other vehicles from its era. I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.
da_chicken 5y ago
I agree, it wasn't arrogance. Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.
- eganist 5y ago
  > Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance. An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.
  - MobiusHorizons 5y ago
    +1. This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line, because you can reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship updates before they come into play. But when you sell someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20 years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later. The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly. There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering). In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.
    - oarsinsync 5y ago
      > This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line ... because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work. I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard. The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.
    - spockz 5y ago
      You can still replace parts in physical products. For example, the yellowing screen of the Tesla could have been replaced no questions asked with an automotive version once available. It is just so more expensive due to logistics and assembly.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Selling something you know breaks within a short amount of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to replace it is fraud.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    "The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones. Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems. Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too. People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have problems, but given the use case it's not really going to be that bad". Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous. The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.
      - MobiusHorizons 5y ago
        People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail. the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty. A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-failure-flash-mcu-recall-model-s-x-nhtsa https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...
- kortex 5y ago
  It's a heckin' internet uplink dish, not a mission-critical piece of engineering lives depend on (if Starlink is your only way to call emergency services, you ought to have a radio backup).
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking about Teslas shortcuts. But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      The correct order is: 1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations 2) Give business advice on (1)
- Isinlor 5y ago
  It wasn't designed for a car, but they did run additional tests on it.
jonathankoren 5y ago
> he put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing. No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t. This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software. So yes, it is arrogance. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting-hurt-because-elon-musk-hates-yellow.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...
- judge2020 5y ago
  It wasn't an unknown that the screen might yellow in high temperatures. A smaller LCD would have been a different product, and certainly an inferior product given a (diagonal) 17 inch non-automotive screen would have had to have been an (at most) 10 inch screen. It was a tradeoff, not arrogance (maybe arrogant for them not to know that jonathankoren would disapprove of it 8 years later). > Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.
ummonk 5y ago
They didn’t need that size, they could have gotten by fine with a smaller size just like every other car company.
- ahofmann 5y ago
  This is just the wrong angle to look at this. The big screen was one of the features that was talked about the most. It was genius marketing, and also part of why the car felt like the future.
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    a lot of things can feel like the future when you don’t have to support them through their lifetime.
- cowl 5y ago
  And they could have "gotten by" with a diesel engine just like every other car company. that's a useless comment to make. We are tired with getting by. we need companies like Tesla/SpaceX that are willing to push the envelope with simingly stupid and useless ideas. After some time people will wander how past generations have gotten by without what they have just like now most of us can't go by without access to smart phones whereas 15 years ago everyone just went by fine.

by zaroth 5y ago

jsight 5y ago

Yeah, and their typical failure mode, yellowing around the edges, still looked better than a lot of other vehicles from its era. I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.

da_chicken 5y ago

I agree, it wasn't arrogance. Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.

eganist 5y ago
> Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance. An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.
- MobiusHorizons 5y ago
  +1. This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line, because you can reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship updates before they come into play. But when you sell someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20 years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later. The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly. There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering). In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > This is something software engineers (of which I am one) often miss-understand about other engineering disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know will run into problems down the line ... because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work. I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard. The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.
  - spockz 5y ago
    You can still replace parts in physical products. For example, the yellowing screen of the Tesla could have been replaced no questions asked with an automotive version once available. It is just so more expensive due to logistics and assembly.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Selling something you know breaks within a short amount of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to replace it is fraud.
alisonkisk 5y ago
Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  "The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless headstones. Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems. Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too. People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have problems, but given the use case it's not really going to be that bad". Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous. The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.
    - MobiusHorizons 5y ago
      People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail. the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty. A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-failure-flash-mcu-recall-model-s-x-nhtsa https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...
kortex 5y ago
It's a heckin' internet uplink dish, not a mission-critical piece of engineering lives depend on (if Starlink is your only way to call emergency services, you ought to have a radio backup).
- da_chicken 5y ago
  I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking about Teslas shortcuts. But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    The correct order is: 1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations 2) Give business advice on (1)
Isinlor 5y ago
It wasn't designed for a car, but they did run additional tests on it.

jonathankoren 5y ago

> he put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S because it was that LCD or nothing. No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t. This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software. So yes, it is arrogance. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-getting-hurt-because-elon-musk-hates-yellow.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...

judge2020 5y ago
It wasn't an unknown that the screen might yellow in high temperatures. A smaller LCD would have been a different product, and certainly an inferior product given a (diagonal) 17 inch non-automotive screen would have had to have been an (at most) 10 inch screen. It was a tradeoff, not arrogance (maybe arrogant for them not to know that jonathankoren would disapprove of it 8 years later). > Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.

ummonk 5y ago

They didn’t need that size, they could have gotten by fine with a smaller size just like every other car company.

ahofmann 5y ago
This is just the wrong angle to look at this. The big screen was one of the features that was talked about the most. It was genius marketing, and also part of why the car felt like the future.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  a lot of things can feel like the future when you don’t have to support them through their lifetime.
cowl 5y ago
And they could have "gotten by" with a diesel engine just like every other car company. that's a useless comment to make. We are tired with getting by. we need companies like Tesla/SpaceX that are willing to push the envelope with simingly stupid and useless ideas. After some time people will wander how past generations have gotten by without what they have just like now most of us can't go by without access to smart phones whereas 15 years ago everyone just went by fine.