Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Employees Say Gigafactory Problems Are Worse Than Known (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla's problems with battery production at the company's Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, are worse than the company has acknowledged and could cause further delays and quality issues for the new Model 3, according to a number of current and former Tesla employees. These problems include Tesla needing to make some of the batteries by hand and borrowing scores of employees from one of its suppliers to help with this manual assembly, said these people. Tesla's future as a mass-market carmaker hinges on automated production of the Model 3, which more than 400,000 people have already reserved, paying $1,000 refundable fees to do so. The company has already delayed production, citing problems at the Gigafactory. On Nov. 1, 2017, CEO Elon Musk assured investors in an earnings call that Tesla was making strides to correct its manufacturing issues and get the Model 3 out. But more than a month later, in mid-December, Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand, according to current engineers and ex-Tesla employees who worked at the Gigafactory in recent months. They say Tesla had to "borrow" scores of employees from Panasonic, which is a partner in the Gigafactory and supplies lithium-ion battery cells, to help with this manual assembly. Tesla is still not close to mass producing batteries for the basic $35,000 model of this electric sedan, sources say.
Those things are already well known; apparently they didn’t hit their stride until the end of December, where they were at a rate of 1000 model 3’s per week in the last three days. Timing now seems designed to hit the stock before earnings.
Also, the base $35k model is a random reference... of course the lowest margin version will be last.
Based on the fact that I have seen a few model 3’s on the road this past week (first ones for me), I am guessing production is consistent now and possibly accelerating beyond 1,000/week.
Not so short term I'll say as somebody with some background in the issue.
Tesla uses many small cells that all require a lot of cooling, weight a lot, cost a lot, and require expensive load balancing circuits.
With them making them just a bit bigger, and getting miniscule cell count reduction, just makes the issue a bit smaller, while bringing up new ones: need for custom tooling, being denied advantage of COTS technology, impossibility of buying cells on open market if your own assembly line goes belly up for some reason, bigger cells have higher risk of overheating, bigger cells will require more cooling, if the cell goes boom, the boom will be bigger, necessitating more massive containment structures.
Compare it with Chinese cars with huge brick cells. They have 12 to 64 of them per car. They are air cooled. They use plastic casing. They have bigger internal conductors that use copper, that have low ohmic heating. Lower cell count makes cell balancing easier and more efficient. While the cell chemistry Chinese use is less energetic, they do get MUCH better energy density because they are bigger. Because they use less energetic chemistry, cells are less likely to go boom by themselves. Because they use bigger , flexible cathodes, cathode swelling is much less of an issue. Lower cathode swelling, greatly extends the cell lifetime.
Chinese simply have better batteries.
So you're saying that the Chinese have simply avoided high power density. Well in that case it's rather obvious that many of those things that Tesla is doing don't worry the Chinese. But I'm not sure why you have to contradict yourself on a space of two paragraphs ("small cells all require a lot of cooling ... bigger cells will require more cooling ... huge brick cells are air cooled"). And why would copper conductors be necessarily better when copper is heavy per unit of conductivity? And why do you think Tesla doesn't use massive internal conductors already? And how come that cathode swelling is suddenly such an issue for lifetime but suddenly thermal control isn't? Mind you, data shows that battery lifetime already isn't an issue even for the older and presumably worse Tesla packs, why should it be a worry in the future? And that's with the smaller cylindrical cells already, which you said are worse, not with the bigger ones.
Ezekiel 23:20
The problem isn't that the factory has teething problems. It is that based, on its quarterly reports and other public data, Tesla is on its way to running out of money. It really looks from outside like Tesla needs to start delivering a lot of Model 3s and making a reasonable profit on each if it expects to stay out of bankruptcy court.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that without some significant revenue stream, Tesla doesn't have enough cash and locked in credit to make it through 2018. Google turns up a plethora of articles on this. Are they accurate? How the hell would **I** know?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Two main sources for the story are people who either "worked at the Gigafactory in recent months"... Past tense...
But more than a month later, in mid-December, Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand, according to current engineers and ex-Tesla employees who worked at the Gigafactory in recent months.
...aaaaand a guy with a huge "shorting" investment, standing to win millions from perceived losses by Tesla.
Stanphyl Capital's Mark B. Spiegel, who has a significant short position in the company, told CNBC:
"While I've no doubt that Tesla will eventually work out its Model 3 production problems, the base model will cost Tesla at least mid-$40,000s to build.
The company will never deliver more than a token few for less than the current $49,000 lowest-cost offering.
Sales will hugely disappoint relative to expectations of over 400,000 a year.
And even at those higher prices Tesla will never come anywhere close to its promised [profitability]."
Also, article is reeeeeaaalyyyy trying to paint a picture of doom and gloom.
It takes a line from a Tesla engineer about how workers were "slapping bandoliers together as fast as they possibly could" back in December - and presents it as a doom&gloom subtitle:
'Slapping bandoliers together'
Hell, it even manages to paint higher test standards as bad, by omission of the fact that test standards are higher than expected not simply "[not] the same kind".
The two engineers also said that Tesla doesn't do the same kind of "stress tests" of its Model 3 batteries which would be expected of other electronics or carmakers.
And then there's that thing where I can't seem to find a single article by that author, about Tesla, which isn't a story about how VERY DOUBLEPLUS BAD Tesla really is.
Feds to investigate Tesla crash driver blamed on Autopilot
Tesla factory workers have filed a lawsuit claiming widespread racism, unsafe conditions
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-tesla-fired-700-people.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/tesla-firings-former-and-current-employees-allege-layoffs.htmlTesla employees detail how they were fired, claim dismissals were not performance related
Tesla employees detail how and why they were fired
Tesla cites performance reviews as it fires SolarCity employees, though workers say reviews never took place
Tesla fires hundreds of employees while trying to ramp up vehicle production
German report calls Tesla's Autopilot a "hazard"
Senate committee calls out Elon Musk, wants answers on Tesla Autopilot
Tesla under investigation for possible breach of securities law, WSJ reports
What the NTSB know
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Tesla is deliberately delaying the Model 3. CARB (California Air Resources Board) created a ZEV mandate. A certain percentage of each car company's sales have to be ZEV - zero emissions vehicles. Right now that's almost entirely EVs (Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market). The percentage increases each year - the details are a bit complex but bottom line it's about 2% for 2018. If an automaker fails to reach the required percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from an automaker which exceeded it. If they fail that too, they are banned from selling cars in California and the approx dozen states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines. That's about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
Since Tesla produces only EVs, they always have excess ZEV credits. Part of their finances is selling those ZEV credits. But the closer the other automakers come to meeting their ZEV requirement in a year, the lower the price for ZEV credits. So if Tesla produces too many EVs in a year in which other car companies sold enough of their own EVs, they get little to nothing for their ZEV credits, and they have to bear a larger fraction of the Tesla 3 production cost themselves.
You can tell how well EVs are selling by how good the discounts are at the end of the year. 2015, sales were really poor (relative to the ZEV mandate that year) and there were incredible discounts on EVs (in California - the only state where CARB counts sales/leases). Dec 2015 I almost picked up a 3-year lease on an e-Golf for $79/mo, no money down (there was also a $49/mo with $1500 down offer, but that's more money overall). The EV deals in late 2017 were close to nonexistent, which is a pretty good indicator that the automakers were hitting their ZEV mandate percentages. That means there wasn't much of a market for ZEV credits in 2017, which meant Tesla had to delay Model 3 production to try to push some of those credits into 2018. And that's exactly what they did.
The problem for Tesla is that they set the pre-order price of their EVs based on assumptions for how much they'll receive for selling the ZEV credits. If the other automakers consistently hit their ZEV percentage every year (or come close to it), Tesla is in a world of trouble - all those Tesla 3 pre-orders could have been "sold" for less than what it cost to manufacture because they'd assumed selling the ZEV credit would've made up the difference. So paradoxically, the better EVs sell, the worse off Tesla is financially.