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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.
Something overlooked in the description, 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! If you have to stamp raw aluminum, put it through a bunch of processes, you're going to get a few that have blemish or minor rework issues, or are scrap. Every factory making parts from scratch has a yield. I remember when flat panels were first introduced they were super expensive because the yield was down around 30%. I would guess the current flat panel yield is up in the high 90s.
Ford and GM had parts fabricated away from the assembly line, so there was a lot less yield related issues by the time someone was bolting on a part, those were dealt with elsewhere.
As long as there's a process to catch problems before the become part of the car, who cares. I for one am extremely happy they are having production slowdowns rather than shipping flawed cars.
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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....in their parts department, I can tell you that pretty much every model of car manufactured has some certain parts from some certain providers that are notorious for failing. This is what led to Toyota achieving such dominance today: they learned the "Barney Fife" lesson - "Nip it in the bud, Anj! Nip it in the bud!". They relentlessly send their engineers into their parts provider's lines to perform front-line QA and "kaizen" (continuous quality feedback). Tesla seems like they want to get there, and will - I believe - but as with all complex systems, there is lots to learn (and relearn) along the way.