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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.
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.
It depends on what they did with the knowledge that they acquired.
One of the most important cases was when Compaq used one team to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS in 1982 or so, then another team to take the documentation that the first team created in order to implement a new BIOS to the same specifications wtihout actually looking at the IBM product.
If Ford takes apart the Tesla, documents the kinds of welds, the kinds of materials, the kinds of battery chemistries, and a bunch of other relevant stuff, then passes that information to another team to design a car using those technologies, with the automaker's patent lawyers involved to help avoid treading where they shouldn't, then they're probably good.
Also bear in mind that Musk has made public statements about letting others use his patents. Could be that Ford is protected, to an extent, but such a well-documented public declaration, at least for Tesla patents at the time that Musk made the assertion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
more importantly, they aren't trying to make an exact copy of the car, they are just learning techniques that they can use to design their own car. In that case I don't think they would even have to be as careful about splitting out the information as compaq had to be where the behavior of the finished product had to be exactly the same as the original in every respect.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
Maybe they did tear it apart but as ford is a very old company perhaps they weren't looking to copy but instead look for violations of their patents. Ford has a truck load of patents and were even producing electric cars before Tesla motor company was around there are many parts that could be patented outside the electric power train also.
Its not just about learning techniques and/or copying, its simply knowing as much about our competition as possible, which is why they pretty much do this for every car from every competitor. Sometimes, you also find a weakness, sometimes you find out that your IP has been violated.
Tesla would be wise to do the same with other EVs. They probably have.
I think a Dodge Aires would be a good target:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Karnal
Oh yeah? Well, I bid $250!
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.
Ford is probably about to build more lightweight vehicles. Every major automaker has their own specific technologies for doing this. They are all basically similar*, and in some cases they are identical, but there are differences here and there. Ford will be looking both for the kinds of violations you're talking about, and any slick tricks that they can pull that help them reduce costs or improve their product. Every automaker takes apart other automakers' cars, it's not even slightly unusual. Usually they are targeting the segment inhabited by the vehicle they're dismantling. Perhaps Ford is getting ready to build a next-generation Explorer or Edge, either one is plausible. It's also likely they're "about" (in the next handful of years, anyway) to build an Aluminum Mustang.
* BMW i3 aside
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Musk has given the patents for the EV aspects of their cars to the public domain. They are free to use by anyone who wants to make use of them, no cost and not even a demand to return any advances on those patents to the public domain should anyone do so.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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.
It's also likely, given that Tesla is a lot more of a premium brand than Ford's sales-bulk, that they'll evaluate what technologies Tesla used and why to figure out how to decontent a vehicle enough to fit their market segment. This is actually a good thing for bringing electric vehicles to the masses, as most of us cannot afford a Model S or Model X, and even a lot of people can't or probably shouldn't try to afford a Model 3.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
plenty of manufacturing techniques are unpatented... it might be a common and well known technique but figuring out which one they chose over 10 others may be useful. You can also analyze the parts that they chose to source, why this motor instead of another one. The patents tell you only part of the story of how the car is made... what materials are used where and how they are connected.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance. Those are pretty much the criteria for an SUV and it meets those just fine. I don't see the problem.
"It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance" is the description of a crossover, not an SUV (or, at least, that is not sufficient for SUV). Crossovers are all hideous-looking beasts, the mutant offspring of a light passenger van (SUV) and a station wagon.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A Tahoe is a truck converted to have extra seats to bloat profits.
Most SUV's are only aspirationally off-road worthy. For most folks buying them it is about sitting higher on the road, feeling safer by being above average in vehicle size, and maybe being all wheel drive in case there is a snow flurry on the way to pick up the kids from their after school "My kid is a special little butterfly" class.
"SUV" is entirely a marketing term. They are van-bodied light trucks with passenger seating.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Generally accepted definitions:
SUV: Truck-based, body-on-frame, 4WD or RWD.
CUV: Car-based, unibody, AWD or FWD.
From the CAFE standpoint, they are the same (both classified as light trucks), and the whole CUV category basically only exists as a way to build a car under the light truck rules.
Also, there's actually very few SUVs left nowadays. It's basically very large vehicles like the Tahoe and the Jeep Wrangler. Everything else is a CUV.