8 ms·

I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or

I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors. What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. In a different organization such a change would go in, and at the same time kick off an engineering investigation to verify that it doesn't make anything worse. If that analysis comes up clean, there is no change. If it finds a problem though, then the change is reverted/changed to something else. In regular car companies you see things like "We're recalling all cars between VINxxxx and VINyyyy" which basically delineate that time between when the change was made and the time the analysis suggesting it wasn't a good thing. If its a minor thing there won't be a recall, just a bit of extra "warranty work" at the next service opportunity which the dealer does.

11thEarlOfMar 3y ago
Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing auto company?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects. For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
  - valianteffort 3y ago
    Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.
    - FiberBundle 3y ago
      Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
      - jajko 3y ago
        But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
        pixiemaster 3y ago
        how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
ChuckMcM 3y ago
As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says that all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been recalled. That isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had enough customer miles on these things yet to flesh out the more subtle issues. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-accelerator-pedal-stuck/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-...
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  > Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything about how slow they've been to ramp up production. Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new model into production. I find it odd that you would assume less than 4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack of interest.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    Musk said last November they had capacity then for 125,000 trucks a year. Are you saying he lied to us?
    - bobmcnamara 3y ago
      Why are there even gas pedals? Musk said self driving is a solved problem.
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      Yeah. He's been known to do that.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  Also isn’t a recall is a good thing for consumers? It means Tesla is fixing an error, not ignoring it.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
tw04 3y ago
> What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. Isn’t that literally an unprofessional error? The big three already have this as standard operating procedure. Tesla still seems to be treating building cars like devops: move fast and break things, but don’t worry about the break things part until it’s bad enough that end users start complaining in a public forum.
chrisjj 3y ago
> I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors. I think you missed "unapproved".
9935c101ab17a66 3y ago
“What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.” So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional. Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Okay. To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this: "This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect." If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1]. To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite. If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see. Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful. You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable. In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional. [1] https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automotive-history/ https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automoti...

11thEarlOfMar 3y ago

Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing auto company?

JohnFen 3y ago
If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects. For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.
  - FiberBundle 3y ago
    Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
    - jajko 3y ago
      But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
      - pixiemaster 3y ago
        how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago

ChuckMcM 3y ago

As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says that all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been recalled. That isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had enough customer miles on these things yet to flesh out the more subtle issues. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-accelerator-pedal-stuck/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-...

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything about how slow they've been to ramp up production. Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new model into production. I find it odd that you would assume less than 4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack of interest.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Musk said last November they had capacity then for 125,000 trucks a year. Are you saying he lied to us?
  - bobmcnamara 3y ago
    Why are there even gas pedals? Musk said self driving is a solved problem.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    Yeah. He's been known to do that.
slowhadoken 3y ago
Also isn’t a recall is a good thing for consumers? It means Tesla is fixing an error, not ignoring it.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago

tw04 3y ago

> What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. Isn’t that literally an unprofessional error? The big three already have this as standard operating procedure. Tesla still seems to be treating building cars like devops: move fast and break things, but don’t worry about the break things part until it’s bad enough that end users start complaining in a public forum.

chrisjj 3y ago

> I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors. I think you missed "unapproved".

9935c101ab17a66 3y ago

“What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.” So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional. Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.

ChuckMcM 3y ago
Okay. To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this: "This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect." If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1]. To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite. If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see. Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful. You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable. In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional. [1] https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automotive-history/ https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automoti...