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Ford Spent $200,000 To Dissect a Limited-Edition Tesla Model X (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Ford Motor paid a sum of $199,950 ($55,000 more than the retail price) to buy one of the first sport utility vehicles made by Tesla Motors, reports Bloomberg, citing vehicle registration documents. The white Model X is a Founders Series with a vehicle identification number indicating it was the 64th one made at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California. The vehicle, with Michigan plates, has been spotted recently in the Detroit area. Automakers often buy cars made by competitors for road testing and for 'tear-downs' to reveal components and materials and how they're put together. But it's unusual to pay such a high price -- almost $212,000 after Michigan sales tax and title -- for such an early model.Well, this $200,000 could shave off hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and development.
If you are going to buy the bakery, it always wise to taste the bread.
And this is why we have the patent system
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The title implies they tore it down to see all the bits and pieces, yet the summary implies they were road testing it. If they tore it apart I would think they would be in DMCA violation.
How do you know that is unusual? Do automobile companies disclose that information? Why do people write this sort of garbage? Ford spends 10 million a year in toilet paper.
I'm still unclear on WHY they paid so much over retail.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
as reverse engineering and illegal under the dmca laws, oh wait they are a corporation sorry I forgot they are above the laws.
The bidding starts at $500.
But these auto companies are notorious for penny pinching too. One of the Chrysler mini van tail gate latches were weak. A proposal to strengthen it was rejected because the additional cost of some 50 cents was deemed too high.
My brother consulted for Chrysler. The employees will get a beige phone with a blinking red light to show there was pending voice mail. But contractors are not allowed that expensive phone. They get a phone without the light. Stupidly the phones were all rented from the telco, for ages, decade after decade. This was not in 1970s or 80s. It was in 1999 or so. They could have bought the whole damned phone, better phone for cheaper price. But still Chrysler rented these phones and saved money by denying the consultants the blinking red light.
In general, in all bureaucracies, once a precedent is set, it will be followed, come hell or high water, costs be damned. But getting the precedent set would be very difficult.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
disclaimer: im an automotive engineer.
What fords doing is also reducing their patent liability in the event --the likely event -- they come out with an electric car as well. Chances are great theyve torn down a nissan leaf and BMW's electric offering as well to avoid uncomfortable litigation similar to what they experienced when they inadvertently infringed on Toyotas hybrid synergy drive and ended up licensing it for their hybrid vehicles. Future ford vehicles will have to be carefully designed so as not to infringe on a wealth of other vehicles that made it to market first while detroit was busy cranking out another SUV with an electric tailgate for soccer moms.
companies that do this often times end up pretty exhausted. it takes thousands of human hours and a lot more than the cost posted to analyze these vehicles. In most cases major auto companies just suck it up, license the technology, and rebrand it accordingly. Chevrolet is an example of a company that tried to dance around the battery vehicle market and likely ended up frustrated enough to just add an engine to get around litigation with the Volt.
Good people go to bed earlier.
After engineering, some of my friends went into IC design. There first few projects were rather painful.
They would sit in large halls where laid large sheets of competitors ICs. The competitor products were stripped apart, grinned few microns and each layer scanned into these large sheets.
There fresh out of college labor was in charge of then crawling over these large print outs and decoding the design.
I think a Dodge Aires would be a good target:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Karnal
Oh yeah? Well, I bid $250!
A ford focus will dissect itself slowly for the first 50,000 miles as the OEM parts fail, just outside of the warranty.
Tia is fairly common practice in the automobile industry.
Manufacturers routinely take apart their competitors automobiles to evaluate their products and to see how they measure up with where they are going.
2003 called, it wants it's opinion back. I say this as someone that just exhaustively tested every SUV model I could. The Japanese aren't what they used to be. Ford beat everyone in price, features, warranty, and interest rates. The Japanese cars still drive well, and expect to have a higher residual, they are just a way worse deal.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There are a number of reasons why ford would be very interested in the model X.
The model X is Tesla's 3rd time around in developing a pure EV car platform. There will be a lot of lessons learnt the hard way embedded in the design of the model X.
The model X is a SUV, playing right in Fords bread and butter market. The previous models where in the small sports car and then the luxury saloon car market. First one is almost absent from the ford lineup, and the second a fairly small part of what they do. The model X is a benchmark for any EV SUV's fords have in development. Ride quality, handling, real range, real performance etc. are all important things to compare against and difficult to get purely from specs. Also simply understanding how it compares to fords conventional and hybrid offerings is important to drive marketing and sales information in the short term.
So they buy 1 or 2 of these. Look at all aspects of it, and use this to drive marketing in the short term and product development long term.
That's funny because every Consumer Reports article on vehicles over the past 10 years still show Toyota and Honda way out ahead for most vehicle classes in terms of quality.
Maybe my metric for purchasing vehicles is different than yours. I want a car that starts every day with a heater that works (winter in Minnesota gets cold.) Next priority is that the systems in the vehicle don't arbitrarily fail, assuming normal regular maintenance done at the scheduled intervals. I've got a pair of Hondas (Civic and Pilot) that are at 108k miles and 180k miles, respectively, that perform exactly as described above. My wife's family and extended family buy American cars and repairs them constantly.
Assuming an American car costs $10k less and you end up repairing it (for non-maintenance repairs) for $10k over its operational lifetime, you don't have a better deal.
I am thinking you missed the ST and RS versions? They have a hard time keeping them in stock. RS are impossible to find and dealers are selling at $5000 to $10000 over MSRP. At 350 hp, All wheel drive and a drift mode it's a tad popular. But hey, 1999 is a good year to be struck in there Marty McFly.
How about 2015? http://www.consumerreports.org...
Ford is not that bad (slightly below average), but the Asian brands still dominate. Fiat is last by a wide margin.
???
The Tesla X is little more than a lifted all wheel drive car. A Chevy Tahoe, Ford Explorer and Range Rover are SUVs.
Fiat is last by a wide margin.
How can you say such cruel things about Chrysler products?
Just today I saw a Dodge Discharge on the road and it looked okay.
There was a Dodge Wiper running along behind it cleaning up, of course.
Why not simply wait for it to fall apart? That has worked very well for many Tesla owners so far.
When you take the infotainment system out of the mix, one that Ford was cutting edge on, They are up on the above average side. I seriously think there are a lot of people not honest about how (until recently) all infotainment systems are glitchy. Toyota's you can't even use steering wheel buttons to answer the phone.
Car companies buy each others' cars and take them apart, to learn what the competition is doing. They also buy Chevy, Toyota, and etc. This isn't actually news.
So what stops a Ford employee from buying one and then giving it to his employer in return for a bonus? You can't stop it.
Contract Law.
You could prevent it if you set up the ownership of the car differently or possibly if you had certain specific terms in your contract. Or set up the car itself so that by opening the hood, you agree to a contract. There are lots of creative things you could do to try and set it up so that if a competitor dissects it, they have to pay you a fortune.
I dont think so. I looked at many many reviews as well and the Mazda CX-5 was supposed to be the best in class. I drove it, it was nice, lacked a lot of the features the Ford had though, and it was also 20% more on the monthly payment. Also many reviews highly rate the CR-V and I drove one of those as well. Drove great, except to get the same monthly payment I had to get the absolute stock model. The Ford I ended up getting was for the simple reason that it came absolutely loaded, while still being cheaper than the other guys that had less features. Will it fall apart in 5 years? I think that's a lot of hyperbole. The cheapest feeling vehicle was definitely the Hyundai and, surprise, surprise, it cost more too. It's a lease anyways - owning cars isn't very smart.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Isn't the DMCA specifically about preventing competitors from dismantling things to find out how they work?
I don't understand
If you look at the list of problems that people have with their Teslas, the company should be happy they were excluded. They would be at the bottom along with Fiat.
Everybody knows Elon Musk gave away all the patents, they're all free to use.
I know why. The old firmwares had bugs that newer ones don't and some of those include security bypasses that can lead to firmware dumps. These systems have literal fuses that are thrown so they can't have firmware read off 'normally.' You can also pay six-seven figures to try to bypass the physical security with what amounts to a razor and then an electron microscope.
And since Teslas can be updated, this 'pristine' unit's crack will give the 'secret' key to decode all later patches, which are encrypted in transit and unpacked in the system; it's the golden key to bytecodes for all later firmwares.
I can't imagine that Elon Musk hasn't already accounted for that eventuality.
If he can prove they did it, that they actually couldn't be innovative enough on their own and stole his work, it would be a profound PR blow to the established auto makers and their monopolies (ahem, distributorships). It would also be a profound statement about low-quality of engineering. If they have to steal good engineering instead of making their own, then they really shouldn't be in the business of making cars.
They are in bed with politicians, that is what keeps them charging $60k for a car that takes less than $2k to produce. It took less than $2k to produce in 1990, and costs have only been driven downward in the intervening 30 years. Musk is giving them an existential threat by actually delivering more than a $4k car when he sells a $200k vehicle. Like Intel's addiction to high margin chips keeping it unilaterally out of the smartphone market, the big car companies are addicted to high margins too, and that keeps them out of substantial leadership in technology or innovation. It is a guild, and Musk isn't a member.
Hasn't tesla made its technology open to the public? What are they hoping to learn that Tesla hasn't published?
And then people all over the (US) Internet complain about the Chinese not inventing/developing anything buy themselves and instead copying western technology...
Consumer Reports dinged Ford pretty hard for a few years because of the Microsoft "infotainment" systems Ford put in their cars for a few years. If you ignore that, Ford made some pretty big improvements in the late 2000's. Though granted, the infotainment systems were pretty lousy, but I'm not a big fan of them to begin with.
If you ask me, Toyota is becoming more and more like GM was in the 70's and 80's, assuming that people will buy their cars because they have a Toyota badge on them, so why even try? Though unlike GM, Toyota still makes reliable cars, but they are uninspired, the decontenting is obvious, and their designs have gone from ugly to bizarro (not that Ford's design language is much better...).
Honda has some of the best engines of anyone out there, but their automatic transmissions have always been fragile, and the rest of their body hardware and switchgear always seemed a bit on the flimsy side, though they've managed to improve that the last 10 years or so. And except for the first generation, the Pilot is one fugly behemoth of a vehicle.