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Tesla Employees Say Automaker Is Churning Out a High Volume of Flawed Parts (cnbc.com)
Several current and former employees of Tesla said that the automaker is manufacturing a surprisingly high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles, leading to more rework and repairs than can be contained at its factory in Fremont, California. CNBC reports: One current Tesla engineer estimated that 40 percent of the parts made or received at its Fremont factory require rework. The need for reviews of parts coming off the line, and rework, has contributed to Model 3 delays, the engineer said. Another current employee from Tesla's Fremont factory said the company's defect rate is so high that it's hard to hit production targets. Inability to hit the numbers is in turn hurting employee morale. To deal with a backlog of flawed parts and vehicles, said these current and former employees, Tesla has brought in teams of technicians and engineers from its service centers and remanufacturing lines to help with rework and repairs on site in Fremont. They also said that sometimes the luxury EV maker has taken the unusual measure of sending flawed or damaged parts from Fremont to its remanufacturing facility in Lathrop, California, about 50 miles away, instead of fixing those parts "in-line." Tesla flatly denies that its remanufacturing teams engage in rework. "Our remanufacturing team does not 'rework' cars," a spokesperson said. The company said the employees might be conflating rework and remanufacturing. It also said every vehicle is subjected to rigorous quality control involving more than 500 inspections and tests. The report from CNBC has caused Tesla's stock to tumble today. You can read Tesla's full statement about the CNBC report here.
My Model X came off the line with a bad charge port that was almost impossible to supercharge. I later found out that this was a widespread manufacturing defect that occurred in cars made over a period of weeks in late 2017. As a result, they ran out of (non-defective) replacement charge ports for the entire region, and had to send out field techs to manually file down the defective plastic guides in the charge ports of a large number of vehicles.
The cost of these mistakes to Tesla has to be just incredible. They would be much better off financially if they added an additional validation step early in their supply chain, even if that meant eating the cost of a few parts.
And this doesn't just affect their new cars. These Model X charge port issues happened more than two years after production on the Model X began. That's insanely late in the production cycle for manufacturing tolerance issues to suddenly crop up. Very bizarre.
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Tesla is making many if not most of the parts there in the factory right next to the assembly line. Having also been to Ford and GM assembly lines, and seen many others on TV (How it's Made!), Tesla's approach is radically different!
Been to Ford's River Rouge plant? Looked at a documentary of it in its early days?
The Rouge Plant was built as a machine that took in coal, iron ore, and other raw materials at one end and spit out finished cars at the other. This was how Ford tried to do it when he was the Musk of his day.
These days things are spread out more.
Also: Tesla doesn't build EVERYTHING at the plant (though they are partial to suppliers located within a few miles, so they can interact and ship stuff around in a matter of minutes to hours, rather than days or weeks. (Much like the chassis and final assembly plants at the GM complex in Detroit, which function as a two-part line with a gap measured in city blocks.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Having worked for an automotive parts manufacturer in the QA department I can tell you that 40% is absurdly abysmal. 1 in 1000 requires an executive meeting. 1 in 10,000 makes the line stop. 1 in 100,000 is the contractual maximum for the Toyota parts we supplied. Ford was tolerant of a few per 100,000 requiring rework (though they just threw the parts away) and was tolerant of 20% "close enough" parts, meaning the plating will wear out on salty roads in 8 years instead of 10.
Zero was the contractual maximum for BMW and Lotus. BMW will accept 5 ppm out-of-spec so long as you don't do it often. Lotus will kick back the whole shipment and threaten pulling your contract with one bad part. Do it twice in a year and the contract is gone with cancellation penalties. Every part for both was QA tested. We had to invest several million into automated multidimensional laser gauging QA equipment.
These Tesla numbers are what you would expect of a garage-based manufacturer of dude-buggies, not a modern auto manufacturer. Perhaps they need to hire engineers and workers from Detroit instead of LA.