Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
Yes, a lot of startups sell-out to other companies, but so far that doesn't seem to be Musk's style. On top of that Tesla is poised to grow exponentially without having to be purchased by another company. Tesla is generally doing things that most of the other companies don't want to do or haven't figured out how to do, there's not a lot of reason for them to want to be bought.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
There's no way to stop it, one way or another Ford will get it. Every technology company on planet earth buys their competitors products and does a tear-down analysis. Often it's done by marketing or marketgineers to come up with a product spec & cost target, but if you are smart you pay attention to what your competition is doing. If nothing else it challenges your notions of what is possible, and that is always a good thing.
I've taken apart many systems in my time. You know you're in a healthy organization when you take apart a competitors system and say "Wow, they did something really clever here". You know it's time to leave your company when you do it, see something really clever, and your peers say "Aw but that must cost too much" or "We'll never get to be able to do this", etc.
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.
Tesla opensourced them. Citation: https://www.teslamotors.com/bl...
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
Lots of reasons...
First, Ford has a dealer network and service network that is far greater than anything Tesla can put together.
Second, Ford might well say, we have done well with EcoBoost, what if we offered EV versions of everything we sell. Musk has said that his goal is to promote EVs, not just sell them. If Ford came to him and said, "Merge with Ford and you'll be the head of the EV division, tasked with making EV versions of every Ford product" he might find that idea attractive.
Finally, while Tesla is growing, they have a huge challenge in front of them. Going from 50,000 cars to 500,000 cars is not nothing, selling and servicing them isn't as simple as you'd think, and many things could yet prevent him from hitting his targets.
A lot of people consider Tesla's success to be a forgone conclusion. That is never a good idea and it isn't true either. All companies run into challenges both big and small, some break through and win, some do not.
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.
He didn't mean "Why would Tesla sell a car to Ford?" he meant "Why would Musk sell Tesla to Ford?"
Thanks for posting that link...
Umm... My respect for Musk just went up a few degrees... yes, he is still self-interested, but I tend to believe him when he says:
Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the worldâ(TM)s factories every day.
It is rare that a wealthy person takes that long view...
If Tesla had some patents, Ford can get some people to just read them.
Most patents explain how a technology works, but not how to make the product. When car companies tear down their competitors' products, they are looking more at how it's made than how it works.
What's surprising is that Ford is trying to figure out how a very expensive car was manufactured. Most of the time the challenge is trying to figure out how to make economy cars cheaper, since the profit margin is much smaller on those products.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Unfortunately, it looks like he's only talking about EV-related patents. I clicked that link hoping to find open-source plans (and ideally, source code) for retrofitting autopilot to my current car and was disappointed. : (
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not that there is anything wrong with that.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Look at Elon Musk's and Tesla's past. Open use patents alone show the willingness to encourage "competitors" to duplicate their technology. Musk as always said that as soon as Tesla is self sustaining, he is going to get out and devote most of his time to SpaceX.
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.
First sale doctrine prevents this sort of thing.
and financing.
They make a good chunk on the financing.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
First, Ford has a dealer network and service network that is far greater than anything Tesla can put together.
Not a primary concern for a company that has a multi-year backlog on orders with deposits already paid.
selling and servicing them isn't as simple as you'd think
Actually I'd argue that yes it is. The problem is only one of a skillset. Dismantling and re-assembling an ICE is far more difficult than regreasing a motor bearing, and swapping a lithium battery, and the rest of it is normal car stuff. The great benefit there is also that the service being simple means that you can handle more services yourself before you have to farm them out.